 I like many people today. I'm an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that a future of human knowledge is on the web, and my textbooks were all out of date. So I told my teachers I want to quit school and start my education on the web. Surprisingly, my teachers all agreed with it. A year later, I founded a startup working on web technologies. I got to join this fabulous internet community that runs with this crazy idea, an open grassroots political system that powers the internet to this day. Today, as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm putting into practice the ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old. Rough consensus, civic participation, and radical transparency surprisingly is working and is transforming our society. In 2016, our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, made an inspiring statement in her inauguration speech. She said, Before democracy was a clutch between two opposing values, but now democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values. Instead of being the arbiter torn between different sides, our government can now ask a different set of questions. We would ask, What are our common values despite different positions? And then we ask, What are the common values? Can we find solutions that works for everyone? This is the spirit of co-creation and civic technology. It's a branch of technology that enables millions of people to listen to each other instead of just one person speaking to millions of people. In the past couple years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked among the best in the world on pandemic resilience and economic growth. And this was because we adopted digital democracy as our national direction since 2014. It was catalyzed and epitomized by an occupied movement in March 2014. There was a live demo of mass participation. We occupied the parliament peacefully for 22 days. At the time, the MPs in Taiwan they were refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing. So the occupiers got into the parliament at night and stayed there. For 22 days, we demonstrated how to deliberate a trade service agreement with a whole society. There were over 20 NGOs participating, the Greens, the Labour, the Independents, everybody. And we supported this deliberation process with a radically transparent broadcasting, live streaming and logistics system which we also exported to Hong Kong for the umbrella movement in the same year. Powered by this community called GovZero, GovZero or G0V is a civic tech community with a call to fork the governments. We take the government websites which all ends in GOV.tw and make better open alternatives that ends in G0V.tw. For example, the annual national budget in 2012, it was hundreds of pages long. In a PDF file, it was very hard to read. The GovZero community's very first project was budget.g0v.tw, which shows the national budget in a way that everybody understands and you can draw down to each and every budget details. And today, this system is adopted by many city governments and powers our national participation platform at join.gov.tw. Anyone can just look at the map, find a part of the budget they care about and type in any question they want to ask and a career public servant actually comes forward and answers that part of the question. So it became a direct dialogue platform not through the city councillors but for the career public servants to communicate with citizens. So why are there so many civic technologies in Taiwan? Like me, I spoke to my clients during the sunflower movement at Apple University Press of Oxford and Social Text. I said, OK, I have to take a three-week leave because democracy needs me. I think it's because our generation and 40 now were the first generation to enjoy freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship. And that freedom arrived in 1989, the year of personal computers. For us, the personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election by popular votes in 1996 was also the year that the World Wide Web got popular. So the internet and democracy do not do things. They're one and the same thing in Taiwan. For the past 30 years, when we see free software, we always think of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and never free of cost because we know that freedom is never free of costs. Our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation paid dearly for it and we need to use the software freedoms to keep it free, as we did during the sunflower movement in 2014. The movement caused a revolution, although a peaceful revolution. There was a radical transformation of social expectations at the end of 2014 and many supporters just found themselves elected mayors when they did not expect it. The occupiers and the civic technologists who supported them, we were invited as mentors, advisers to the public service to solve emerging issues such as Uber. Now, Uber is very interesting because it started as a meme, a virus of the month in 2015. And the meme was called Sharing Economy and it says that algorithms dispatch cars better than laws so we don't have to obey laws. That meme spreads through the apps, from drivers to passengers to drivers. You can't really argue with a meme, just like you can't argue with the common flu. It's not even in the same category. So there were protests. The taxi drivers surrounded the Ministry of Transportation demanding negotiation. But how do we negotiate with a virus of the month? For us, the solution is through deliberation that involves thousands of stakeholders. It's a scaling down of the deliberation we did on the street with half a million people so we think we can do it. Delibration, thinking deeply about something together, that's an effective vaccine against the virus of the month. When everyone, passengers, drivers, academics, public servants, when they listen to each other and form a consensus, we become collectively immune to devices PR campaigns and to conspiracy theories in the future. A proper deliberation with the focus conversation method involves four stages. The first stage is facts where we collect evidence, first-hand experiences and objective data. And after that is confirmed, we move to collect everyone's feelings about those same facts. You may feel angry, I may feel happy and it's all okay. After people converge on their feelings that resonates with everybody, we then talk about ideas. The best ideas are the ones that address the most people's feelings. And