 My name is Allison Hewitt, and I am the Senior Fellow in Social Innovation here at the Mars Discovery District. I'm very pleased to have you all, and I think we're going for a very interesting discussion. And we're hoping, as I explained to you, that it's going to be incredibly interactive, so we're going to keep the prepared remarks pretty short, but the minister's going to start with presentation, and then the two other panelists, Alex Ryan, who works with me here at Mars is our VP, leads the Mars Solutions Lab, we'll be saying a few words, and Charles Finley, former Martian, that works for Code for Canada, and many other wonderful things, is going to talk a little bit about their work, and then we're going to just go right into Q&A. Okay, so I hope you're ready for some interaction, yes, because it'll be really boring if you don't know. And we don't want that. So let me just get started by introducing the minister. I'm just going to say a few words, and maybe I'll go to the mic. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah? Okay, fantastic. So the minister's name is Audrey Titan. They're near close. Okay. And the minister is comfortable going by Audrey. So Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages, Pearl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system, ethical and collaboration with Dan Brickley. Does that mean stuff to people? Awesome. In the public sector, Audrey serves on Taiwan National Development Council's Open Data Committee and the K-12 Correctional Committee, and led the country's first eBluemaking project to join the cabinet as digital minister on August 1st in 2016. In the private sector, Audrey works as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on Prouds, Lexography, and with Social Text on Social Interaction Design. In the third sector, Audrey actively contributes to Taiwan's Gov Zero. I'm really interested in hearing more about that. The vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society with the call to fork the government. You really have to be careful about that one, don't you? It's incredibly interesting. So minister, if I'm calling upon you, please kick us off with a few words. Awesome. Hello, everyone. I'm really happy to be here. And do we have a point of the mic with you? Okay. That's much better. Hi. Yeah. So actually, without the mic, I'm sure everybody can still hear me. That's great. Yeah. So I'm going to be here and feel free to start asking questions on the secretive app. And this is literally my office. I just want to show the office. It's not quite Mars, but it is the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab. And it's co-created by hundreds of social innovators. And a bit of personal story in Taiwan. We were a relatively new democratic country. And unlike many people today working on democracy in Asia, I'm an optimist. And that's partly because when I was 15 years old, it was 1996, I discovered this thing called the World Wide Web. And I told my teachers I was like first year engineer high. Back then, I see that the future of human knowledge is being created on the web. And all my textbooks are 10 years out of date. So I convinced my teachers that I want to drop out of high school and start a startup on the World Wide Web and make knowledge together. And surprisingly, they all agreed with me. And so, which is why I put so much optimism on bureaucracy and their ability to adapt. In any case, I discovered this wonderful community called the Internet Society, the ITF, the ICANN, the people who still run the Internet, the core of the Internet still today. And so today, as I was a constitutional minister for two years now, I'm applying the practice that I learned when I was 15 years old to say radical transparency, location, independence, voluntary association for the digital transformation of Taiwan. And surprisingly, it's working and it's changing our country. And so I'll just start with a very brief, like 10-minute conversation about the social innovation lab and GovZero communities work in shaping the social innovation lab. And so this is literally what you would see when you tour around the social innovation lab. It is co-created, as I mentioned, by many social entrepreneurs. So these soccer fields were drawn with people with Down syndrome. It turns out you're excellent visual artists. And you also see those silk driving tricycles roaming around. And these are a collaborative project with MIT Media Lab. These are called persuasive electric vehicles, or PEVs. They're very slow. And if they run into buildings or people, they harm no one. And so we think of AI and autonomous vehicles as not something that's larger than us, but actually just like pets, you know, so that we can co-domesticate these open innovation devices because these are all open source. So if you don't like how it flashes red when you feel that it doesn't understand the situation, you can change it to the face of the cat or something like that. And people have actually built a lot of useful user experiences using co-creative methodologies. And in this space, which opens until 11 p.m. every day, people ask for a chef or a resident chef in the kitchen, and things like that. And me personally, I'm here every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. It's my office hour, so everybody can talk to me directly. And so all these social fabric to collaborative governance is because we want to solve a problem of a non-collaborative governance that plagued the public administration as of this century. Because in the old bad days, people with different inches talked to different ministers or different councillors. And like one note, maybe the administrative economy and the other note, maybe the environmental protection agency or something like that. And then the line in between the career public service is kind of invisible, but they have to arbitrate and also make decisions. But this kind of decision-making is broken now in this century because first people don't need ministers to organize, right? It was the right hashtag. Tens of thousands of people just show up randomly from nowhere. And then for all the emergent issues like autonomous vehicles and so on, we cannot have one council for each new emergent issue. It just doesn't work. And so because of this, we took a page from the Internet Developers and asked a different set of questions instead of asking who are going to organize these people and also how to arbitrate. We asked instead, even our very different positions, are there some common values that's important for everyone? And even the common values and common visions, is there innovations that people can deliver that can make things better for everyone without leaving anyone behind? And just by keep asking those two questions, we created a co-creative environment. And so that brings to the GovZero idea of forking the government. Now, the word fork has a meaning in computer science and collaborative development that very simply put, is taking something that's already there, going into one direction and keeping what's there, not destroying it, but taking it into another direction, kind of like alternative experiments. So in Taiwan, the GovZero community, which is the largest city-type community in Asia, basically systematically look at any part of government that they don't look like useful to people, which all ends in GOV.TW anyway, right? So the legislative, for example, is legislative GOV.TW and, for example, the budget, right? And so on, right? So it's all government service websites. And then the community just changed the O2 and zero. And that's it. So you don't have to pay for advertisement or run Facebook pages or do anything like that. Just with this single domain name hack for each government service, you just change the O2 and zero, and you get into a shadow government that is built by the open source community. And so the best thing is that the community also really inquisits most of our copyright. So by the next procurement cycle, if the government likes it, the government will just merge it back. So each fork is kind of like a standby solution for people to merge it back. Like, this is the ink-bomb-rock-of-zero project, which is the visualization of the national budget. So you can click into each single item and comment on it and have a real conversation. And this one has already been merged not only to municipalities a couple years back, but also as of this year, all the 1,300 ministerial projects are visualized on the join.gov.tw, which is our merging back of the government zero community's contributions, so that if you have anything to ask about any project, whether it's budget, KPI spending, procurement, anything, you just comment publicly, and the Korea Public Service just answers to you directly. This is a prototype built by the Civic Act community that's then incorporated back to the Gov.Tag community. But after a few digital services, this being done this way, people started to get more ambitious and think maybe we can do the same, but with regulations and laws. So it's not just websites, but also actual regulations and laws. For example, if you want to wrap up the self-driving tricycles into actual cars and drones and whatever, then you will run into limitation restrictions that is put by the current law of self-transportation and so on. And so we have a one-stop shop, sandbox.org.tw, that you can just go to and state your current regulation and our law is currently blocking this wonderful idea that will solve a social problem or environmental problem. And then people, this is not intruding our lobbying because it's all open innovation anyway, will basically show you to one of those back ends. For example, the National Development Council have a public health economy, so if you want to do something like Uber or Airbnb or share your private party space and so on, they will do the sandbox for you. For FinTech, of course, like AI based banking and things like that, there's a FinTech sandbox and the UB, of course, belongs to the economy affairs ministry. And all of these share the same concept. You get a year to break the law. You get a year to break the law to introduce something that you think you identify such a need and satisfy it with this hybrid vehicles that drives and flies or something like that because it's all the same for the administrative economy. In any case you get one year to try it out