 Okay. Good evening. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's program, Digital Governors and Public Spear Beyond COVID-19. Good evening. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's program, Digital Governors and Public Spear Beyond COVID-19. Good evening. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's program, Digital Governors and Public Spear Beyond COVID-19. Good evening. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's program. Okay. Sorry about that. Sorry again. I think there was some ghost in the machine going on here. We're speaking three times. It makes it important. Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's program, Digital Governors and Public Spear Beyond COVID-19. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello. Hello, everyone. Hello. Squeeze my arm關 because it's Route 3. Squeeze, please. I'm sorry. Hi. Historically, in liberal democracies, these activities constitute what we know as the public sphere. Now as the public sphere becomes increasingly the domain of digital governance, what has changed and what has not? What will be the impact on democracy and social life as we know it? To help us tackle these questions, we are joined today by the person who is most knowledgeable about the topic, Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tan. Welcome to the program, Mr. Tan. Hi, good local time everyone. Great. And we're also joined today by two experts in the area of public space and urban design. First, Kevin Xu, who is a senior assistant director at the Center for Liberal Studies Singapore, and also formerly a researcher at the UIA Digital Planning Lab, as well as a lecturer in the D school at Stanford University. Hi, everyone. Great to see you. Next, Henry Teeben, who is a social professor and director of the MSC in urban design program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He's also one of the initiators for the 2020 The Year Without Public Space webinar series that set the stage for today's event, Professor Teeben. Welcome to the program. For today's program, we'll spend the first hour or so going through a series of questions. And then we hope to set aside the last 20 minutes or so to take a few questions from the audience. For the audience who are watching on YouTube right now, you may type in your questions in the chat box. And we have staff working behind us to collect those questions in addition to the ones that we have already collected through the registration. Okay, so now let's begin. The year 2020 is almost at the end. We are now more than nine months into the pandemic, at least according to WHO. What has been the role of digital governance, including open data, civic tech, and so forth in addressing the COVID-19 crisis? And in what area has it been the most effective, or perhaps not? So perhaps we can start with Mr. Tan. Okay, I think digital is the most effective when it plays an assistive role as in assistive technology, assistive intelligence. I always emphasize the most important is the physical vaccine, the mask, the chemical technology that's hand sanitizers, including soap and alcohol sprays, and then maybe digital technology. And so if the digital technology is there to assist people to remember to wear a mask to protect ourselves from our own unwashed hand, then that works very well because it enhances the agency of each individual. If on the other hand, digital technology is built to replace the role of human contact tracers, then it doesn't work that well. And so this is just to set a stage. Now, how would digital technology actually help to remind people to wear a mask to protect their own against their own hands? Well, we have this huge analog dog called Zhong Chai, the Shiba Inu, the official Spokes dog of the social media campaign of the Central Epidemic Month Center. So when I tell you to wear a mask to protect against your own hands, you may remember, but you probably will not share the message that easily. But when a very cute dog tells you not doing this, like literally not putting your fingers in your mouth or something, you will probably not only remember, but actually because it is so cute, you will probably share it. And the same goes to, for example, the physical distancing rules, when you're indoor, keep three of those cute Shiba Inus away, and when you're outdoor, keep two of those away from each other. And so this is communication designed to be remixed, to be kind of mimetic, to be like a vexing of the mind, because you probably cannot unsee this after seeing the cute dog. And so you will probably not believe the conspiracy theories concerning physical distancing or masks, because we already laughed about it. And this is the digital communication strategy that we call here, humor over rumor. And that is the beginning of my response. But I'd like to hear from others too. So we're talking about these kind of everyday digital technologies in addition to the ones that may be more advanced than most people. The daily communication, basically. So there's a technology. I'm not sure even if it's digital, it's called TV broadcasting every 2pm. So every 2pm, the same time epidemic command center, there's this broadcasting for more than 100 days during the pandemic. And people actually just tune in every 2pm, kind of listening to it like a podcast or something. And so the Queens, the five medical officers just provides a very to the point response to all the questions that all the journalists ask. And so based on the press freedom in Taiwan, sometimes they have to field very interesting questions. But always the commander Chen Shizhong works with a kind of humility saying, oh, that's a really good question. Oh, why don't you teach us? Are things like that like working with the journalists instead of against the journalists and also enables another. I'm not sure whether it's digital or not technology called a toll free number and a call center. Okay, I guess this is digital. And so anyone who calls when I do to the hotline can actually get their kind of slowly repeated version of the 2pm press conference. If you happen to miss it, or if you don't understand some of the details, you're free to call 192 and someone from the call center will patiently explain to you. But some people call it to complain. For example, back in April, there's a young boy who called to complain saying we're rationing our mask and all he got was pink medical mask. And he doesn't want to wear pink to school because pink is for girls and people will laugh at him. And so what to do. And the call center people doesn't know how to answer that. And so it got escalated to the CCC. Now the very next day, all the medical offices wore pink mask, regardless of their gender. And so in a sense, the gender mainstreaming becomes the most cool thing. And I think the commander Chen Shizhong the minister even said pink panther was the childhood hero or something. And so for a while, we all have those pink medical masks. Yeah, exactly. You see that there too. So the popular brands actually collared their social media avatars pink as well. And that massively increased the likelihood that people wearing the mask, not just for safety, protecting against their own hands, but also to make a statement. So this rainbow part will also be quite popular when we had a pride parade and things like that. And so this all increased the basic transmission rate of science and clarifications and ideas that's worth reading. Yeah, that's great. We give us a sense of what is really on the ground in Taiwan. So perhaps director, do you want to respond to this question? Sure. So Singapore has also been quite proactive in using digital tools to support the efforts of our multi ministry task force on COVID-19. In the early days, working very rapidly to move from concept to product. The gov tech agency put together a Bluetooth based protocol called Blue Trace. And in Singapore, a trace together app using this protocol can be downloaded onto a smartphone, which allows health authorities to know which other trace together users have been encountered by the phones user. But one thing to note is that all the close contacts are actually stored on your own device and not sent to the government. So only when a person is found to be coronavirus positive and then uploads the data only then does the government have access. And gov tech actually made this protocol open source so that other governments interested in utilizing it, as well as advocates who might be concerned about privacy could actually peer into its workings and be reassured about its capabilities. So that was one example of kind of a use of additional technology. But I think some other very practical ones as well. So Singapore we actually implemented a circuit breaker from April to June when essentially people were asked to stay at home and not come out very much. And during this time, however, people still needed to access essential services such as buying food from supermarkets or going outside for exercise. And the Urban Redevelopment Authority, that's our planning authority planning and conservation authority. Our digital planning lab actually developed a web based resource called Space Out. And it allowed the public to actually see real time and historical craft levels of different premises such as malls or markets or post offices. And then they could actually choose where and when to go to purchase things or to access those services. And the National Parks Board also used