then we translate them into legalese and we sign them into decisions. However, if the decision-making process is not self-transparent, then people on the street would speak a different language than people in the government, so they're not even agreeing on basic facts, let alone each other's feelings. And in that situation, ideas evolve to become ideologies, virus of the month so potent that they can blind people to new facts and to each other's feelings. And so it's not the common flu anymore. So our first step is always open data, that is to say to make all the facts available and asking the economic sector and the social sector to share what they have. And next, we created this interactive survey of feelings on Poles to ask people how they feel. Four groups of people soon emerged, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers, and other passengers. The Poles system shows each group how their shared sentiments are received by other groups. And the interesting thing is it lowers people's antagonism. Because you see all these people on different sides. They're your Facebook and your Twitter friends. We just didn't talk about this over dinner. So at the beginning, the people were all on the different corners. But because we say we only give binding, a gender-setting power to anything that people can propose that convinces a super majority. There's 80% of people here. So the participants converged gradually on feelings that resonate not just with like-minded people, but across the aisle. So instead of distracting, we attracted consensus. And after we got a set of feelings that resonates with practically everybody, it's now much easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders, check with them one by one. We'll say, here is the consensus of the people from this pro-social social media. Do you agree? If you do agree, how do we translate that into law? So they're bound to the words they said during the live stream consultation. And the stakeholders, they agreed. When we ratified their agreements in August 2016, everybody knew it was coming. And everybody anticipated it. So for years now, Uber operates legally as a local taxi under the new framework. But so did the taxi companies, local co-ops, temples, and churches, who are all adopting the same model that Uber was using for dispatching its costs. So our next question is, can we scale this process of listening? Right after the ratification, I joined the cabinet as digital minister in 2016 to explore this possibility through PEDIS, the public digital innovation space. As a digital service at a national level, we work with designers, programmers, and facilitators. We automated away a lot of this chores that the public servants are doing in order to make room for participation. But even more interesting than the technological contributions is a culture that we're bringing to the government. For example, I'm a radically transparent digital minister. And by that, I mean all the journalists, all the lobbyists, everybody gets to ask me questions by early answer publicly. It's not just the lobbyists and journalists, but also for internal inter-agency meetings. For all the hundreds of meetings that I have chaired since I became the digital minister, everything was transcribed. There was a written record for everything everybody said during meetings, and we send them to participants afterwards to check for 10 working days and then we publish. The effect of this is very surprising. The public servants actually become quite innovative and even risk-taking. They propose some very good ideas under this condition and that's because previously, before radical transparency, they would get a blame if things go wrong and the minister would get a credit if things go right. And now with this radically transparent record, if things go right, they get a credit because their name is on the transcript, but because it's an experimental method, if things go wrong, it's all the digital minister's fault. So under this condition, they become very innovative and open to a lot of interesting ideas. One of the ideas is adopting this co-creation cybersecurity platform, called SESTOR. As our public service infrastructure, we can now host the community tools, such as Git, HackMD, RocketChat, precisely as how the developer community is organizing on the open internet these days. And we have a lot of interesting system proposed, written by the young public servants, like apps for ordering lunch together, to plan travels together, whatever. It's really good to have this choice to amplify their innovations. Also, we co-created a petition platform as a way for people to participate. It's like the We the People platform in the US. But the US system, as I understand it, it did not receive the same level of attention as in Taiwan, perhaps because for cross-ministry issues, people would sometimes get those bureaucratic answers that just explains the issues rather than resolving them. So we asked all 32 ministries to build a team of participation officers. Now in Taiwan, when people start a petition and collect 5,000 signatures, they know instead of just a duty for response, they will actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries, either in Taipei or Capital City, or we will travel to those rural areas and remote islands if they are petitioning for local development. Twice a month, we would meet to resolve issues together without exposing any public servants to risk. So gradually, we relieved their fear, uncertainty, and doubt around civic participation. For example, a petitioner in May 2017 rallied Mac and Linux users around the fact that national income text filing software was explosively hostile to use. And instead of just explaining the problem, our participation officers invited everyone who complained the loudest to co-create the new text filing system. And through this kind of co-creation, people learned that they can contribute their expertise, not just as complaints, but as fellow contributors. And by collaborating with the social sector, we're building a robust environment suitable for social innovators where the power of civil society could be brought into full play. And the venue we hold these collaboration meetings is called the Social Innovation Lab. I personally provide my office hours at a lab every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Provided my visitor agrees to have our conversation posted online. Anyone interested in social entrepreneurship is welcome to have a discussion