and in a way that is collaborative that shares the data with the municipalities or the regions and so on and at any point if you are not comfortable with it we've got multi-stakeholder consultations but if you are happy with it you can expand the scope for another year and so on and if it's a good idea then it gets merged back into new regulation and if it's a law change then of course the MPs have to deliberate to up to four years but after the deliberation you would then get merged back into our continental law system and so this really works and if things don't work out at least everybody learns something we thank the investor for paying the tuition for everybody since the data is shared the lesson is shared next innovation we'll try at different angles so this is the idea of a regulatory co-creation but how do we say it actually addresses a local need so as I mentioned every Wednesday I'm in the social innovation law for people to talk to but every other Tuesday I tour around all the rural indigenous and all those you know underserved regions in Taiwan and have a real-time conversation I stay for a day or so with the local social innovators so this is why and and even more remote areas like I don't can't teleconference in but whenever I do that all the 12 ministry that I mentioned was their participation officers they are actually in the solution innovation lab enjoying pretty good food and relax mood but also seeing what I am seeing in those local and rural areas and so any issues that's brought up must be resolved by those officers within two weeks or they say you know we this is a problem we can solve that which then the sandbox experimenters can point to that and say okay so we have their rationale to break the regulation and our law because you have admitted that you don't have a structural solution to this local problem and so this is our regional innovation system and so before each and crew vehicles or things like that are of course released to the wild so to speak there are also clear simulation sites like a zoo for everybody to visit and to do real-time conversation so that brings to the final question like after a year of experimentation how do we actually determine whether this is a good idea or not right how do we run consultations that scales to tens of thousands of people and we also use a power conversation for that so this is a piece of open source technology called police and it basically shows your avatar among your Facebook and Twitter and other friends of how people feel react after having some first time experience this particular one was in 2015 when Uber entered Taiwan people clustered into different groups and so after a year of experimentation with a lot of data as community owned everybody can expect the same open data measures open government data but also open citizen data and so we ask people how do you feel about it and that's the key part of the conversation because if people just brainstorm ideas without checking on each other's feelings it tends to be polarized but if we allocated most of it for people's feelings then the best ideas are the ones that are addressed most people's feelings and then we can rectify and or ratify those ideas into laws and so for example for in order of UV here maybe your avatar and you see a fellow sentiment from your fellow citizen you can click agree or disagree and your avatar will move among the people that you know and like you just get a talk about this over dinner and so and it's impossible to make a common attacks and or disrupting the conversation because there is no reply button so nobody can paste cat pictures or things like that if you see a few you know yes or no questions then you can share your own authentic feelings for other people to vote on and after a period of three weeks or four weeks we always see a shape like this this is a experiment with it involving green in the US like people agree to disagree on a few key things that actually takes everybody's attention on mainstream media and creates the perception of people are polarized but people really aren't people spend far more time to refine the consensus their common feelings around the thing that people feel are important and so because we design the social fabric in this way people can always arrive to consensus statements which we then take it into a binding agenda for those different stakeholders to innovate on saying this is what people commonly feel like and you have innovation to address of it and so during our regional tours we see a lot of things that people care about that government doesn't yet have allocated resources to and once we permit we don't have resource yet we see the go zero people stepping in for example this is a go zero air pollution visualization map there's more than 2000 sites around Taiwan just installing very cheap air quality sensors and it's very easy to measure it in your balcony your school and things like that but it's not just for your vicinity it actually uploads to a blockchain actually to a distributable ledger called the and so it keeps everybody honest and it makes it possible for people to aggregate those data into the super computing center and also shows the basically at the white lines you can see a digital divide of Taiwan and then the government can then allocate more environmental stations in places where there's less citizens scientists or if this is the scientists feel that they really want like here to have a station it's impossible for them to fly a drone 24 hours a day but we can because the government has wind offshore wind turbine you know electric generator towers and so we're saying okay we're now installing those civic tech pieces on those electric generators and because it's all open source it's all open innovation anyway anybody who has already we know Raspberry Pi or anything like that can download it off the internet and download the source code you can change it if you don't change it by default upload to the Taiwan network and so we have this open innovation network that aggregates a lot of data and we have one particular website for his English and nearing as well the collective intelligence that Taiwan.gov.tw that collects well intelligence about air quality water quality and all sort of meteorological data as well and we have one web presence for collective intelligence for SI social innovation for AI for smart Taiwan for bio Taiwan and so on and these are like one stop shops also for our national strategies working with people and so in conclusion I would like to say the main idea of doing this innovation is to make sure that the people can see that economic social and environmental needs are not always at odds with each other if we make use of the digital technologies well which is the 17th in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals I always say that my work as the Minister is just on 1718 which is reliable data from everybody 1717 making sure they're using the same data we can arrive in the place where we can share thank you feelings and 176 to make sure that innovations does the result of sharing those feelings are open by default so that people around the world can use it in a non-colonizing manner by co-creating manner and so this is the main message which is you know global books and Taiwan can help and I finally I'd like to read you because when I joined the cabinet two years ago I didn't have a contract I had a public ask me anything period for one month and I had a compact with the government so I always said that I'm working with the cabinet not working for the cabinet and because of practical transparency voluntary association and location independence so when they asked me for a job description I wrote them a poem instead which to me kind of shows what for good means and the shows how do we migrate from a traditional it my side to a more digital mindset so I'm going just to read the poem which is my job description when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that the singularity is near that is always remember the plurality is here thank you so much yes this is really fun can you catch okay a great talk thank you very much for sharing just wanted to get a bit more clarity around the forking so when you form the government website do you actually work and then do like worship how does that work is that like a meeting process when you go and talk to the government and say here it is or is it using the internet yeah that's a great question so this domain name is not reserved by the government it's registered by the civil society and just last week got zero that italy gets formed so if you go to budget.g0v.it you see the counter burning Italy and that's the basic idea is that this is just a meme it's not a trademark it's not a patent or anything like that this is just a way to easily discover alternatives to the public service but once people see that this has cashed out like the air quality measurement thing EMVG0V that TDAF has called on naturally the the public service will be interested and then they will also attend the by monthly hackathons as individuals in the individual capacity so more often than not we find in the list of contributors also actually from line civil service people working in their individual capacity so there's many people like wearing two hats because they either don't get a political will or the budget or cross-side of you know communication in their line of work so they go to the civic tech community do approve a concept and ask for it to be merged back which then very much simple idea on work and so in Taiwan we have a annual presidential social innovation hackathon and it's kind of a big abuse if the term hackathon because it's three months long it's not two days but it's a three month long process of like three weekends and one demo and basically it's more than 100 different proposals and then we match the proposals like the Taiwan Water Corporation donates their water pressure and water flow sensors because they want to detect leakage faster and the machine learning expertise who came to contribute basically there is no award money for the presidential social innovation hackathon the award is to vote first the president's office who will be your PM office so there's no data you cannot get there's no political will problem because the president herself will be your PM and the second thing is that for the ones that win the award the