drones and human counters to track how crowded parks were to make that information available online. So as presidents could also go out to safely exercise. So it was really putting that type of information at people's fingertips. And I think as the minister mentioned earlier, kind of giving people the ability to make that right choice. Professor Thiven, do you want to respond? Well, for me, first of all, I had the opportunity to stay the first five months of the pandemic in Taipei because I was at that time there. This week came over Chinese New Year and got stuck in a way there and then worked online. And so I understand I could see the impact of all those ideas and I was very impressed. So I missed that particular period in Hong Kong where I'm working. I think, of course, in Hong Kong, I would say compared to many other parts of the world, because Hong Kong and Taiwan went through SARS, that in general, I think in international context, it is relatively okay. In terms of digital tools, they were very early already, those kind of maps where you could see exactly where an outbreak would be. I think what was a little bit different to the Taipei version or Taiwan version was that I think in Taiwan was never revealed any kind of personal information. It was relatively easy potentially to spot exactly which unit it is. So that might be good for safety reasons, but also create potentially anxiety. Recently, we have a system with QR codes, but it's not a must to check into those. But I think that the most important parts in Hong Kong were probably more the reaction of the civil society, because many people just went through SARS and were just kind of panicked. So aware and scared and really immediately started to wear a mask and try to be careful. And I think if the numbers are low, I think it's very much linked to this, right? Otherwise, I think in terms of digital device, of course, what kept probably many places alive is also digital food supply and so on, right? Of restaurants and so on, even though we can go to restaurants. But I think that's another level that many places have, but also here started very early, I think. So moving on quickly to our next topic. The public sphere has long been a critical component of liberal democracy. Three exchanges of ideas, for example, are important in shaping public discourse that in turn holds the government accountable. How do you see digital technology and governance reshaping public sphere? The formation of public opinions, the public discourse, the system of representative democracy, and so forth, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps Professor Thibon can start for us. Yeah, well, I think that we saw overall that the pandemic basically didn't bring like entirely new things, but it's basically more created earlier tendencies gained much more momentum and were boosted. And so we have all kind of, let's see, online communication, online education, online shopping already existed before, but they were just kind of boosted to the scale that was never there before. And they affected maybe the use of physical public space, but not necessarily so much the public sphere. Then on the other hand, we saw that there's an increased use of digital tools for surveillance, right, and also restrictions in some countries of press freedom. It's kind of interesting. I recently read this fantastic book by John Berry, The Great Influencer, 1918-19, right? And you could see maybe basically almost everything that we are talking about now, the restriction of press freedoms, fake news, and so on, were already there at that time more in the United States and in Europe. And today we see it here in some places in Asia. And they might kind of erode the political culture, right? The other thing is I believe, as we have seen also, or a reason to have this event, right, that we have new digital tools, obviously, that also create new opportunities, right, for digital governance or new forms of exchange of ideas like the initiatives that we had. It's kind of a very small one, but where all of a sudden it's possible that we're dealing with people in six continents and discuss about experiences and so on, and it's almost for free, right? Those kind of things didn't exist before. So I think we see those kind of different tendencies, I would say. Great. Perhaps, Mr. Tan, you have a lot of experience in the platforms for these kind of public diversion. Does this spill over into the larger public sphere, or what are some of the lessons that you have come across? Definitely. I think one very good case study before the pandemic was the Airbox Initiative. In Thailand there's a lot of people who are concerned about PM 2.5, which probably cannot be intuitively felt, but people do feel the effect of PM 2.5 in air pollution. Instead of waiting for the government to do anything, people just bonded together and installed those very low-cost, like less than $100, airboxes, usually actually in primary schools as the teachers teach data competence, digital competence, data stewardship, and things like that. It's actually much easier to teach if the students are in a data producer role rather than just a data consumer role. All across Taiwan, you see thousands of those airboxes and sharing their data of real-time PM 2.5 measurements to a distributed ledger. Also, the Academia Seneca National Academy supports the algorithm that calibrates those airboxes and so on. This is accountability. This is the citizens giving an account of what a pollution level is like to each other, but it's started by the social sector, by the people. Then they will pressure the public sector, saying that, hey, we see those missing points here. What happens there? Well, it turns out these are industrial parks, and the primary school teacher probably cannot break and enter industrial parks to install those airboxes to complete them up, because they already gain so much legitimacy vis-à-vis the public sector, so the EPA has to work with them instead of against them. Then we set up the civil IoT system, and then we started installing those air pollution measurement devices also on the lamps in the industrial parks because it turns out the municipalities own those lamps. This is the people-public-private partnership. It's the social sector setting the norm, the public sector completing the norm, and the business sector working with the norm. This has been the case also of the PPE supply. Starting early February, pretty much the same mapping technology has been used to track the availability of masks in pharmacies, and people who queue in line can see with their own chatbots or things like that, or voice assistants, and so on, the real-time inventory. When I see someone queueing before me, swipe their national health card and get 10 masks, then I know that they purchased 10 masks because it's refreshed at most every three minutes. Actually, it was 30 seconds every 30 seconds in the beginning. Because of that, people who queue in line are engaged in participatory accountability. They don't have to blindly trust the national health insurance about the numbers, which would be the case if we publish daily, but just like air boxes, this publish every minute or so so that ensures people who queue in line can keep each other in check if they see somebody swipe their card, but rather the inventory increases. It would call 1922, right there. So that is part of the public sphere but builds by the social sector. That's great. So we're really talking about governance from the bottom, right? So we often think about governance as it's going to tap down on the bottom. This is really distributed, you know, governance from the bottom. So, Dirkuschi, what do you think? Well, I thought it was really great when the minister was sharing about this idea of citizen science, it was really neat to kind of see the connection between kind of online with offline projects or offline presence. I think that exchange of ideas and education bringing people up to speed and training them on how to use these tools, that's a really good use of digital technologies. It really reminds me of some of these open online courses that we put together at Stanford and really tried, I think the potential, of course, was there to educate people about certain topics, right? Whether it's math or computer science. But the ones that I found really exciting were the ones that these courses might have had a social mission or a public interest goal. And it was really a great way of kind of adding to the public discourse about these topics and then making sure everyone is equipped to kind of have a conversation about them. And in those kind of settings, I think for these open online courses, right, sometimes called massive open online courses or MOOCs, I think what was really important is not just the course content itself, the ability to actually build communities so convene people and then bring them together into conversation and let them have the tools for having a meaningful and positive exchange. I will say that doesn't always happen naturally. And so kind of thinking through what are the ways you actually have a positive kind of community building experience is quite important. And I think recently in the U.S., we've actually seen kind of an uncontrolled situation, right? Where it was very prevalent during like the COVID-19 pandemic and the election season, you get basically false posts on social media. And essentially, there had some people claiming the pandemic is