with me. And at different regional cities, social innovators, they gather around me when I tour around Taiwan. Although it's just me that travels, everybody else remains in Taipei. We still have good video conference and transcription services that makes it very easy to see the local problems being resurfaced and being resolved in a very quick fashion, because all the related ministries are there on the telecommunication service. And once the people's co-create the solutions, they got understood by the ministries. Even unrelated ministries can say, okay, so the way we resolve the text filing system, they can also be used to distribute medical grade masks and to book vaccines. A recent example is coming up with an effective solution to contact tracing. To eliminate community transmission, contact tracing must be done in a way that makes sure that we don't put ourselves into a dilemma of having to choose between protecting privacy on one hand and preventing the public health crisis on the other hand. However, rolling out a mandatory government app, it will likely backfire, as we have seen in many other countries. So instead of centralizing contact tracing data or yielding control to multinational corporations, we sought social sector solutions, not for the people, with the people. In May 2021, civic technologists in the G0V GovZero community invented the mechanism of contact tracing based on text messages. We worked across sectors with telecom carriers to deploy the 192 SMS contact tracing system in just a week. By scanning the QR code with your phone's built-in camera, sending a toll-free text message, people can keep track of their itineraries. And this allows contact tracers to confirm the footprints of infected people and their contacts without revealing any private information to venue owners. And this collaboration cannot happen without strong trust across sectors. Of course, we need to breach the digital gap for the elderly and visually impaired. So contact tracing, it can still be done through measures such as handwriting and stepping. But when contact tracers apply for information about certain phone numbers, they must submit requests through this platform to brass them. And the phone number holder can then reverse-audit contact tracers' requests and activities. All records are deleted after 28 days. And because the civic tech originated from a community that always valued personal data sovereignty, we can respond to new challenges to privacy with timely improvements. For instance, text messages sent to 192.2 were discovered by a judge using a police search warrant. Fortunately, the multi-party security design prevented the police from accessing the mapping between the random codes and the specific venues. So the judge denied the warrant and publicly questioned the legality of wiretapping texts sent to 192.2. And following discussions, the Ministry of Justice concluded that the 192.2 SMS does not constitute communication under the Communication Security and Surveillance Act and, therefore, should not be repurposed for law enforcement keeping the original civic intent intact. Rule by the people is the original intent of democracy. In the face of global threats, such as the pandemic and the infodemic, the Taiwan model shows to the world that this people-public-private partnership with the people can shape a digital democracy. To give no trust is to get no trust. Trusting citizens to participate in policymaking can form shared goals, develop innovative solutions, and contribute to the world. And now, I would like to share with you my job description as Taiwan's digital minister. 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 a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. And now, it's your turn to co-create this plurality with democracy-affirming technologies, working with the people, not just for the people. Imagine, how can we enable better civic participation and dialogue between citizens and governments? At this very moment, the need to rebuild trust is essential. In the long run, the need to rethink how a democracy runs and how civic participation manifests. That's crucial. So think about today's reliable infrastructures that makes our lives safer and more convenient. Civic infrastructures in the digital realm does the same for democracy. Consider, in 2015, civic technologies invented Airbox, a low-cost air quality tracker adopted by many schools and household balconies. Citizens science supplemented our government's limited capacity and paved the way for data stewardship and environmental education. The following year, we initiated the CIVO IoT Taiwan program, which expanded the network to industrial areas. At that time, there were around 2,000 devices, and today, there are tens of thousands. For the next step after sharing data, consider forming shared goals through assistive intelligence. For instance, many passengers welcomed Uber's entry to Taiwan in 2015, but also triggered taxi driver discontent. With help from the GovZero community, our governments utilized the PODIS system to invite stakeholders to resonate with each other's feelings, and we have learned that shared values are hiding in plain sight. For example, safety is a value on which all parties agree, and the rough consensus was that drivers need to have professional licenses, purchase insurance, and pay taxes. It's all ratified in the diversified taxi program of 2016. And the same idea also works for global topics. During the past couple years, the AIT-AD40 digital dialogues and the co-hack hackathon both used the PODIS system. With a visualized spectrum of ideas, participants around the world can see where they stand compared with others, so we can reflect and co-create a good enough consensus. And finally, think about how to institutionalize the rapid deployment of social innovations. Taiwan's presidential hackathon has been held for four consecutive years, with thousands of social entrepreneurs and public servants participating alongside teams from dozens of countries to contribute to public digital goods. Five teams each year receive this trophy, carrying the presidential promise of support in the next fiscal year. So, let's start small and think local. The platforms, the plans, processes, and products in the plurality would serve as bridges between communities and government bodies, as I've said in my keynote. To give no trust is to get no trust. As democracies, we must trust our fellow citizens. Thank you for listening. Live long and prosper.