top five there's a guarantee to merge it back into the public service for the next budget year and so this is basically maximizing the impact and we see many presidential hackathons being proposed by the civic tech community but it's risen by someone in the public service so it's a very interesting thank you my name is Fernando I'm actually CEO of a company that we provide consulting and blockchain with the government and semi-governments looking at this scenario that you're providing here that actually regulatory and now regulated market and I wonder if you're adopting the idea to put the blockchain back from across all this spectrum of the government right to have a specifically no transparency and obviously more regulatory opportunity for that yeah very much so we use distributed ledgers as a kind of externally auditable distributed databases so like not cryptocurrency but ledgers right and and we we use that for pretty much everything exactly as you said and so yeah I think it is one of those things that we're creating a digital double additional twin as I mentioned the main use case is that because the civil society organizations don't necessarily trust the government to not change their numbers so if you really want to have open data this much as open government data but also open private sector and open social sector data you really have to have something like a distributed ledger to keep everybody honest so I totally agree with your position how do you manage to avoid anybody gaining the voting and the presentation setting up bots yeah so yeah what's our control control strategy so very carefully so two things right in our national e-petition system you have to have a sms number and then you have to have an email box so it's kind of hard to get you know a large amount of sms numbers without people noticing but people can participate suit on as well because there may be power imbalances involved and so that is the same and also once you're here actually we don't look at the numbers in the groups so if you mobilize five thousand people each read the exactly the same way about or not actually it doesn't mean anything because this measures the diversity of feelings it doesn't mean it's not that at all this is basically to try to come up with things that resonate with everybody and so this cannot really be automated if you of course have a AI algorithm that can generate sentiments that resonates everybody then I for what welcome our new overlords but so far that has not happened to to resonate with everybody's feeling that really takes a human authentic experience to do and so that's both for the authentication and also for the telling part well two points number one this seems to eliminate the low beast and the so-called corridors of powers that we still have here and number two I'm curious if you how does this compare with what's going on in Estonia we also have an experiment here you seem to okay so if you want to comment on that oh yeah I think Estonia is particularly interesting because their governance system is set up after the internet right so there is no legacy to speak of while in Taiwan we started with a paper-based governance system so we have to do digital twins we have to slowly migrate people we have to introduce the use of stylus over the place because we're part used to pencils and things like that so we have a much more longer migration path compared to Estonia but we also think that this means that our innovations are more equally applicable all around the world because many places just like in Canada there are also you know a paper trail or people's love with paper-based processes and that is why this kind of dual mode is I think is particularly interesting and useful but we do look to Estonia and we were sharing a lot of technologies operation with the digital seven groups because we are all committed to open source everything we use so for example the up-vote and down-vote system and so on that's actually a Icelandic contribution we took it from Beterikevik and so there is a active network of people collaborating going on okay my name is Anna and first of all when you mentioned World Pascal for the language I was surprised because that's the first language I learned back in Armenia University and I came here and nobody actually knows what it is so it's a beautiful language and I like to understand what you did to revive it secondly this is amazing and I just don't know how we can do the same in North America. We're holding into the workshop actually the workshop is going on right now and we have people from the city government from the Ontario government and as was from the CSOs and it's about 30 people and people started sitting next to the people they know and in the very first thing we did in the workshop was to maximize strangerness like if you know anybody from your table move your position so they can properly mingle because really it takes cross-sectoral trust for something like this to happen because otherwise if one size legitimacy is too high it actually incentivize everybody else from participating so this cross-sectoral trust is the social fabric that enabled this kind of co-creation and that is the kind of thing that we're trying to foster with our workshop here we also did workshop in NYC for us with the same dynamic and the Pascal, it was probably an awkward one but actually it's Haskell but but I write on Pascal's will they'll find things like that. Okay so how about we I'll come back to that and I'd like to if you can go up and just say introduce yourself and say a few words and tell us your values yeah that's correct so yeah take the mic thanks very much well that's a hard act to follow agree that's a fantastic way so I'm VP of solutions lab here at Mars I have run a social innovation lab called the Mars Solutions Lab and maybe to start with my values yeah so I think what drives me is I think that to for us to make progress as a society we need to be better at solving complex problems I think that actually the future of humanity rests on our ability to be able to solve complex problems together and I think the two problems of our time that are of interest to me are climate change and growing inequality and income polarization so I think that those are two of the big issues but they are part of the sustainable development goals and so for me when I time my own personal values around you know sustainability for for the future and and driving towards equality if I was to summarize that as a value the word I would choose is flourishing flourishing flourishing it's a sustainability to me has always seemed boring it's always seemed unesthetic it's the kind of thing like I can't get excited about being sustainable but when I think about flourishing that's a value to me that I can get excited about that I can share and it's something that's very organic we think of the planet flourishing but we also think about people flourishing we can think about a healthcare setting we can think of it in a in an environmental setting we can think of it in an economic setting and so it really brings us to that that triple bottom line kind of perspective flourishing goals flourishing goals yeah that could be the next level of of the UN sustainable development goals could be that the UN flourishing goals um so that's that's a bit about my values and where I come from um so yeah I've been doing this work for for a few years now um I've I moved to Canada five years ago to south the first social innovation lab inside a provincial government here and that was the government of Alberta so I moved to Edmonton not for the weather it's going there today and I probably headed towards minus 30 but I moved there because the government was in a very interesting place where they were as you may have heard there were a few headlines around Keystone XL the pipelines trying to get oil sands to market and um all of a sudden they started getting these protests they started getting people Hollywood celebrities talking about Alberta and the oil sands and the great stain it was and and so forth and so all of a sudden this oil and gas development which had powered the economy for the last 50 years was being called into question and they were losing social license and so the it was a point where the dominant success myths of the of the province and its economy were being called into question and so I did a few workshops with the government and then they asked me to set up a lab inside of government and so this lab was focused on how does a province like Alberta maintain its competitiveness in a transition towards a low carbon economy so it's a pretty tough challenge to solve and and oil and gas energy touched on everything in the province it was it was all of the social challenges it was all the First Nations challenges it was healthcare it touched all parts of the system and so when I when I moved to Alberta nobody knew what a social innovation lab was nobody knew what systemic design the type of method we were using was was all about and so we took kind of a show-to-tell approach where it's like rather than explain this to people let's just start doing it and so in our first year we ran 38 projects across 13 different ministries of government we engaged citizens in the policy making process and basically our our goal was to engage more more perspectives and more of the complexity of issues and do it faster than the traditional policy development cycle and so that was kind of where we started as we as we iterated from that and learned from from these these rapid policy sprints we started to deepen our expertise around specifically the natural resource management sector and the energy sector and we formed a partnership with the social innovation lab that was outside of government called the energy futures lab because we found that doing this work from inside of government was was very frustrating it was the kind of work where you push the boulder up the hill and the boulder rolls down on top of you every morning and it was the the kind of work works it just felt like 90% of your energy your creative energy was going into overcoming the bureaucracy rather than doing the innovative work that you really wanted to do and so what we did was when we found an alliance with an outside of government social innovation lab we found that we had access to the leaders of power and the policy that they didn't have and