not real. You had a lot of fake news that's distributed online that contributes to a coarsening of public discourse. And I think in this whole digital realm, it'd be great if corporations, I mean, they essentially, they can influence or amplify certain types of speech. For instance, by recommending videos, that might claim like the earth is flat, for example, right? So we've heard of those types of algorithms. And it's really done through algorithms sometimes, not always through explicit editorializing. And so if these algorithms are basically tuned toward user engagement or mind share or monetization or provoking certain types of behaviors, then they really have to be administered very responsibly. And that's why kind of in the citizen science case or in a classroom setting where it's a little bit more, it's not as Wild West, you have a chance to really craft the type of engagement and craft the experience that the students or the participants are able to enjoy. And I think that's like a really powerful use of the tool. Okay, so speaking of citizen science and, you know, education, obviously some communities might be better equipped or prepared to be engaged with that. So I think one of the most critical lessons of the pandemic has been the impact of disparity between people with different social economic standings. So, you know, for example, people at the bottom of the social ladder, you know, tend to be in worse, you know, situation under specific housing conditions or inability to work in home or lack of healthcare. And so how can digital technology or digital governance address this disparity? And does it aggravate it through the digital divide and how can such divide be overcome? So perhaps, Director, can you continue with yourselves? Sure, okay. Digital tools certainly can help us diagnose challenges and give it a spatial dimension and then work to solve it. I think one interesting thing is like in the United States they've been tracking ethnicity related to coronavirus cases alongside other important demographic information and that let us know that some minority communities such as Black, Latino or Indigenous communities in some states are actually being harder hits. I'd say like when we think about disparity, even with the advent of new technological solutions, maybe not everyone has access to the same technology or is not digitally literate in the same way. I am older people, for example, may or may not know how to download and use a smartphone app. So in Singapore, the government's actually manufacturing and distributing physical tokens which use that same Blue Trace protocol I mentioned earlier and they're much easier, these physical tokens for senior citizens to just carry around. I think if we kind of return to the realm of urban planning and the use of digital technologies and disparity and especially if we're thinking about this new normal that will come after the pandemic, we need to use digital tools to actually assess equity and evaluate if all residents are doing well under a certain planning scenario or if there might be communities that are underserved, especially I think not everyone's going to experience public space the same way and we understand through the pandemic how important having access to public spaces and so that same demographic information, things like age, ethnicity, linguistic group or native language, physical ability, I think all those things are important to understand because what's good for like the average person that the planner looks at may not actually end up serving all members of the community because people do have distinct needs. And so I think I'll just close with a point that it's really important that we actually make amenities accessible, walkable and reachable for all and in the US we actually have had studies that show some minorities have less access to green space for example in cities and so if we know this we can try to amplify voices that aren't usually heard in the planning process and make sure everyone's needs are met. Minister Tan, what has been your experience in terms of addressing issues of poverty? Yeah, in Taiwan of course we have broadband as a human rights so anywhere in Taiwan no matter how remote even on top of Taiwan there's Savya or Pedogunung or Yushan or Jade Mountain, many names because we're a transcultural country with 20 national languages. Anyway, so even on the top of Taiwan you're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second at just 16 US dollars per month for unlimited data otherwise it's my fault, like personally we had people like complain like who literally wrote email saying it took me 4 attempts to send this email I mean the currency in place near the Yangmingshan and in this particular site near the mountain I don't have telecom reception I have to go to the other end you promised broadband as a human rights and so two weeks after that we installed a new telecom tower, so anyway the point is that we're really committed to broadband as a human rights and this is the basis on which to build for example the universal healthcare system the single payer health system that then made it actually more accessible for people to get a mask from a local pharmacy to go to a local clinic for a diagnosis if they develop something like covid symptoms it's actually cheaper than drive-thru testing and you can't say that in pretty much anywhere else in the world and that's made actually the support very grassroots so that a local pharmacist who are trusted by the elderly people the elderly people doesn't know how to work with a mobile app that's okay, they just take their physical token, that's a national health car which is an IC card to the pharmacy and with the same experience as getting a refillable prescription they can get not only the mask but also pretty good advice from the pharmacies we had a choice earlier on to start deploying mask rationing based on mobile payment or real name easy cards in convenience stores but we consciously chose the pharmacies because we'll empower the people who are closest to the pain, who are elderly who don't know how to use mobile payment and things like that and also because it increases the trust trustworthiness of the pharmacist system and so I often say that the national health insurance is a social democracy where social democracy when it comes to health and learning where liberal democracy otherwise but it is actually very important that those pharmacists do have fiber optic connection, more than 90% of them like Liningfast to the national health insurance agency which enable the mask rationing to go without congesting people like long lines and things like that due to the lack of broadband access so this is the most important thing to be assistive in helping the helpers in the community yeah I think you wrote somewhere about you know bring technology to people rather than bring people to technology to technology and indeed yeah this is a great example Professor Thiebun, what do you think? Well I think that the point of the pharmacist is quite interesting and I remember a common friend of us who's writing about or thinking about how important in Taiwan the relationship between the very high density of pharmacies in the first place is and might have also contributed to the success of the mask system and so on because that in itself is already a kind of amazing infrastructure that you can build on on top of that in Hong Kong I think that in general the number of infections and so on were relatively low but I think as it was in New York and other places the question of health disparities is of course quite important for example we we were studying with NGOs together the situation of people in the subdivided flats for example units which are very famous for Hong Kong where people just live on less than the space of a parking lot or maybe have a parking lot and I think that in general the access to internet most people have some form of internet access but they were under the pandemic some kind of shortcomings one was that libraries were one of the first places closed and many particularly living in this very crowded conditions particularly kids would usually go there to study for the exams and so on so those spaces all of a sudden would be there together with the universities with the need then for the kids then to stay the whole time home in this kind of very confined situations of course they can walk around in the city but because also for example that's where they if they have internet where they would have internet and then under these conditions all in one room and then two kids maybe parallel having online class I mean then also you need to have really a good internet and so on but in detail there are a lot of issues that are very much related to this very dense living conditions and the access to affordable housing and so on that were brought even more stronger to the foreground on the other hand I think Hong Kong has this kind of amazing system of a lot of NGOs that civil society that tries to help by providing maybe Zoom discussions with elderly and so on and finding some other ways like how to support local communities this was just for my part and that I think it's probably what we see also when we have discussions with our webinar series the question of how disparity and crowding and so on that are very different from urban density itself because we can see like for some Hong Kong Taipei is very dense but it's not necessarily said that you have more