 Welcome to day one, Rebuild Democracy, and we will start with hacking democracy with Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang, and it's my pleasure to introduce them. Regularly referred by the Taiwan Press as child prodigy with a reputed IQ of 180, Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Xunqing and Tao-Cheqing at the age of five, started coding with eight, learned the programming language pearl at 12, at 15, they started their own company serving as a CTO of a team of ten hackers. In 2014, they retired from the business world and began focusing on civic engagement, working on the collective intelligence of civil society with open source software. In 2016, the autodidact and self-described conservative anarchists become the youngest person ever to be appointed a cabinet member in Taiwan and the first non-binary digital minister of Taiwan. Their work focuses on how social and digital technologies can foster empathy, tame misinformation, and build or rebuild stronger, more open and accountable democracies. So this is no surprise that Audrey Tang was the first name we had in mind to open this conference. Dear Audrey, we had a hard time to give a title to your talk. We could have called it the technology of democracy or technological change and its impact on society or even the power of open innovation or the future of democracy. We opted for hacking democracy because it was the shortest way to bring it to the point and introduce this day and this conference hackers use their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle by non-sounding means, but hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. In your case, it is all about collaborating with others to create open source solutions using publicly released data, code, and technology to solve social, economic, and environmental challenges. Basically, you are bridging all topics of the conference and as on top you are also an artist. I could not think of a better match than you to open the conference today from Taipei Live with us. The floor is all yours. Just for the audience to know, I will maybe pick a couple of questions after this keynote. Thank you very much, Audrey. Please enjoy every word. Hello and greetings. I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister in charge of social innovation and I'm really, really happy to be here to share with you some thoughts around digital social innovation. Now, if you see a cute dog, and I hope you do see a cute dog, that means that the presentation is working. And this is our main way of countering the pandemic in Taiwan with no lockdown and countering the infodemic with no takedown. This dog, the name is Zong Chai, is a Shiba Inu, and the dog lives with the participation officer or the PL of the Ministry of Health. You see, in each of our 32 ministries, we have a team of people who engage emerging hashtags. That is to say, just like media officers respond to journalists and the parliamentary officers respond to the MPs, the hashtag officers or PEOs engage what's happening in the here and now when people have anything to say about democracy. So instead of just, you know, three bits per person every four years uploaded, which is called voting, anyone in Taiwan can pick up the phone and essentially talk to the spokes dog. This is how we communicate our physical distancing rules. When you're indoors, keep three, Shiba Inu is away. When you're outdoors, keep two of them away. Remember to cover your mouth in those when sneezing and wear a mask. But why would you wear a mask? Because a mask protects your own face against your own unwashed hands. And this is what we call humor over rumor. This ensures that the scientific information, the clarifications spread faster than rumors. And each and every citizen can just pick up the phone. There's a phone called 192 and just ask to their heart's content about anything related to counter pandemic and infodemic. Just in the last years alone, there's more than two millions cost placed. Last April, there was a young boy who called saying, hey, you're rationing out mask and all I get was pink medical mask. Well, the boys in my class, he said, all have navy blue ones. I don't want to wear pink to school. Well, the very next day in the 2 p.m. press conference, the daily press conference where all the journalists questions are answered, Minister of Health and all the medical officers at a request of the participation officer wore pink. And so after that pink became the most trending color. The Minister of Health, even sipping panther was his childhood hero. So the boy became the most hip boy in the class for only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes hero, I guess, wear. And so this fast response ensures a collective intelligence that takes care of people without leaving anyone behind without divisiveness, without the polarization on social media and such. We also make sure that we work with a shadow government, so called gov zero or G zero V. You see, in each and every digital service in Taiwan, which all answers something that GOV that TW, there's a bunch of people, civic hackers that always watch what digital service doesn't do well or do right. And they instead of complaining, demonstrate, demonstrate as in demo. So building alternate websites using the same domain, but always in a more fun and open source way and using something that G zero V that TW. So just changing O to a zero in the browser bar gets you into the shadow government that's always relinquishing the copyright also so that in the future, when people accept that, hey, this is actually working better, we can always merge it back into what we call a people public partnership or reverse procurement. One case in to note is that last February, there's a bunch of people in Thailand city who noticed that masks were in short supply. And so they coded up a map that displays the availability of masks using crowdsourcing reports. And because I'm part of the gov zero collective, I noticed this work and then I talked to the premier head of our cabinet saying, we need to trust citizens with open data because in Taiwan data could be published as soon as it collected. And because we have broadband as a human right, any corner in Taiwan, you're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second for just 15 euros a month. Otherwise, it's my fault. You can call me personally. And so using this available infrastructure, we made sure that when we're rationing out a mask in more than 6,000 pharmacies, each and every pharmacy updates every 30 seconds like a distributed ledger to more than 100 different tools built by the social sector so that people who queue in line can see that people using the national health card, which protects not just citizens