they had the space to take risk and experiment and do things that the bureaucracy was unable to do and so we found this this kind of partnership and it was a very successful partnership in doing this kind of social innovation work and over the course of four years we ran a hundred different projects across all ministries healthcare system transformation, reforming family justice system and helping Alberta to diversify its economy beyond oil and gas. So then I moved to Mars and I've been here for about 15 months now running the solutions lab and we are working on some projects in social innovation to do some cross-sectoral type of change so I'll just give you a couple of examples of the kind of projects that we work on. Number one we're working to get 40,000 youth into employment across Canada in the next five years this is called opportunity for all youth and while government has been part of this this particular program with ESTC employment and social development Canada this is actually being driven by the corporate sector this is something that Starbucks has been doing for about 13 years but at a very small scale they realized that when they could hire a youth that has faced one or more barriers to employment that hiring that youth actually gave them a better return on investment than their other hiring channels. Why is that? Because the kind of youth that maybe are not in school and they're not in a job they have a form of resiliency that the silver spoon kids maybe don't have that have had all of the benefits handed to them in life they also have a loyalty to the company that when when you're in a situation of feeling like you have no hope and somebody gives you a career opportunity that's that's pretty amazing and so they found that they've gotten some loyalty from that and so what we've been doing is working to expand this across a coalition of forward-leaning employers but we're doing this not out of corporate social responsibility to to kind of do some public benefit it's not it's not philanthropy this is them hiring to meet a hiring need because they can't get the talent that they need and we're getting them 85 acceptance rates from the youth and they're sticking around longer and so it's actually having a positive P&L benefit at the same time as it is solving an important social problem so that's an example of the kind of work we do a very different kind of project we were asked to come into the city of Edmonton where there was this this kind of polarization you talked about in the conversation safe injection sites being set up all three set up in Chinatown so Chinatown was furious about this because there wasn't consultation they started to sue the government and so the city is being sued by the by the citizens the service agencies are also frustrated with the city and the citizens are frustrated with the service agencies because they feel like their suburbs are being ghettoized by the by the concentration of services for people who are on the streets or homeless having mental health and addiction challenges there were proposals to build a large wellness center to make life better for for the people who are street involved but when we actually went out and hung out on the streets and spoke with these people the new shiny building would solve exactly none of their needs so we've got multiple levels of government that don't trust each other we've got citizens who are angry at the government we've got the the agencies lost the trust of the of the population they're part of and we asked to run them through a social innovation process and that started with deep ethnography which is really just a fancy word for hanging out and getting to know people and getting to figure out what their hopes and dreams are what's their motivations what do they care about what do they want and then we shared that information with government officials but with people with the experience of homelessness and with people who were who were working to help those those communities and as we brought them around and shared this new data and new information with them we were up to really pinpoint very specific kind of active puncture points where a small change a small prototype a small intervention could achieve a big result so we ran 14 of these prototypes in parallel and one of them was called project welcome map we took well street community services which was one of the homeless shelters old banana packing factory from the 1950s and we outside was this huge expense of concrete where all of the homeless people would gather when they got kicked out at 6 30 in the morning and it was right next to the brand new oilers staying downtown so when people are going to the game you would see them walk down the street and they would kind of there's a crosswalk here they would go down and they would jaywalk to avoid this place where all the homeless people are hanging out and it was also an area where the police would come by frequently for for drug use and for violence and so we took that and we entered into a co-design with the folks the community members that hang out there and we asked them what they want and we asked them what what could we do here and we brought in some indigenous artists and for $300 worth of paint some borrowed furniture some some plants we completely transformed this space and it was a co-design co-production where the the street involved folks were actually felt ownership of of what happened because they got to to decide it and as they did that work people noticed that kids were coming out to play here because there were giant Lego blocks when kids are playing there's going to be violent and doing drugs the seating lowered the temperature people were now relaxed there was an abundance of seating rather than just the one seat that everyone used to fire over there were umbrellas to keep people shade in the sun so it just created a completely different atmosphere it was colorful it was inviting and people from the city started coming in and figuring out what's going on here we started to build bridges across the community so an example of a different kind of social innovation project we've done so that's enough from me we want to hear more about you and your your amazing experiences but that's some of the social innovation lab work that's happening here in Taddleup checking that but I think we're going to throw it over to Charles because when we open the questions we want to have them available for everyone I don't have as long a speech prepared I want to compliment you Audrey on your well-constructed URLs and probably help to the government have those well-constructed URLs as well as we can do that parallel go zero I just wanted to start to say so I'm Charles we were talking about values and I've started ahead of my career about in 2005 I was doing my PhD which I didn't finish and but at that time it was also a U of T I was heading up a project called Project Open Source Open Access it was very involved in a lot of the camp community and the sort of open side of things I left my PhD and I kind of joined the corporate world and I built a career around sort of driving digital transformation inside organizations so I found myself on planes going to New York and London and working for Big Fortune 500 clients or being employed by a Big Fortune 500 company which was amazing and I had a lot of great experiences and we worked with some really great people but five years ago I kind of realized that I had lost something along the way and I had kind of forgotten most of my life has been around just on the sort of intersectional design technology and sort of urbanism and civics and I kind of lost the urbanism and civics side of things along the way and so I decided to change and I ended up coming here to work at Mars which was very transformative for me and I met so many also really amazing people in the community here but I also at that time started at a new profit at that time called Urban Digital and the purpose of Urban Digital was to bring what we had seen it was with Gabe Sonny and a few others it seems sort of the community of urbanists the planners the activists the social workers weren't very disconnected from the tech community that there was sort of at that time the burgeoning tech community here in Toronto and those two the urbanists didn't seem to know much about technology and the technologist didn't seem to really be connected with the ways in which cities were designed and we could see this tsunami of change that was coming with smart cities and data and technology was coming into our cities the internet of things so we started this nonprofit which was you know very small and underfunded and we both said we basically just did events and meetups we wanted to build community that was the purpose of the nonprofit and so we ended up actually able to be held an event right here in this room actually called in 2013 called the Urban Mobility Futures and we had we had Lyft here and we had we had Cardigo here Uber was not here yet we had a number of other people from the TTC we were talking about transit which is actually a funny thing now given where we've gone with Urban Digital but so that went on for a while we built a really good community there but we realized that actually where our our effort should be focused was more on the civic side we saw what was happening globally with Smart Chicago and Code for America and then you know my society and the WK so there are a lot of changes happening around the way that citizens and residents were engaging with their governments the way that governments were trying to grapple with the rapid technology change and that citizens and residents were used to actually having amazing digital experiences with banking and music and then they go and renew their driver's license and it was a terrible experience they'd fax things in or it was very animal on so we we started to look at what could we do in this space and so we pivoted and we started something called Code for Canada so a year and a half ago we started Code for Canada which is part of the global Code for All movement there's Code for All's in Taiwan in Japan in Germany in Nigeria and Pakistan in the United States it's a part of the sort of global civic tech movement and what we're looking at was how could we bring citizens together with government and the community and the technology and design policy community to