people infected by the street and that kind of crowdedness and how disparity the lack of maybe health insurance or here is one but it's as strong as in other places these kind of the social infrastructure is an equalizer to deal with issues of disparity so for those who have just joined us before we move on to the next question for those who are watching on YouTube right now typing your question in the chat box to your right so next we talk about the bottom up governance and the phenomenon of that in Taiwan and elsewhere but we still have government and in most part of Asia the culture of civil engagement is still emerging there is a strong resistance from the state democracy state democracy towards civil engagement which is often entangled with other politics so how can digital governance help address issues like these Ministers Tan have you had any experience with Chinese digital quite a few actually we run every year the presidential hackathon which is for the social sector to work with public servants and the business sector those three months prototypes projects and it's for the people to vote through a new voting system called quadratic voting the importance of those sustainable goals so each project needs to correspond to one or more SDGs and which project ends up making the cut is determined by quadratic voting so this system ensure that there's broad support for the project which is for the cross sectoral coaching for the competition and the five winners every year of the hackathon they don't receive any money as a prize rather they receive a trophy which is the shape of Taiwan with a micro projector that when turned on projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen our president handing the trophy to you so it's a self-describing trophy and that represents the presidential promise that whatever you did for the past three months it could happen either locally or on a national scale in the next 12 months and this is very important because there's many good social innovations that just needed this sort of presidential commitment that makes this kind of planning happen so for this year alone there's I think three urban planning related winners out of the five champions there's one called patch by planting they use AR tools on the phone and also on tablets and so on to look at unused lands that's owned by the state or one of the state's subsidiaries and plan what will happen if we plant trees there and so this is really a great tool for people to envision a scenario together and commit to taking care to the trees and for the trees to talk back well not like the movie Avatar but to kind of share the kind of health indicators of the trees so that the local government do not have to assume all the maintenance cost of working with the gardening but the local people can join as well and thanks to winning the presidential hackathon it's already working on the ground with the Taoyuan City Municipality Council on that and there's also one called circuit plus that use again a map there's something about maps in Taiwanese civic tech a map of nearby drinking water places like water fountains and so on but also local businesses that want to provide water for free and we call it foam cha or tea serving referring to this ancient Taiwanese tradition of offering free water to the passer-by's and so people who want to reveal their borders can just use this app like a Pokemon Go to go to the nearby station to check it and to rate on the flavor or warmth of the water served there to connect to each other to earn some coins to redeem the coins to win some commission and go to on the local tour and things like that and all the while just making it that habit of refilling their portals rather than buying new plastic and the same app has been connected to another champion of this year which will then send you push notification to engage more with the local drinking places when there's excess heat to not suffer from heat damage and things like that so this is essentially a place making tool but masquerading something like Pokemon Go a game and that will enable more community engagement and things like that so that's three out of the five champions I just briefly describe please feel free to check out at the presidential hackathon website It's great you mentioned that after planning I actually know the team that's the new project It is an amazing project That's a tip and you probably the most experienced on this question what has been your experience You mean in terms of the digital one or the other public spaces that are still physical because the message I believe is much more experienced in this I would say that we see now of course also with our students more and more are kind of working on making kind of apps for public spaces and so on but I think it's still kind of a longer way to go and we see in general a certain kind of fatigue either a fatigue in terms of public participation because people feel like this maybe it takes too long time until they really see positive outcome from those points or also don't trust maybe that it's really making a big change in we see on the other hand much more people kind of working with kind of using games and so on in the process of public engagement and so on but I think many of them are not only digital but also physical but I think that I see there a kind of big trend now in architecture schools or in colleagues and so on to work with that and we're just kind of encouraging we just need to see how these things become kind of implemented and so on Kevin, what are your thoughts? Well I think you mentioned civic engagements in your question and I think for something like that digital tools are definitely helpful though maybe it might not be a panacea so they can augment civic engagement in terms of for instance if you have very users centered platforms and services and try to collect citizen feedback or sentiments and then try to use these to support participatory planning I actually think the minister has worked on some really interesting stuff so I would actually love to kind of hear more about that from the minister but I think when we talk about engagements the URA the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Singapore for example has increasingly tried to experiment with some different modes of engagement in order to interpret more grassroots voices or make planning itself more participatory I think the parks board has also national parks board has also used participatory methods to identify features for new parks that are designing I think out of all these exercises the real key is transforming our understanding of what engagement is because it's not a pro forma exercise we should see it as something that can help us better understand a problem and better understand human needs solutions that respond to them and I think really take inspiration from what you might call design thinking or human centered design where we try to understand the users before developing solutions and so it's not engagement isn't just here's my solution now I go out and engage right it's actually trying to understand the user in the first place and that type of engagement and understanding really helps us uncover what the real problem we're grappling with is even before we start generating new ideas and solutions okay so Mr. Tan mentioned this project patched by planting and there is a digital platform as a medium but ultimately trees still need to be planted right so the actual space is still there and so we have talked a bit about the digital dimensions already what about the continuing significance of actual physical space you know space assembly gathering hackathons still take place in actual physical space right I just attended the golf zero meeting recently it's a wonderful gathering so what is the future of public space in the age of technology and social media maybe you can do an extra what do you think I think that if you can frame it like let's say for example is there another public space after for the new normal right and for that I would say the experience of I would say Taiwan and Hong Kong show that we don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel that we need to have spaces for social distancing because wearing this and being responsible and so on and we don't have a lockdown in Hong Kong no real lockdown so I think in terms of if public space need to be fundamentally different I'm not sure because still it is important for people to come together but what we see is I think that investment into certain kind of projects I think on one hand certain kind of green or green kind of systems networks that allow kind of alternative forms of traveling through cities can be very successful because they really provide these breathing spaces but also kind of calm down so when I was in Taipei I used extensively these areas of the artificial wetlands and so on and you could see everyone and then of course you can very easily get a bike and bike around and so on I think these spaces obviously help a lot in those kind of problematic moments I mean if you look to Hong Kong houses in some parts where I live I'm lucky where my university is it works actually very well and these were planned in the 1970s interestingly but today not necessarily would be implemented new in other areas so I think this is very valuable and the other things of course health disparity and so on to see like particularly in the worst neighborhoods how we can help them because