by residents in line and then they can swipe the card and they see the real time availability of masks actually depleting while they're queuing. And so they don't have to queue in vain and we get three-quarter of people wearing masks and washing hands in all districts in Taiwan by April and after which we move on more or less to a post-pandemic lifestyle. And so the point here is not just about the fair distribution. It's also about crowdsourcing. What does it mean to be fair? For example, there's independent analysis being built at a time by people from the open street map community and the community realized that even though it looks fair on the map, on a distance point of view, however, according to the open street map community, if you zoom out a little bit, then suddenly we discovered that in the rural places it's actually the time cost to reach pharmacies is not as short as in the urban areas. So this MP, the VP of data analytics in Foxconn before joining the parliament, MP Gao interpolated administrative administration saying what's fair is actually biased. It has a tie-paid bias, but administration didn't defend the policy but rather say, hey, a legislator teach us and then we co-created the pre-ordering system as well as the new distribution system in just 24 hours, again in a evidence-based co-creation. And so this seems to speak to Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president's inauguration speech in 2016 where she said before we think of democracy as showdown between opposing values, but now we must think of democracy as a conversation between many diverse values. And you're looking at the social innovation lab. It's my office. Every Wednesday any social innovator can book 40 minutes of my time to talk about anything that they wish to talk. The only thing I ask in return is that a conversation that we had must be published to the commons after 10 days of co-editing as a transcript or as a video under creative commons attribution license. And so the nature of conversation changes. It's always centered around the sustainable goals because the future generations in a sense are in the room too. The live streaming or the transcripts or the tape recorder stands for the people who will look at our conversation in the future. So always when people introduce new emergent ideas to me, they always make a case that also benefits future generations simply because it will look quite bad if they make a proposition that only benefits this generation at the expense of future generations. And so the digitalization is not just about the development of technologies, but also making sure the innovation and the governance are inclusive, meaning that we must leave no one behind. And so every year we have a presidential hackathon hosted in the Social Innovation Lab and the top five teams that won the trophy from our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, gets their ideas amplified within one year. So for example, the Water Saviors team detects water leakage because we've had no typhoons last year. This is actually very important so that we can plug the pipes in real time. They co-created this map with the assistive intelligence or AI and collective intelligence. And so they shortened the time it takes to detect the water leakage from two months to two days. And again, this co-creation just won the trophy, which is a micro projector. If you turn it on, it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing you the trophy. It's META. It's a self-describing trophy. And the five teams that won the trophy each year basically get the presidential guarantee that their idea of data collaboratives will become national digital public infrastructure within the next year. And that's how we get a lot of the infrastructure from the civil society into the public sector but still maintained by the civil society, such as the air pollution map that has been repurposed to, well, the mask availability map, but also so water resource map and many other maps as well. And so this idea of a civil IoT system shows that it's not just about the state or the surveillance capitalist gathering data. Rather, all these thoughts that you see here are in the primary schools. It's part of basic education where we teach not literacy but competence in a democratic polity with broadband as a human rights. It's no longer the same with radio and television where the students are merely watching or reading where they just are creative or critical to the existing stories. Rather, they tell their own stories, becoming their own data stewards and have access to fact check the presidential debates or start their own presidential hackathon idea and all in all having the access to the computational facilities that powers such infrastructure. And so when it comes to social media, we're not as afraid of the antisocial corner of social media to disrupt democracy because part of our infrastructure, Polis.gov.tw, is a pro-social social media built by the free software community and hosted in our national infrastructure. So we understand the cybersecurity and the privacy guarantees are to be trusted. And so this is the place where we have national deliberations on, for example, the Uber X-Case in 2015 where people instead of arguing what's platform economy, what's gig economy, what's sharing economy, instead concentrated on what do you feel about the facts that people crowdsourced. And there's no right or wrong about feelings for each new fact. I can feel happy. They can feel angry. And it's all okay. But after three weeks of letting people voice the feelings and resonate with one another, almost magically, the feelings coalesce into a convergent whole, what we call a rough consensus. And so the experience is like you see a fellow citizen's feeling. I feel liability insurance for passenger is very important. Well, if you agree, then you move toward me on this map. And if you disagree, then you move farther away from me on this map. But there's no reply button. So there is no room for true to grow. And we designed a system such that this headcount does not affect the area. If you get 2,000 people voting exactly the same way, well, you may see an extra zero here, but the shape does not change for the only agenda that's binding from this consultation must be cross at the aisle, meaning all the four groups must be agreeing on it. It must be a super majority. And so while people agree to disagree on a few divisive statements by and large, people agree with most their neighbors on most of the items, most of the time. And so because of this, everybody can see that the insurance, the registration, not undercutting existing meters and so on are what the entire society, including Uber drivers and taxi drivers, feel the same. And