create a space where along the philosophy of building with not for so it's actually coming out of this sort of 19th century model that we have for government which is very machine-based and binary based and governments need to produce services at scale for citizens and citizens are treated like consumers, governments, producer, citizens are consumers can we can we build some things that allow citizens to co-design to co-produce with government so we we started a group here in Toronto called Civic Tech Toronto which uh in every Tuesday and then hack and hack makes and so people would and you know people say well are people getting paid to do this stuff no like volunteers would come out every Tuesday night we're up to like 60 to 100 every Tuesday night now to work on projects on an ongoing basis and these projects were things like budget media which would help help citizens and residents understand the way that the city budget is created using that data and actually creating tools to allow people to interpret the budget a little better access to justice which allows new comers and others to navigate the justice system that's often done for government silos it's very difficult for a newcomer to to navigate so projects like that we started Code for Canada as a national non-profit so we have a number of programs our sort of big flagship program it's called the fellowship program so we embed teams a product owner, a UX designer and a coder as a team in a scoped out project with a government partner that actually helped the government design a better experience for their residents and their citizens so we've gone through our first cohort that just graduated in the summer an example of one of the projects we worked on was with a veteran of Paris Canada and basically if you looked at the if you're a veteran you're you're you qualify for a number of benefits and you really don't when you when you're looking at you're looking at the map of all the different benefits that veterans would have it's a labyrinth of the spider what spiders went the veterans are really having a hard time navigating and understanding what things that they actually qualify together what they were so the Code for Canada fellowship team working in partnership with veteran affairs built a kind of portal but actually showed all the different benefits that they would have but tested the names of the benefits were tested with veterans themselves both in French and in English so that they were in a way that they would understand not to talk down to benefits to the veterans in many cases the language was very bureaucratic and impenetrable to make it simpler and easier to understand so you can understand the benefits that they weren't entitled to get as a veteran so that's an example of one of the projects we now have so we have we've had and have fellowship programs with the government of Canada with the government of Ontario and the city of Toronto so that's that's our flagship program and we're getting great interests across the country it's a way in which you can help governments as you may understand any large organization just not governments struggle with the new technologies because they have you know they have layers layers legacy technology processes and in many cases sort of cutting-edge designers and coders don't necessarily work for the government so this gives them a way for teams to kind of work it not as a vendor but and not as an employee but actually as an embedded team over a 10-month period to work on a scope-no project and help maybe create some culture change inside of the government at the same time the other the other pillars that we have so there there are now civic tech communities across the country from Halifax to Vancouver to Yellenide in clean Edmonton and and so Code for Canada helps connect those communities together we built like a civic tech playbook to toolkit I guess to help either help those those communities grow or help people in other communities start up a civic tech program so that's another program that we've done we've also watched Civic Hall which is there's a civic hall in New York it's not exactly the same the Civic Hall in Toronto is focused on municipal governments mostly and they work on small workshops and small projects and there's a membership model where the City of Toronto members and others are also participating can have a membership in a hot desk it's actually hosting a CSI right now so that's another program that we've launched and finally last thing we've launched is Canada's first civic user testing group so a lot of government services when you're rolling out how to review your driver's license how to qualify for you know payments or whatever else you may get it they're not often user tested or they're not tested very well or if they are they're often done through professional user testing groups and those groups are usually not very representative of the population and and so the civic user testing group is new it was just launched in September and it's a way of actually having citizens who actually get paid to participate but it's a diverse set of users in in some cases priority communities to allow them to participate in the co-design of government public services so that's another thing so to return to values I feel like I've gone on this journey and so now I'm much more focused I still have a corporate job but my corporate job is with an engineering and architecture and planning firm we're trying to make cities more and more better so I come full circle and my values really are around sustainability resilience openness and then I think about all the best leaders who I've all who I've ever met and they're always to your point they're always relentlessly optimistic so that optimism not to be accused of not to be confused with what I need to take relentless optimism is what we really need right now I think we need a lot more of that so that's one of the values I try to avoid according to my so that's it thank you um are there any questions for Charles yeah you ready I know they're silly aren't they hi thank you um yeah I've been following what you've been doing for Code for Canada very interesting I went to some events I saw you at the open apps yeah that's right um I have a question about um I was thinking about one of the obstacles you might be faced with with the fellowship program is managing confidentiality of information has that come up with the government like you know having these people who are embedded for a short time how have you managed that part the uh they they are they do sign agreements when they join in as part of the sort of agreement that we have with the government so it's like any other relationship that you have uh with uh you know with another entity is that they they do sign agreements around being as to your point uh the information about our about citizens for example our veterans needs to be protected and not to be shared so all of all of the uh all of the fellows do sign those agreements before entering into the relationship thank you can you throw it to the back catch hold of it okay good job I've worked out about fully good at it there was a physical test just I don't know I'm just curious I've been a U.S. researcher for about seven years and I was watching and following the sidewalk labs initiative because I've been to IOT now I'm just curious that you mentioned this civic user group is that something that people self-selected in do you recruit is there an outreach I'm just curious how that works yeah it's actually just started okay so I think we're still figuring that out how we're going to actually we are we we are recruiting people so we will recruit people but we have to part of the value of it is that it's representative that means that you get a part of the value of this is that you're going to get people testing that normally we never test so we're going to be doing outreach as well that's awesome it's the hardest part of researchers finding more people yeah anybody else before we yes I understand your advice to IBI group IBI I'm the head of communications for that yeah I'm maybe in price okay and by the IBI's setup and I can you elaborate how IBI groups promote more like a design urban sort of technology field into some sort of stakeholder industry that's why I like the idea so even myself now I'm saying can you elaborate elaborate a little bit about the structure the goal how IBI set to more like a promote in elevating the design industry into more like a stakeholder of the society how do they promote the design community yeah how they structure how IBI is a structure which okay do you think we already said technology so they they actually do run a number of cities in outreach and engagement programs usually with their clients who are cities so we've done it for the city of Calgary we've done it for Toronto we've done it for the U.S so we do we do do that citizen engagement piece as part of our consulting services okay let's let's go minister I'm going to call you up to the panel Alex Charles if you want to just take your seat and we'll look at some questions that we've got on the there's a theory that clustering of creative class to make coming few competitive and successful global cities fairly spiky is Taiwan is a de facto city-state well equipped to be coming a competitive creative city or state I think that's for you I would love to hear from the other two that's interesting because um geographically we're kind of small from Taipei to the south most of Belgium by high speed rails it's just one hour enough right but it's also 23 million people and so when we see you know this kind of geography and when the president sign says you know broadband is a human right many people say that right but we actually deliver so now in any place in town including the remote or rural islands and things like that if you don't have broadband access of at least 10 megabits per second it's our fault and so this is this kind of geography really makes Taiwan civic texting feel like like a larger municipality like a very very connected civic tech community but also provides a large population of many layers of like 16 indigenous First Nations with its own cultures and all the different languages by the end of the year we'll pass the national language fact so we'll have the 22 national languages so you can you know if a child want to learn calculus in Sakilaya or