usually that's also where then those kind of spaces are provided and so on right and where people live so crowded for example here that the need is much much higher right maybe I leave it with that for the moment sorry okay perhaps Kevin um yeah I mean I think it'll still be very useful to have physical public spaces I think people want to meet and when William White was studying New York right his seminal kind of research on public spaces in New York what really attracted people to places was the presence of other people and I think what we're seeing though in pandemic times is when you want to be outside you might actually want to be spaced away from others so you still need public space that can accommodate that and then also we kind of talked a little bit earlier about having public space to exercise and that really means that the quality of public space matters you can't just have like a small pocket park near your house and then you know check off the list and say oh this neighborhood has access to public space right because that space needs to be sufficient to actually accommodate the type of activities people want to take on right so it needs to be kind of broadly available to everybody and then also of sufficient quality so people can actually do the activities that are important to them whether it's during the pandemic or perhaps after so I think really for urban designers in the future when they're designing these public spaces it's just going to have to be a lot more flexible so they can be useful both for pandemic times when people want to space out and find solitude or you know sometimes you might even have to convert it into like a field hospital or quarantine site and then non-pandemic times when people actually want to gather together and be social so I think it was a common date. Ministers Tan, so what what do you think the interface between public space and and digital governance? I'll just share with you my office like like literally my office so if the people who who help the show can help putting on the presentation that I just shared you will see literally my office and here yes so this is the social innovation lab literally at a heart of Taipei city and this place is drawn the public art it's drawn by people with Down syndrome with trisoma differences and so while of course I look at the world and see I guess UML diagrams or category theory arrows or I don't know raining numbers there are people with Down syndrome see the world like Van Gogh like with connected geometries and topology and so by making sure that the space is open to everyone we literally tore down the walls because this used to be Air Force headquarters so anyone can walk in and engage in social innovation work and I'm here like every Wednesday from 10 a.m to the evening so anyone can book 40 minutes of my time to talk about social innovation matters and so this is actually a connected space so this connects to like five other social innovation labs across the country so that when we tour around island for example I would go on this social innovation tours and I will meet people like empowered people who are farthest away from Taipei city and then meet them at their regular town hall sometime with cultural interpreters if it's indigenous and then in the social innovation lab 12 ministries gather and just in a kind of immersive co-creation experience just listen to the people who share about their locality and this is important because too often people in the central government just read the descriptions of the issues brought up by the local people so they can fix doubt and solve those problems in the abstract but actually create more problems for people on the ground but if they can listen to the whole story and instead of sending you know powerpoints or where documents actually were more into open documents around then actually they can co-create with the local people and the local people will feel that they are much more close to other connected spaces so a business with like this is important to inspire people to think outside of the box to do hack existing policies if you will talk about hacking there was a visitor to the space a pirate or really the mayor of Prague at Stenikhebe of pirate party and this is his small cabinet and they get so inspired that they just take climb on those grids that are not designed for climbing and while holding the sustainable development goals cards and took a picture together I was smiling kind of nervously because we've never tested that and so I was afraid they may fall but they did not and so this is how inspired people get just by virtue of showing up in the co-creation space and we can connect many of these together then we feel closer to each other than ever before that's great so so now we know where to find Mr Tan on Wednesdays that's right always in this innovation a lot right okay uh so you kind of gave away my my next question we have talked quite a bit about governance already but for those who know my own work which is focused on bottom-up urbanism I'm actually more interested in the notion of hacking so so Mr Tan is a currently a perhaps former civil hacker what can the government government or governance learn from the community of civil hackers and what are some of the lessons of civil hacking for the healthcare yeah I want to pick up on the earlier note of design thinking because in design thinking it's kind of the digital tools are great to help us discover more and also more effectively define common values that's what the digital technologies really assist us but on the development and the delivery of course that takes time and also space uh and so this is like the the usual view of things but I think hacking is very interesting because it kind of reverses the time like in a movie tenant uh so you can go with a system that's already in development but then you think uh repurposing it in a different way uh and then you think uh in the backward notion to redefine and rediscover what a system might also be good for so in a sense the gov zero movement g zero v dot tw which you actually participate in one of our hackathons is just about looking at all the digital services in taiwan by the government which is something that gov dot tw and changed to a zero and then you get into the kind of shadow government like join the gov dot tw become joined at g zero v dot tw which is always more fun and engaging and so on and people go on a journey of uh redefining together and rediscovering together but it's always into the commons because we always use creative commons and open source and free software to work on those alternate visions and so when those alternate visions it could be budget visualization it could be a transcultural dictionary it could be many other things with the governments likes it well they can just merge so forking is with a aim to be eventually merged and I think this makes this diamond like a pincer movement if you have watched the movie so that we can all work together in both directions that's great so we're really talking about you mentioned the term shadow government we're really talking about you know people creating you know the government on their own terms that's right exactly like self-empowering the governance which is why gov zero people usually talk about governance instead of government because it's a pluralistic take on governance that's great so maybe Kevin I don't know if you do any hacking on the side where you're a closet hacker what what what are your thoughts um so I guess I can focus on kind of a physical analog to this um kind of in the realm of place making which we could call tactical urbanism um and I definitely you know there is a role for bottom-up participation in the planning of cities and the making and shaping of cities I think especially we need this because a population may be quite diverse and you want to give people agency to shape their neighborhoods and so globally there's a lot of interest in place making and in particular kind of one way that this is accomplished is through tactical urbanism where people actually make small interventions in their neighborhood and if it's worked it then might become formalized by the city and so some cities are welcoming this trend of experimenting and it's a physical experiment right and it's not necessarily a digital one but there is kind of physical making and then these prototypes that go out on the street and San Francisco even has like a prototyping festival where artists and designers are able to try out prototypes with the public with a sanction of the city for a few days during the year and then oh yeah and then Professor O actually has a good book on some of this place making and kind of grill urbanism that folks may want to check out I think one last point about this is that for cities broadly then the critical question is how do we activate the public to participate in these types of experiments and I think it can be really helpful as too if we're thinking about post pandemic can people be part of rebuilding after it right so what kind of role can they take in revitalizing neighborhoods revitalizing the economy and I really think that participatory place making is a great way to channel that energy for the public benefits and then if you are hoping to do something that is participatory you do have to remember as a city that part of this is about accessibility how do you make processes open and more welcoming to folks it is about in part using more open source