so we then hold all the stakeholders to account and built the multi-purpose taxi regulation. Uber is now a just regular taxi fleet in Taiwan, the Q-taxi, but we then revamped the taxi rules to allow for search pricing, app-based discussion, and so on, so that a co-ops and many social sector people, even local churches and temples can operate a Uber-like service so that it's a people-public-private partnership with the people setting the norm first via such online consultation forms. So this is still KPI, but the key performance indicators are crowdsourced. Crowdsourced agenda setting, I think is the key to make democracy a form of social technology that everybody can add in without distracting one another. And so as a concluding remark, I would like to share my job description. Back in 2015, when I was running this V-Taiwan-polis consultations, the SDGs were being deliberated in the UN and I really liked the SDGs and how it unifies the visions of the three sectors together. And so when I become digital minister in 2016 and the HR asked me, hey, minister, what do you mean by digital minister? Taiwan never had a digital minister. And I was so inspired, I said, well, the digital minister's job is just 1718, reliable data, 1717, effective partnerships, 1706, open innovation. And the HR people said, I don't think the Taiwanese population have memorized all 169 SDG goals. You have to explain in plain language. So that's when I translated that into a poem or a prayer and I call myself a poetician ever after. So this 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 a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening. Let's work on democracy as a technology together and look forward to the questions. Audrey, thank you so much for this opening keynote. This is so perfect to start because it gives really a big picture also on the potential of the empowerment and to take it in your own hands. This is what we really want to have. So you are bridging it fantastically. Thank you so much. I would like to see if there are any questions from the audience which will be sent to me through technology also. It is also like crowdsourcing questioning here. And while waiting for questions, I can already start because I have one personal question. I recently saw you talk with Yuval Harari recently about the future of democracy. At some point, Yuval is suggesting that technology may be able to hack human beings. And my question to you is, I mean, when we talk about all these empowerment and people and doing and tech and access to tech and et cetera, what is, do you think that we will be hacking human beings ourselves? Certainly. I think what Yuval Harari's point was that many technologies bring the power from the edges into the centers. That is to say, previously, the people-to-people relationships depend on certain norms, but those norms may be disrupted in the form of disruptive technology and the norms will be asked to give way to technologies. That's my understanding of his position. And my response is that it could be done the other way, too. We can empower people closest to the pain with the universal broadband, universal healthcare, the access to assistive intelligence, not authoritarian intelligence as human right. And so, one, we can empower people who are closest to the field to basically appropriate existing technology become appropriate technologies. And so, I have in my mind, for example, there was a call to 1922 last year, last April, and the caller said, I tried out the traditional rice cooker, and it seems that if you don't add water to it, it can kill the virus, but it doesn't kill the musk, so that the musk, which were at the time still in short supply, could be reused two or three times without getting the need to be renewed and so essentially tripling our musk supply. Now, this is a really good idea. It's been replicated. Our minister can even try it out on the live streamed press conference, and it also reached many people. I translated it to many different languages, but I'm sure that the traditional rice cooker makers did not have this use in mind. And I have in my mind all the open source, open data, and open algorithms that the society is producing so that if we make sure that our digital infrastructure is built in such a way that anyone who gets affected by it has the whereabouts, has the competence to change it, then I think we can collectively hack the democratic institutions and policies for the better. If, on the other hand, the right access, the commit rights is restricted to just a few people, then Harai may well be right because then we are all read only while just a few people equipped with hacking rights eventually determine the destiny of many other people. Absolutely. I'm just checking again. People, you can actually write your questions in the chat. We have great chat moderators and you can write your questions. It is for the accredited people, I think, and they can actually bring this up to me on this stage. So I am also in a participative democratic experiment here, and I try to bring it to you, Audrey. Just another question. You said you are also an artist, but it goes beyond the poetry. I think it is absolutely genius to have translated the 169 measures you had into poetry like Haikus, so to speak. Are you an artist also beyond this yourself and do you have time to do art yourself? Yes. So I call myself a poetician. So a lot of my work is just to write, as you said, Haikus, either writing it myself or translating from the great poet Lao Tse, the Dao Deng, which I draw a lot of inspiration from. And I think it's also to get some, like, short snippets, like boiling down the idea of digital social innovation to fast, fair, and fun, which I just share with you, and so that anything that's fast, fair, and fun may spread better. These are the components that make their ideas worth spreading, spread. Or the idea of humor over rumor. That's another short snippet that says if the outrage and polarization drives people's behavior on the more anti-social corner of social media than using humor, especially self-deprecating humor, it actually spreads even faster, as I demonstrated with a very cute Shiba Inu dog. Which is actually, by the way, my favorite dog. So I love Shiba Inu. So I was like, oh, this is so cute, obviously, and everybody is like feeling trust, as you were saying. Audrey, it was really wonderful to have you with us, and I'm so glad you were opening the conference. Thank you so much. I wish you a good evening in Taiwan, where you are right now. Thank you again, and I hope to see you soon to our next conference, and we will all check what you're doing over there, right? Thank you. Live long and prosper, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Bye.