in Amis or something the administrative dedication need to provide AI and other resources for further students to actually learn that so I think we're a extremely rich cultural layers and those cultural layers makes the creative classes not competitive but rather as I mentioned plurality I think plurality is our own value and it's very easy to connect with other cities and municipalities and nations that also values plurality and diversity of perspectives. Some great values here freedom of speech, collaboration, plurality, agreeing to disagree, fairness, transparency, co-optition, equity, equality, generosity, innovation, hard work, fun, family, doing good for others and one deeply philosophical person who wrote why am I here I have a question for you I haven't heard you say this but apparently someone is asking why do you say you are the warm power of Taiwan well yeah I'm not saying I'm the warm power of Taiwan I'm saying you know soft power hard power right sharp power warm power so basically warm power is a short hand that says Taiwan solves our own social and environmental issues through co-creation and social innovation and when we share those innovations we always share it openly that is to say not in a colonizing manner but rather in a co-creative manner case in point I mentioned briefly on stage that the Taiwan Water Corporation through the presidential social innovation package don't work with machine learning researchers to reduce the workload detection by tenfold now because we SDG index that like climate action and life underwater and things like that like all the presidential hackathon items are SDG index people in Wellington in New Zealand discovered that what that we do just by googling and then they said you know they didn't have a water shortage problem but now because of climate change they actually do now so their choice is between you know buying a proprietary Israeli solution that they may have to renew every year and it's not co-created or they could invite a presidential hackathon team from Taiwan to Wellington for three months and co-create something together and based on open source toolkills and technologies so they actually communally own their technology in their water pipeline so that is the kind of warm power we are proposing because when they increase the machine learning algorithms Taiwan also benefit because it's open collaboration and everybody else on us can also see the collaboration happening in real time okay that's the one and so is to the benefit of the entire plan and not just for two countries and that is what would mean by warm power please put up your hand or please send it on the app so the title of this is tech for good so I'm really interested in what is your favorite example of tech for good or it doesn't have to be a favorite I won't put the pressure on you but a example of tech for good that you want to share with us anybody have one in mind apparently Alex has one I guess I do um I don't think I think uh a lot of the media these days you hear um the first thing you hear about tech is the the fear and the concern and I think that we're definitely seeing some case studies Cambridge Analytica style that that being those concerns are warranted um but but I do think it's also really important to follow some of the the really positive applications of technology because technology is just a tool we can either use it for evil or we can use it for good and often the first kind of case studies come out military and you know on the internet the first case case studies are usually porn but then but then after we think of kind of some of those examples we often will third or fourth or fifth time will actually say well this could actually be useful to do something really good so I think one one good example is the behavior insights teams that have been running in the UK I think they have been bringing an evidence-based approach to policy making which which I think is very encouraging rather than just putting policies out based on ideology you use them to say does this actually work it's a pretty basic question but it's one that's usually not asking government and over the last few years they've been making use of machine learning to augment their their behavioral economics type approach and so they've done eight separate trials using using machine learning to see if they can just use publicly open data sets to help improve government services and one particular area that they've been being focusing in on is how government inspections government has to inspect a lot of a lot of different services across across the the country in order to make sure that the public safety is upheld so for instance child care facilities need to be inspected GPs need to be inspected and senior care providers need to be inspected so one of the things they did is they looked at the data sets and say could we identify from the public data where we think the most likely are that there might be a dysfunction or a failure and it turns out yes they could and so for GPs for example they could by doing physical inspections for just 20 percent of the GP population they could identify 95 percent of the problem clinics and so that's an example where by using this public data you can actually improve people's safety and you can use public resources very efficiently so that's an example that comes to mind for me. I'm also starting to advise a startup in that sort of aging place space and so lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about this also with the aging parents and the general meeting and the population I think I look at some examples of technology in this space that is technically definitely I mean right before I worked at the on the project open source project before that I was working at the adaptive technology research center at the University of Toronto it now is at OCAD and it's called the Inclusive Design Research Center but even back then they were working on things like screen reviewers that allowed people who were visually impaired to actually look at websites so that's an example. We're going to see more and more of this with VR. I've been hearing about there's apps now with VR that allows people with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia to actually experience streetscapes from their youth and it helps them reconnect with their memories and it helps people mind at least. So there's things like that that I think are really really positive and as we're seeing now with the Asian population we're going to have to start retrofitting thinking about the way that we move through our transit stations our cities our offices that actually normalize people who are having more trouble moving around so there's lots of technology that can help with that and that's definitely technically good. So I'll share a very simple thing it's close stated so a very simple thing I was supposed to say it it's I think done by the my society people in the UK and they use it to capture their parliamentary speech break records and put it online so people can easily index and surge it and so on and hold their volunteers to account and this has been internationally adopted but far as I know I'm definitely the administrative branch in the world that says you know for all the meetings that I am a chair of I'm also going to publish the entire transcript of whatever everybody said even inside government before the policy is made and this is what we mean by radical transparency because for most of the freedom of information acts in the wrong world that only applies to after the decisions made but that means that the citizens are consulted to when actually the policy is already formed they just want input on the implementation details but by opening up to more than three thousand speakers and seven hundred meetings that I've held in the two years since I've become the digital minister it's like putting a VR asset to everybody so people can feel what being a digital minister is like like follow my day to the schedule and my meetings and meetings with journalists and lobbies and so on provided they are willing to be indexed by the state's technology and this technology being really simple it turns every utterance into a social object so we can quote on everywhere and turn it into a social object to be discussed on twitter on facebook on media and things like that and they'll have a whole stack of technology to support the automatic transcription translation and so on of all the meetings into this kind of prominent archival and I think this really radically increase the trust of the government to the people right because people have to you know see how the government actually thinks and functions and so on it also lowers the risk of the public servants because traditionally if things go well the minister get all the credit and if things don't go well well it's always a public service to blame but with this kind of radical transparency is the other way around if even if things don't go very well if things feel somewhat well the people who innovate actually gets the credit because we can see it in the public transcript and the journalistic people do get an insight on why the public is making and if things fail it's always my fault because it's just my experimentation anyway so because this reverse payoff metric we are now having a lot of corpus what we mean speech and text data that we can now use to train AI and bring into all the other Taiwanese communities and languages and common you know indigenous community and so once they were partnering with Mozilla common voice which I would donate like two hours of my speech into the AI recognition engine so people are not restricted to what Siri understand as the perfect accent but they can always speak in their local accent and local language and leave no languages behind so this whole speech technology stack in the service of radical transparency I think is one of the examples that we're good. Any downsides to radical transparency? Well I mean we're radical but it's not like we livestream all meetings so we do allow for 10 working days if it's a internal meeting that I chair or 10 days if it's an external meeting for our visitor for people to edit for professionalism so that in jokes and so on are usually taken out without losing the context but without this 10 days or 10 working days buffer there will be very enters because then people will be afraid