tools so perhaps a broader range of people can participate and explicitly inviting people sharing data sharing knowledge so people aren't starting from zero right right um professor tiban you have actually done quite a few place making projects with your students at chinese you what's your take on hacking well um I would of course we can see that that maybe uh that some of those kind of place making projects uh are maybe if we use Kevin's way of kind of uh saying that tactical urbanism is a bit kind of linked to it then I think that many things that people have tried out also in hong kong and and we were part of of that in a way uh might have uh made kind of steps in this direction I think that the most important thing is then of course at some point and this maybe also is this go the different governance pages right how they merge right and I think for us what was very interesting when we traveled last year with our students to study this um um New York City public plaza program um which was one of the the programs or projects that was launched by Bloomberg who who also created Hudson Yards and maybe one of the most exclusive uh projects in New York but on the other hand that particular program I think the plaza program was quite quite interesting because it basically encouraged communities to propose projects and then helps them basically the transport department that then would actually roll out and build those things but with the community input uh was famously from community organizers from the queen's museum in corona plaza and so on and then we went back to to those places on the online now during the pandemic because we couldn't travel but uh we looked at it during the pandemic together with with uh Miradrach Mitrasinovich our partner in Parsons in New York um and what we found out that during the pandemic those places that were really created in some of the the most impoverished maybe neighborhoods also with the most cases of of covid but that in those places those uh community public spaces that were co-created um they had an important role not necessarily being used as public space but because of the community networks that they created and these would also then become the help networks under the pandemic right um and which was very uh interesting to see and very encouraging that this is an interesting way to bring this together visa v for example projects like of course the the highlight that is kind of beautiful and so on and started as a as a citizen project but uh also uh changed a little bit and was one of the first projects and was closed right uh and millions of dollars and so on while those kind of uh mix of hack and and uh government right um they they seem to be quite valuable in this uh these moments one one question i would have maybe for for uh minister like now when you are because now you are on the on the other side right uh did you had situations that that your work was hacked in a way that that made you uncomfortable and so on because uh of course uh and and not in a good way i mean when we first decided to roll out an open api for the real-time mask inventory in all pharmacies i mean this is because i believe in open api and our procurement rule is written so that's vendor system integrator cannot discriminate against robots so they have to operate api in addition to a human interface um so this is all well and good and that enabled then two social innovations two hacks if you will one is the visualization the real-time map which is good i guess because it helps people to find a pharmacy that still have masks but one is by the pharmacist themselves who invented uh in and both have it on February 6th um the pharmacist invented take a number system because they don't uh want to process linearly uh the national health cards so many pharmacies started to offer those small numbers plates so that people who queue in line just trade in their national health cards to those numbers uh maybe they started saying you know we start getting the queue from 7 a.m. and all the way to 8 a.m. and then we hand out all those numbers but they tell those people to go back in 7 p.m. or something to collect the masks while they process their health cards during the lunch break as to not interfere with their drug dispensing business because they still have a drug dispensing business going on so this is great social innovation it saves them time everybody's time this is great social innovation it saves everybody's time but taken together they clash because from the mask maps viewpoint this pharmacy have completely availability except during lunch where it drops to zero and so the map become not useful at all in the pharmacies that have introduced uh take a number system so the two hacks cancel each other out and makes the trustworthiness kind of a net loss for everyone who practice both in the first time and so I even had a nearby pharmacy uh who paints uh using this a4 papers one character per per paper so really large letters uh that was saying don't trust the app exclamation mark with the exclamation mark on its own a4 paper uh and so of course it was very frustrating like people were hacking in two different ways and they were opposing each other kind of um but unfortunately one of the uh civic tech people uh the name is phingian kiang who is the second person to make their map based on open street map the first one is called how are phingian kiang's map has a place a form for the pharmacies to file in their feedback information so there's a lot of frustration i don't know if ed hotman attacks and so on but if when I browse through them all and suffer through them all I see one really good nugget of idea saying hey why don't the map display two time slots one for getting the numbers and one for getting them up uh the mosques and of course I'm like like eureka and thank you uh random pharmacist because it was anonymous uh and so we implemented right away the very next week the two data points so that they can announce they're open from seven to eight for the numbers and then seven to eight in the p.m for the mosques and so that puts some end to this um cancelling out but on the other hand if they hand out all the numbers by say seven thirty then that's still 30 minutes of time that they are on the map with inaccurate numbers so one of the pharmacists told me and minister why don't you just put a button here that says disappear from the map so soon as I run out of those numbers I'll just click this button and then nobody will call me uh and actually there's a brilliant idea and so by amplifying this on the ground social innovation we empower people who are literally closer to the front line the queuing lines and once we implement that idea they stop canceling each other and then uh started to get pharmacy into a much more cozy place and that in all took three weeks um and so of course I'm very fortunate to to kind of survive through it but the frustration I guess is turned into the spirit of co-creation after all right right so co-creation and then open source uh instead of getting the threats right right uh so at this point uh we're going to transition into a q&a uh so for those who are uh now watching uh this conversation uh in front of your screen uh on youtube you can type in uh questions to the right uh so we have our quiet and we also have uh collected quite a few questions through uh the registration and uh and there's actually quite a lot of questions on um this issue of uh privacy and and we just talk about your national health insurance card uh in taiwan and and you know I think uh this is something that has been on people's mind uh so one question uh what specific ethical frameworks do you use for digital governance um you know and in this one person mentioned this example in korea where uh credit cards transactions and security cameras uh are now being used to conduct uh contact tracing how do countries in asia use digital governance uh differently uh what has been the experience in taiwan to you know protect personal data so perhaps minister tan can can start with with that it's not so much a framework rather than a heuristic during the pandemic we simply say the government should not set up new data collection endpoints that was not there before the pandemic period uh and this has its reason because we've never declared a state of emergency so we're still operating under constitutional law system instead of this you know ad hoc um uh permission by the sorry forgiveness by the parliament we have to seek permission from the parliament for each and every work that we do because we never declare a state of emergency um and so we can only work with the cyber security and privacy parameters the data collection points that was already there before the pandemic so for example handing out those tokens uh the trace together tokens in singapore has been considered but never deployed in taiwan partly because we never had a community spread but partly because that would constitute a new data collection point so we had to work was for example the pharmacist which are already handing out their uh refillable prescriptions based on the national health card so the collection point is already there it's just a new way to apply this data right and also during the digital quarantine instead of working on bluetooth or gps or uh wi-fi based more precise location systems we basically made use of the cell phone tower signal strands which is already used uh although it was very coarse uh parameter