of speaking out so this kind of strikes a balance just as this pseudonymous arrangement of e-petitioners we try to strike a balance of having the access to the Y in the context but also have the public service in somewhat free capacity to make in jokes the only downside is that I cannot access state secrets anymore because any information that comes into the state secret pollutes the entire system so when you're saying military drill or something and just take a day off I still don't know where the bunkers are so I cannot access data confidential information but there's a conscious trail of that I mean. Yes I'm just going to show the where's the Smiling up to the radical transparency doesn't it automatically cause people to not be as transparent in their viewpoints I mean if you're going to publish I mean I'm a fan but like won't there be generally human nature of people who don't want to go in the direction that you're taking the conversation and who will not be honest in that conversation so you mean that people would with what refrain from speaking authentically yeah let's say that I don't want to like there's obviously going to be people who don't agree with your agenda share of index and so those people also part of these meetings I appreciate right because it's open and so how do they get around the fact that they're going to be projected to the world openly when and they may be the ones who are going counter to you or so how do people actually behave so very simply put as an MA a conservative anarchist I don't give orders I don't take orders so there's no agenda actually I'm a purely facilitative minister and so but if people do like fight in each other in the meetings they have 10 days to review each other's positions and what we discover is that after 10 days because sometimes people in meetings they just speak they don't listen being forced to review what everybody having said actually after 10 days sometimes they just go back and say we don't have to run another consultation I actually understand the other person's point so having this review time really really helps but in the worst case they can just edit their own speech out right because everybody's free to edit their own speech so we had an extreme case where a journalist views that what the question that she asks is proprietary information or whatever and if you look at my theoretical transparency you see that everything she asks is redacted and you just see me monologuing all the answers so that that's the most extreme case but we don't usually go to extreme okay so this is a very good question for Rob you're right it's a big tsunami someone said coming in red and that's off to the blockchain and AI but there are many more disruptive technologies right all together and the key question is time right so I think everybody's feeling that way right at the definition of the youth program here and as well and he's going to actually all these disruptive technologies going to affect our generation and next generation as well code you see will be the solution right for you know what is step one or smart cities tier one tier two that they want to create this ecosystem be part of this the national smart cities when it's a lack of data scientists that there are no these ML SMT's as well and the real network so this is a lack here it's a lack as well of talent and the world of talent the U.S. a brilliant one everywhere right where I go on the travel as well as here I was there from Barcelona this market this event everywhere I go this talent and work right so where is the solution the lack of talent well I think we move at speed of trust actually without trust the talents are there but they're kind of to console each other at that is my honest feedback I have one with many professional ethnographers people were specializing hanging out with people and they work from the angle of say cultural anthropology which focus on people or human geography which focus on places and and always they find that when people say there's not enough talent what they actually mean is that there is no common vision or common value of that place or that neighborhood because if people do have common value the surface that you need to actually do the solution the solution is so well defined that it's it kind of just falls into place but if it is not well defined if you need to have a lot of competition in order to kind of swarm into a solution that of course people feel that shortage of talent as the minister also in charge of social innovation but I'm trying to do is always to ask the right how may we question we may take one year two year to ask the right how may we question but once we get to that point we never find it like a talent problem I think it's so important too because the whole sport city discourse right now is it reminds me and I always quote jane jacob spying on the board of james water it reminds me of the mid-century where you have a lot of technocrats sort of deciding about what a city should be like from an efficiency standpoint the traffic you know the investment standpoint and what jane jacob's was writing was actually these are the ways that people actually live in cities this is the way they actually move through cities this is the way that they interact with people I think we can't lose that and I think that's part of what civic tech is trying to do is to say and we still have a long ways to go but in some of the things you're doing is is how can we actually involve people in the design and into the consideration of the technology as it gets applied to our cities and that's what's been missing and I think we need to work harder to get to get there but we'll end up with a far better far more human result that if we just simply look at the technology as a standard yeah I think the talent's top of everyone's mind right now particularly as you know Toronto experiences this boom in the tech industry having put on more jobs than Silicon Valley and New York combined in the last couple years so it's definitely that the talent crunch is concerned what one thing I would add to the points which I agree with is that actually if you look at the current diversity statistics of the industry it's actually not very diverse and that to me indicates an opportunity for us to tap into talent sources that for many reasons are being overlooked right now and so Mars recently released a diversity inclusion belonging report which talks about we did some surveying of the tech community around this topic and we think it is a big opportunity for us to to to grow the the talent pool by taking a more inclusive approach to developing the industry yeah thank you it's called talent fuels tech if anybody's interested in looking at that report I think there's um it's it's pretty clear I know this happens in a lot of industries but we advertise for hard skills and we hire for soft skills so how do we bring them together how do we meet that gap how do we get more women into technology more visible minorities etc etc so it's a huge opportunity in that space I'm now going to go to one of the questions survey um minister who do you surround yourself with to work and how would you describe the skills you bring to the function you hold sure um so my office is very interesting in Taiwan we have 34 vertical ministers meaning that each government ministry or a commission and we have eight at the moment horizontal ministers who look after the cross-ministerial issues is always been like that in Taiwan and so at the moment as the additional ministry in charge of the governments of innovation and use empowerment um actually my portfolio touches every single ministry and so when I joined the cabinet there was a public negotiation period where the records transparency and so on was negotiated and the second principle I mentioned was voluntary association so I mean that by saying you know I would pitch at most one volunteer from each ministry to form my office the public additional innovation space so theoretically I can have 34 staff at the moment I have 22 but that means that no single ministry which each ministry present a value right so um no ministry dominates the discussion but everybody gets into the habit of working out labs meaning that we use the shared combat board we have a rocket chat we use all the you know collaborative tools in a cyber security hardened virtual workspace of course but that means that um each ministry don't have a dominating discussion on the digital policies but they have to actually come up with something they'll work in the one workspace that is to the benefit of every other ministries as well and so I surround myself with volunteers from like two different groups and ministries and so on without each voice any voice dominating anything else and then the peripheral is participation officers in each ministry there's a team of officers past of meeting people who are emergent bringing emergent issues like engagement directly and the PO's I think the agricultural PO is actually here in Toronto helping running the workshop and we have one of these PO teams in the tainan municipality as well and various other municipalities and all these is the idea that whenever there's an emergent wicked problem a coordination problem there is a set of people it seems in each ministry in each bureau in the tainan municipality to make sure that they can work as a team to meet with people with emergent issues so that we can work on domestic issues that escalate to national or national issues that devolve to domestic without any bureaucracy involved with the same line of design thinking so that's the kind of people that I involve myself with and so the skill that I bring as in is the core internet values which is permissionless innovation and rough consensus and these are the core internet values that I'm bringing into the government system yeah if I could pull up on that that was my question um um how do you there's that technical aspect you know so how do you manage that because your discussions you know they set up pretty technical tools so you see how volunteers from ministries but are they all technically savvy like how do you manage that piece of the puzzle in your discussions I guess yeah I would say that because I work with Apple especially the Siri team for the first six years we always value design and design as a kind of proxy of what we call onsite customers which means