like 50 meter radius resolution um it's already used for advanced earthquake warnings people who don't receive those warnings even say that they're kind of nationally forgotten border people or something so but nowadays people do receive those earthquake warnings uh quite well um in advance like seconds before the actual earthquake hits and there's also the flood evacuation warnings and things like that so people understand this will not read your application level message this will not interfere with your gps you can receive the earthquake warnings even with the gps and bluetooth and wi-fi all turned off and so basically this is a existing data collection point the signal strands there's already well understood by the citizenry and so we have to make do with whatever we have uh based on this heuristic otherwise we will have to pass new laws and new um approvals by the parliament which could be a much more lengthy process now kevin have you come across any ethical uh questions or issues in singapore or elsewhere um i think probably if you're talking about um how we think about using digital tools or algorithms um i think that is something that we can think about and especially thinking um through like what maybe the limitations of digital tools are um one thing that's um you know is that it's important to have like perhaps more transparency around algorithms like when they're used and then also um how they're actually being coded instead of just letting them be black boxes i think sometimes they can be a bit um mysterious and um i guess um the minister mentioned kind of a heuristic and i guess the idea too is that um these tools aren't separate from human beings and so it's really helpful to have human beings who understand um and know when to apply the right tools at the right times um and for instance there may be times when machine learning methods actually are quite useful um but we also should understand bias um i think a computer science department recently was found to have been using um algorithms to rank phd candidates instead of really having the full set of readers human readers for the applications and i think some critics were a bit uh well they were rightly concerned that this could potentially perpetuate biases um by the software developers who actually coded those algorithms right so i think um just kind of thinking through some of these issues can be helpful um another kind of thing that you know oftentimes we sell algorithms as it can be very time-saving um and that's definitely true but it can also like obscure um what we're really aiming to reach for when we rely on a digital method um and i think essentially you have to make sure that the system actually is accounting for the things you truly value um and so from a planning perspective for example like actually being on the ground engaging with the community understanding their needs hopes and aspirations like there's not many good substitutes for that um it's a very important and fundamental part of planning um but it takes time and it requires being thoughtful right and so um you know it may not it just might require more time to be spent on that i think my last point on this is just that um we can be we just want to be careful not to over rely on optimization methods because they're helpful as guides um but i think that's the key they're guides they're not prescriptions and so there's still room for human beings to be planners especially when we're trying to understand communities or balance different choices or make trade-offs and i would say that the best tools actually empowered planners to spend more time pondering over the right questions great um we have quite a few questions on this uh issue of uh inclusivity uh and this uh somebody mentioned uh you know that the group that could be characterizes uh digitally excluded uh so the question uh was how can public engagement um uh digital platforms be truly inclusive in terms of age uh social economic spectrum of the public anyone perhaps uh we can always start with minister ten okay uh so the answer is very carefully in taiwan uh for example our 5g spectrum we designed the auction uh algorithm the mechanism uh really really carefully so that we make sure that the telecoms do pay for the actual values uh that they will create um through those 5g spectrums as a result of that we have a lot more money uh than the original like minimum price uh when getting the 5g spectrum and then we dedicate year mark those price um the spectrum auction price to the expense of basically subsidizing the work on not only communication but also health and education in the most rural and unconnected places so so much so that we would say uh the more remote you are the more advanced you become and this is important because then those purpose driven businesses will be attracted to the places that actually needed the most where the broadband application uh and um for example using uh drones for to deliver um pharmacy prescriptions uh is not a nice to have is a actually must have because they have to spend maybe uh two hours or more on public transportation to a nearby pharmacy and so on and so basically this way of designing with intentionality using market design and mechanism design to make sure that these are the public commons the the social common capital uh that everybody agrees uh on those three areas where a social democracy everything else we're liberal democracy but these are social democracy this then creates a market to for example the startups that want to prove their merits of service without necessarily a business model in a competitive marketplace in the municipalities but they can prove the social impact first and become a purpose driven business or social entrepreneurship as we call it here uh and i think having a robust social entrepreneurship landscape and social investment landscape then encourages a more uh like sustainable capital and patient capital to enroll into markets of the state doesn't have to subsidize everything but as they need to take the lead on those uh issues like house and education and communication where it is actually this day's responsibility to be a social democracy okay uh professor debon what uh i mean you have quite uh have done quite a bit of work in community engagement are there things that we can you know that digital uh you know governments uh realm can learn from uh community engaged design in to make the process more more inclusive well i think that in in Hong Kong i think that the most important point is maybe that that we have programs also for social innovation and we have a lot of on the on the grassroots level and NGO level i think a lot of very interesting initiatives and there but not necessarily only using digital tools but also maybe using conventional tools but just to see like how can they be kind of scaled up or really affect the mainstream right because uh in if we see our kind of very uh strong kind of uh wealth gap uh and and the the very high guinea factory in Hong Kong and so on right that um it seems kind of difficult to make a kind of very critical change of this kind of bigger the bigger framework right um so so i think i'm i'm i think there are a lot of kind of innovations that are happening on this kind of more uh smaller level sometimes through government programs or universities and and other or private uh uh initiatives right uh but then basically then there's it's almost a kind of a disconnect then to to to bring this into other parts which is maybe not it's a bit easy to say that is everything in the system is like this because if you look at the housing system in in in Hong Kong public housing for example sometimes even on a very high level uh from its quality to a certain extent right uh it is is creating a certain kind of inclusion maybe to or at least like providing something of of public benefit but but in there are many levels where there is this kind of disconnect and it would need a kind of more a better way to to basically create and the link from those ones into the kind of larger impact systems right and which maybe is kind of interesting that what happened with this kind of go the two different that the shadow website it's on so so something like this doesn't really exist here right um yeah Kevin what do you think well uh how can we make the platforms more inclusive yeah it's a good question and um I think for the creators especially uh it's useful to remember that you're not only programming for yourself or people who are like you um so how do you really think about the broad spectrum of users and what their needs are um accessibility I think is incredibly important um one helpful way of doing that is to work directly with those minority communities themselves to make sure that for instance an app works for people who are visually impaired um another kind of really important uh feature to keep note of is especially if you live in a multilingual society is that perhaps English or perhaps Mandarin may not necessarily be people's first language and so how do you make sure that whatever resource you're offering is actually available to people from different linguistic backgrounds that way it'll really be accessible especially if you're trying to reach those populations great um so let me see uh so the next question is how can digital governance fend against threats to democracy uh over the last few days we have heard about you know hacking from from russian uh in uh in the united states you know and then this is not the first time it has happened and the other form of threats uh you know like the softer side in terms of just uh you know things are happening through social media and so forth uh so so how so what can we do to fend against these kind of threats uh mr tan how how about you sure um so um because uh I understand we only have like 12 minutes left I call server security and disinformation so I have to make choices uh since it's uh more like um a place making and digital governance I think infodemic uh is more pressing uh and also less technical so I'll focus on infodemic our counter-infodemic playbook which is counter-infodemic with no takedowns uh is markedly different uh from other playbooks uh around the world and I think this comes from this simple heuristic just like uh people above 30 years remember the lockdown of the herping hospital and so we fight a pandemic and with just very simple heuristic never go to lockdown because we know how bad it could be to the society people who are 40 years old or older remember the martial law uh and the takedowns and the censorship and the lack of freedom on all fronts and so people don't want to go back uh not even a little bit there and so we have to fight a infodemic uh with no administrative takedown power basically um and so that basically means that we have to make sure that the vaccines of the mind uh race against the disinformation and win and this is very difficult actually because unless you can detect the uh exponential disinformation before it actually goes exponential you need kind of like advanced warning system uh because if you counter-order this information there's no enough fact-checkers or comedians or spoke stocks around and we focus only on the ones that have a r-value above one then there's sufficient uh resource but how do we know the r-value of which misinformation will trend and become disinformation so we also rely on crowdsourcing in taiwan there's this a broad system called co-facts which is also a graph zero project so graph zero is in everything uh so the co-fact system basically makes sure that anyone can share with a simple long press a long click um on their end to end encrypted channels uh so like what's up here it's called line um to the fact-checkers and it's crowdsourced so anyone may join so just like flagging your email as spawn this shows to uh line dashboards what kind of misinformation is now trending to on the verge of becoming disinformation and so the the co-fact system which is also adapted in tailand so instead of co-facts.org which is in taiwan they remove that as and so if you go to co-fact.org you see the tai version of the co-fact system so i put it on the stream yard uh and so just by uh long pressing and sharing we actually gained a kind of advanced warning of what disinformation will actually be trending two hours from now or so so and then we're given two hours to work the fact-checkers the social sector people the journalists have two hours to fact-check that the government on the other hand the competent ministries have two hours to work with comedians to produce memes that are hilarious and funny and make sure that you know the emotions goes from outrage to worrying but then to joy because it's humorous so this is a co-creational spirit instead of from outrage to fear and then to disgust which is the antisocial part of the antisocial media and so this is a race against time it's it has missed uh at times but i think by and large we have now worked uh a system out so that we can counter most of the trending or would be trending this information within two hours time into pictures sometimes with very cute dogs and less than 200 characters. Anyone else want to add? It's kind of inspiring to to see this right but of course it's a question like if you see it in in larger scale like for example we look at American election at the moment all those kind of things like it's you you wonder how how on on such larger scales those things can can function right because it might not be possible to to react so fast and also because the audience is already so split right because i think that also has a lot to do with the question of a fundamental uh a kind of first trust in in in the government right uh that maybe i think was was quite uh uh luckily quite quite positive i think when the pandemic started to to hit in in taiwan that uh at the beginning was also not so clear or not but but then also with the kind of tv response that you mentioned and so on that that helped a lot right but i think sometimes if if you have political leadership that is for example not supporting that or undermining that uh as we have seen with particular politicians in in big countries um then then of course it's very very difficult right um would you have any kind of uh suggestions what one can do in in this kind of more you you live very long time in in the u.s also in such kind of context how how could you approach that um well if gov tech um isn't helping then civic tech takes over i mean that's why we occupy the parliament so i am not saying that you should occupy our parliament i'm definitely not saying that uh but but that is essentially the grass roots response right so for the places where the top down state uh flat out didn't function well actually we had that for example back around the turn of the century when we're still at a very beginning of democratization on the first term of dr li den hui of the direct elected president in 1996 with a really huge earthquake right the september 21st earthquake and that's i think that the event that connected the npo's charities and ngo's and co-ops and place makers into the so-called social sector there was no social sector before the earthquake to speak of on the national scale there was a lot of local scale of course place making activities but the earthquake really brought the social sector national because they fill in where the government cannot they fill in where the government did wrong they filled in when the government um kind of abused uh is asymmetry uh in governing and things like that and that's made the social sector much more legitimate i mean even now more than 20 years later when there's a large earthquake and one of the charities involved in the original september 21st earthquake published number people still believe the charity's number the social sector number more than the municipal number that that is true yes and that that has been the experience in uh elsewhere in in japan and even in china as well the social power of the social sector especially in situations after disasters um you mentioned uh occupied this uh maybe this we'll use this as an ask question uh so the question uh is like this in the united united states there's a stigma about around the world uh anarchist uh what does the word uh anarchist means to you uh as a government minister yeah how do you draw upon your anarchist principle in your work yeah i used to simply say i'm a Taoist but then the people in the u.s seem to to think that i i don't know practice qi gong or spiritual rituals like the folk Taoist religion which is great i respect that but that that's not what i meant by saying that i'm a Taoist person uh so so then i came upon this idea of calling myself a conservative anarchist which is kind of just the um philosophical Taoism uh but expressed in western terms conservative in a sense that in the more than 20 national languages in taiwan each representing one more tradition i don't for they want to make progress on one of those coaches to the expense of the other coaches um which is what used to happen during the martial law days um too too much right and so the idea is to be called cultural and i even called chong hua minguo the the official name of the state i translated as the transcultural republic of citizens um to highlight the idea of transculturalism and the conservative thoughts now the anarchism is very simple i don't give orders and i don't take orders i joined the government to work with the government not for the government to work with the people not for the people uh and this is by voluntary association radical transparency location independence forming the principle of the digital governance uh but these principle i didn't invent on my own because these are the core internet governance uh principles great that that's a great note to to end um uh it's been a wonderful one and a half hours i've personally learned a tremendous amount about uh digital governance and civil engagement we talk about you know governance on the bottom uh we we talk about pharmacies uh you know the everyday spaces uh and and your idea about green technology to the people i think that's one you know great example and becoming the government themselves so these are some of the great lessons i think for me i'm sure for a lot of people so so thank you well that's all the time now we have for today i would like to first thank our speakers for joining us this evening in Taipei especially Minister Tan for taking the time out of your busy very busy schedule and also to both Professor Teeban and Kevin Su for joining us from Hong Kong and Singapore. I will also like to thank all of you watching uh in front of the screen right now as well as our staff Infan Chen and Jennifer Joy from the UW-Taiwan Studies program who have been working between the screen and and we hope to see you again at another UW-Taiwan Studies event in the future so thank you and good night from Taipei. It's 9 o'clock.