that all those ministries people they have varying levels of digital sadness and we have to adapt our methodologies to fit all the modalities we have a lot of more senior people in public service will join they are most comfortable with pencils but if we use like these kind of stylists they're actually okay with it but if we force them to use like phones it doesn't work and things like that it's very little things like that but basically we tailor made our digital technologies to meet with the existing habits and workflow with the civil service but whenever we see opportunity that people are doing something redundant and trivial and things like that we just automated right away in a very opportunistic way and so yeah that's the basic idea when you say we is that the people are the close to the people around you really have a team of people who are ready to implement like yeah of course of course that that's the public digital innovation space we call ourselves a space is that the office because we're literally like three rooms in the administration building three rooms in the social innovation lab a lot of virtual spaces that's the one so people can be interns we have like 40 interns every year who just systematically look at all the government service and websites and check for mobile and responsiveness design and multi-lingual and whatever and they're not just debugging or doing qa many of them are actually versed in javascript and css so they bring gifts right to the ministry saying if you just changed those two lines your website is going to look so much better and things like this so we build relationships so that the civil service see the young people and the civic community as always contributors in components instead of vendors and so when we we just you know throw out interesting issues for the crowd and the collective intelligence to wag with so in many senses i'm just a channel to amplify the collective intelligence i don't actually personally do anything other than you know ordering pizza and taking the trash out of it very important role in the middle piece i'm just wondering are you concerned about sabotage from the mainland and to the extent that you could mention it how do you deal with it yeah um i think uh the first thing i did as a position minister is to recompile the linux kernel that we use in the in the in the intranet um and because i don't touch state secret that's the first line of defense but even for our collaborative uh brick space we use this technology called sandstorm sandstorm.io and it's one of the most secure cloud platforms around it is entirely open source and we get our top notch like defcon number two um you know white hat uh people to penetrate testing it for half a year and line by line because it's open source and to make sure that is actually one of the most secure systems around and then on top of the sandstorm system then all the civil service can innovate by writing you know java security applications that orders lunchbox together or whatever uh and then uh not worrying anymore about the cyber security because all the basic uh defense in depth is there in place and with the sandstorm system people can just adopt any open source uh even if it's known to have a lot of vulnerabilities once it's contained within the sandstorm sandbox it can't do anything because the sandstorm system considered all the applications as malicious and then it has a really good permission control model and so i would encourage people who are cyber security um inclined to consider a system because we get data tests from nearby jurisdictions and so far as i mean i really working pretty well and standing to this i'm thinking more in terms of data pollution so would you be that they can feed you bogus data which can disturb the conclusions right uh well there's two kinds of data right if you're saying you're environmental sensors and iot devices and so on of course nowadays we've manufactured most of it ourselves and we substitute the for example the ip cams and so on we have a standard bismi certification that's one of the first one for an iot devices so for the hardware of course we use hardware this is like just common sense but for um citizen initiated data which you maybe you know uh like uh faking uh consensus uh basically um we have many different uh defenses the first one of course being the difficulty of actually obtaining a large number of domestic sms numbers is actually not that easy and the second thing is that because we measure always in the first uh diamond of design thinking we only measure you know the collective facts and the feelings and the feeling always only coalesce on how i question the second part which is the implementation delivery and so on that part is actually not a i automated conversation is always face-to-face consultation that's live streamed and so it's much harder to to throw this part and it doesn't actually mean much to throw the first part for the reason that i've already explained because we don't measure in numbers we measure in the quality and diversity and if they're able to actually propose something that really resonates with lots of people i for one would come so thank you all very much for your absolutely wonderful questions i have one final question for the panelists and i'd like them to think about their concluding remarks in our last five minutes but my question is this and it's completely selfish one of the things that we're very concerned at at mars is not only how we help the individual entrepreneur but how we put a systems lens on it so how do we address barriers to the adoption of innovations and so what can we learn from your experience in terms of creating the receptor capacity for this way of thinking being doing acting back to you we're going to start with you you got the answer all right um yeah just just be really humble i think what would we say design in taiwan because we're so good at you know semiconductor design hardware design supply chain management and things like that people usually think in a iteration cycle that's measuring half a year or a year that is capital intensive that is very precise and things like that i was known for this kind of thing since the personal computing but it nowadays when we say design we have to assume a kind of humbleness that is to say we automatically think co-design and that's that's what i really mean by when we think user experience we need to think about human experience because if we design was in mind of users then you're just interacting with that single slice of time that the person every acts or reacts to your service or your product but if you design with humanity in mind with how to enrich the humanity of the whole gecko system and supply chain rather than just the user when it's using the product and i think that enables a design that opens up so much possibility just like the social innovation space that every week people are tweaking their space to reflect the social need and so the iterations cycle has shortened to one week long essentially you meet me on Wednesday we make a change and the next week you're seeing roaming self-driving tricycles and things like that and so it is this humbleness just participatory spirit and self-awareness that's the people actually always know better and the only thing we can do is to create a social fabric which the people can review their authentic selves if we adopt this approach to design then there can be no failures because there is no preset top-down agenda whatever shows up is the right thing whoever who shows up is the right person whatever they show up is the right time and that is why we work so so much with human geographers because we see the place as virtual and physical as kind of the main social object that we're working on and the people who pass us by the space occupies the space including the parliament gets to set agenda for the space and it would adopt this approach i think the adoption itself will be driven by the people and the actual use they have to the fabric of the city and that is our vision for smart city actually the smartness is in the collective intelligence any final words from you Charles that's a tough one it's very tough i'll try to try to move up to it uh the uh to your question around the systemic lens so i think for uh if i'm talking from the city tech perspective uh it's really thinking about humans as humans treating humans as humans and that uh so we look at some of the successes that we've had it's because we were you know we had people in the community working with people in the government at all levels and we had teams in the government that have now formed digital service central to centralize digital services that are now thinking this way as well that they want to include uh communities more in the work that they're doing and so and it's the same thing in the private sector there's like there are people inside those companies that want to do things and they want and so it's like working with them as humans i think to your point like the philosophy of city tech of building with and not for it does not mean once or went on and the work i think we still need to do is try to figure out how do we have an ongoing way of doing that and that that that insurers in this resume right i don't think we're there yet i think we still so i think we have work to do there but i'm confident we can do it thank you so the social innovation lab approach that that i have been using playing with for the last few years i think it's expensive it's slow and it's in some ways elitist because the number of people you can see in a face-to-face setting is limited so we're making decisions about millions of lives and yet most of the methods are optimized to have 30 people sitting in a room together and so one thing i've been very interested in is can we mash up the methods of social innovation labs with the field of democratic deliberation so that we can do high tech and high touch together to get faster cheaper and more democratic in the way that we do these approaches um minister you inspired me to end with some poetry um this is not my own poetry no no no um this is by adrian rich um what would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope you yourself must change it what would it feel like to know your country was changing you yourself must change it though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair