 This will be edited, of course, so I will not use the film as it is, just for your information. What's on here? Yeah, happy to be here. I'm Anders from Sweden, I work as a freelance journalist. I've been covering open data for a pretty long time, writing a couple of books. I'm impressed by Taiwan in many ways and I'm happy to be here to ask you some questions about it. And especially your work with the government and so. So we have been emailing, exchanging some questions and answers already through the web-based system. But here we can elaborate a little bit more on thinking. So the most central question is how are you making the government more transparent? Do you want me to go into the specifics or do you want an overview? So I'll be happy to, because you have said that you do it through radical transparency, etc. So just quick the overview and then some details about it. Okay, sure. Which camera do I look? You can talk to me and the cameras will be here and you don't need to... So that's a side camera? That's a side camera. I might use it, I might not use the X-Drive. So do you read Chinese or should I just translate everything? I cannot read Chinese, unfortunately. So I'll just translate everything. So that came as recording this screen. So you'll have the footage of the presentation also. Which camera is it? That's the camera. That's shining green. Okay, right. So transparency for me is an instrument. It is not an end in itself. The end goal of transparency or radical transparency, as you put it, is to rebuild trust between the civil society and the government, as well as between different stakeholders in the civil society. And so that is our driving value. So everything that we do is centered around this rebuilding trust. And on the civil society side, of course, I'm the minister with a portfolio in charge of social innovation and youth empowerment. And in that we try to build a civil society that can look at new issues facing the society and instead of waiting for the government to fix it, instead take proactive action to solve it and then share the result with the government. And so this is a very different idea from this top-down approach of policymaking. And it enables a lot of agency from the civil society, especially when they see that there are also data producers. In many countries, the open data policy focuses on government open data. So it's as if open data just means government open data. But in Taiwan, it's not like that. When we're saying open data policy or transparency policy, we see the civil society, the private sector, as equal as peers, as also data producers. And so one of the concrete examples is the GovZero movement. The GovZero movement takes the idea that any government website that should exist but doesn't yet, the civil society, make a g0v.tw counterpart. And so instead of the g0v government website, you go into the shadow government. So for example, this is what the civil society thinks the government should do but doesn't yet. This is the air pollution map of PM 2.5 as well as other substances in the air. At the moment, there's only very limited measurement stations set up by the government. And so the resolution, the granularity of data is not so good. And so this is basically citizen science, people donating their houses, their roofs, the kindergartens or schools or whatever to set up citizen measurement devices and ensuring the data under a radically transparent way. And I think the distinction that we make here is that we see the trust as mutual. So if the government affirms this kind of citizen science and also uses this in our policymaking and also commits to calibrate our data with the citizen produced data and essentially aggregates all the different sources of data into a super computer center, for example, allowing independent researchers to run models and whatever, disputes a platform on which the civil society people can make their own interventions but nevertheless is based on the same factual data as the government policy makers. So this is basically us saying we respect the civil society and private sector actors as peers. And then we do policymaking by looking at the social innovations that's perhaps done on a local level or on a smaller scale and then we amplify those good ideas. So that's the left side of my work, which is social innovation and user empowerment. May I just stop about this air pollution thing? I mean, when you have, of course, the quality of the measurements, when you have the governmental devices, the quality of the data is probably pretty high while you have the data from the crowd, which might not be so accurate. We don't know, it can be very accurate, it can be less accurate or good accurate. How can that be taken into part in what we just saw here? I mean, how can you help building trust by merging, by mixing the high quality data with more uncertain data? No, I think it's not by default that it's just because it's produced by the citizens that it's automatically lower quality. No, of course not. I'm talking about the technical, I mean, the device created, I made this myself, a device for 30 euros. The air box, something like that. While a governmental device might cost 1 million or 10 million, I don't know, a lot. So it just means you can make them equal to each other. That's what I wanted to do. But that could be equalized by, for example, our Industrial Technology Research Institute has been focusing for the past few months on making very affordable air pollution detectors for the citizens. And so while at the moment it is based on, as you said, uncertain quality, because if the sensor gets polluted or when it fluctuates a little bit, it actually relies on surrounding data to calibrate. So it doesn't always work. But if the ITRI produces such sensors in a way that doesn't exceed the cost of the current off-the-shelf components and nevertheless passes the BSMI testing requirements, then that's the best of both worlds, right? Because then the citizen scientists can just use ITRI certified sensors and especially if they get to participate in the definition of its specification, its range and what to measure and things like that. So I think what I mean by peer production or social production is the idea that we solve the problem of the problem solvers, right? So if the citizen scientists report that their measurement device is not accurate enough, we solve that problem. But we're not saying that, okay, you're automatically disqualified or at least a degree, we don't think that way. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay, great. Right, so and then that's on the left side, which is social innovation and collaboration with civil society and things like that. On the right-hand side, I'm also working on automating the administrative public servants workflow. The idea is that if data is produced specifically for open data and it's not part of the automated service delivery chain, then it's essentially relies on the outside third party to verify whether the open data actually works or not because it's not part of the information flow of normal administrative function. If it doesn't work or if it breaks, the downstream would not notice. It's only when the third party notices, then we get the feedback saying, okay, this is broken, right? So the whole idea is that the data governance and the automated data gathering devices should first be part of the administrative workflow and second, it should result in measureably less burden for the administrative functions. So for example, there is a project that we did called IOT for Public Welfare and this is a special budget project and this project combines the air pollution data with disaster recovery data, for example shelters and things like that, as well as typhoon and weather data, as well as water pollution measurement, as well as anything that is part of the nature that doesn't have privacy concerns is game for IOT for Public Welfare and one of the end goals of the IOT for Public Welfare, especially when it comes to pollution, like air and river pollution, is that for the EPA, for the Environmental Protection Agency. At the moment when they get some incident response saying that this particular factory or this particular field is perhaps burning something or smoking something that causes air or water pollution, they have to actually go there and measure and do a lot of preparatory work and their staff is limited, right? So if we don't design the open data flow with their workflow, then they keep getting overworked and then have also the obligation to maintain the open data and then this doesn't really work. So we designed the KPI, we designed the Key Performance Index as how exactly does this save the people, the investigators' time? So that perhaps in a day they could only look at two or three incident responses, but with the IOT for Public Welfare, they could check with much finer granularity, they can deploy drones or do other automatic measurements so that they can process 10 or 12 incidents per day. And so that lowers their burden and that increases their work quality because the repetitive work they don't have to do anymore, they can focus on their domain knowledge work. And so by basically selling open data and data governance as a way to reduce the governmental public servants workload, we try to ensure that they can be the maintainer of the system instead of a higher up, a CIO or whatever, being the caretaker. And I think this integration with the government workflow is the counterpart of the civil society empowerment, which is ensuring that the civil society will keep us honest. So these two are like, you know, balancing each other. What you just mentioned here was very interesting because you... Sorry. Second. Ah, yes, having those not CIOs maybe or not, because if you can just come back to your own working organisations, you appoint champions to every department. That's right. The participation offices. It makes the same feeling as what you just mentioned here. Why do you think this approach of appointing champions either to your own or every department or what the judge mentioned? Why is that good? So as compared to what? As compared to having this sort of formal hierarchical structure of the bosses here and then going down. Why is it better to have this champion? Sometimes it's better to have champions and sometimes it's good to have a hierarchical control. I'm certainly not saying that anarchy is a solution to everything at the moment. But I think one of the reasons why we appoint champions is that we want to make sure that whenever there is a cross-ministry or cross-departmental case, the participation offices, they can talk to the same people across different ministries. For example, the IoT for public welfare, that is essentially like five, six different ministries. If you have different ministries having one-shot meetings, it doesn't really accumulate the knowledge in their ministries. For each of them, it's just a one-shot relationship. But if we have a stable participation office, we call it a network or a community, then every time you go into a cross-ministry or case, you meet with the same cohort of participation offices. As any students of prisoners' dilemma would tell you, if you know that it's the same bunch of people for the next four years, then you better start building camaraderie and solidarity because otherwise it doesn't pay off in the long run. So I think that's the main reason why it's champions. The other thing is that it also is like a fractal, it's like a tree in the sense that we also empower through regulations that those ministry or champions can also appoint their agency levels, third-level champions, which can in turn appoint fourth-level champions. So the idea is that because they are essentially the coordinator for their respective ministry, they can also build camaraderie between those different third-level or fourth-level agencies when it comes to public participation. And I think this is even more important than cross-ministry or team because there are existing cross-ministry or communication mechanisms, but there's actually quite few cross-agency communication across ministries. So what I'm saying is that when it's more than three levels of hierarchy, usually people don't communicate across silos at all anymore. When it's just one level or two level, people still find some way. But when it's three levels deep, there's no way for a third-level or fourth-level agency in one ministry to contact the third or fourth level in another faraway ministry, right? But with the participation office in there, everybody is flat on the same rocket chat channel and it's just one click away. And so that builds this camaraderie more easily than if we have just one CIO and then everybody reports to the same person. Besides those meetings and how are they communicating with each other? I mean, which technical platform are you using or which system? We use the Sandstorm system. The Sandstorm system is a free software design that is certified by our cybersecurity department and includes chat rooms, file storage, task management, documents, branching, editing. Basically, you know, it's like Dropbox plus Facebook plus Wikipedia plus whatever, right? And so as you can see, it is quite varied. There's collaborative bookmarks, there's collaborative link sharing. There's even an application for ordering lunchbox together that was designed by one of the public servants here. So the idea is that because the basic platform is hoarded against cybersecurity attacks, anyone can write applications very easily without worrying about its cybersecurity implications. And so people start innovating on exactly what they can do to collaborate there. And my office, the PDIS office, about 20-something people here. Every day we just start by looking at this Kanban board and then we see what everybody is working on, what everybody's current task completion is doing. And as we can see, for example, this is one of our websites, and then as part of this website, we can see exactly who is responsible for which redesigning action and how complete it is and things like that. And so basically this enables a culture, what we call working out loud, meaning that people who don't have a direct reporting relationship nevertheless has this ambience feeling of what everybody is up to. And so when there's an ad hoc group that needs to be formed, we can very easily form on a chat room or on a shared mind map or whatever. To what extent is this used by other departments as well? Is it just your department? No, and champions. Our chat room, for example, the PO chat, which is the chat room of our participation offices, initially it's just one person from each ministry. But now, because everybody can invite anyone from their ministries, so it's now like 105 people now. So this is very cross-disk departmental, as you can see. I should rephrase. Because it feels like this could be used in the whole governmental organization, not only amongst champions, or what do you say, what's your feeling? Could this platform or system? Well, I mean this is basically a set of applications. So what we know is that, for example, some departments such as our MIS department here, they only use the command board, they don't use anything else. For example, when we talk with the Taipei cities, the DOIT, Department of Information Technologies, they're mostly interested in this organized link-sharing bookmarking system and little else, for example. So I think the idea is that we set up this platform and we make sure that anybody who has any email address that ends in GOV.tw automatically gets a user account. And they can deploy their own applications. They can use one of the existing applications. And we don't try to say that you have to use exactly the set of seven applications that we do. It's okay if you just use, say, Dropbox replacement, for example, and that's one of the more popular ones. Well, we started to talk about this government making government more transparent. Every Wednesday you work outside the administration in social innovation lab. That's right. Why? Well, that's one of the things that they asked. When we built the social innovation lab, we run a set of five consultation meetings. Basically, we just prepared the hardware, the building itself, but we don't define any software. The software was co-designed by more than 100 social entrepreneurs, social innovators. And so they asked for a kitchen. We got a kitchen. They asked for a room with whiteboards and with no tables. We got this kind of ideation room. They asked for green screen and live streaming equipment. We have that. But software-wise, they asked for two things. First, that they asked that it opens until midnight. So now it's open from 7 to 11 in the midnight. And then they asked that for me and responsible ministries to send their window to social enterprise policymaking into the service office. And they asked for office hours. Because it's also an accelerator or incubator for social innovators. So it's natural that mentors have office hours. So that's what they asked. And so that's what I delivered. So every Wednesday, technically, if you look at se.pd.tw, which is our social enterprise portal, you can see that the Social Innovation Lab actually has a... Audrey is always here, timetable, which shows exactly when I'm here. And so what technically says that every Wednesday from 10 to 2 p.m., that's actually the formal schedule. But in practice for the past month or so, I'm practically from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. there. So it's like 12 hours and every Wednesday. And so people gradually think that it's not a big deal to just go and talk to a minister. And aside from the fact that it's all recorded, we also make sure that every other Tuesday we go to the four different regional offices of Taiwan and bring the office hour results to those different areas as well, while the 11 ministries related to social enterprise stay in the Social Innovation Lab. But we set up two-way video conferencing. So they also have the office hour, but remotely. Interesting. You have been establishing your regulations for this PO network. And you have done many good things, but what are the biggest challenges? And you mentioned trust, but how can you mention more details about how to build trust? Sure. So one of the ways that the social media is getting people closer is by essentially having people who meet each other through common keywords or common causes or whatever, right? And so this is what we call swift trust. People very quickly form rapport on the social media. But due to the way the current generation of social media is designed, it's easier for a message to go viral if it makes people to respond within the first six seconds, basically engaging in people's enragements or in people's whatever their negative feelings are. It's actually easier to get people to press share before commenting or before reading everything. So it means that counter power is easier to manufacture on social media than power. Because for power you have to actually understand what's at stake for all the stakeholders. But for counter power to assemble all you have to do is to point at one example and inside outrage among that photo or among that idea, right? So we have an e-partition system. For example, there is someone who partitions saying we have an explosively user hostile text reporting system. And that's perhaps not an exaggeration. Maybe it really does take four hours or whatever for a Mac or Linux user to finish their text reporting online as compared to a Windows user which only takes maybe 20 minutes. But Mac and Linux users are used to better user experiences. So it's doubly insulting for them. And then it's very easy for this kind of messages to go viral because people all have the experience of finding texts. And also finding texts are not usually associated with a pleasant feeling. And so it's very easy for people to feel for this petitioner and for the social media to fill with counter power messages. And that blames the vendors and for example, right? So to rebuild trust, the whole idea is that for people who are assembling and measuring their counter power and petitioning or whatever, we have the participation offices to contact them immediately. And for this example, I think it is within the first 48 hours that our PO decided to contact the petitioner. And it's very interesting because we watched the social media, watched the petition. Initially it's like 90% negative, 10% positive. But as soon as we did a contact and saying that we're inviting the people who complain the loudest into a workshop to discover how can we do better. And then it becomes like 80% positive, 20% negative. So it's just like that. And then within a couple of weeks, we actually invited everybody. And then we livestreamed this workshop over the internet. So anyone who doesn't like the text wireless system can all see that. How is it like for the public servant to engage on what we call user journey mapping of all the touch points. And as soon as that happens, the ministries actually see the advantage saying, all those people who complain the loudest are actually UX experts, expert service designers, expert reporters and journalists. And for example, so they actually know what they're talking about, which is why they're angry than other people. Because they understand the problem in a deeper fashion or has suffered for longer than other people. And so then the participation office of the Ministry of Finance organized five workshops. And so in each workshop, we have various stakeholders, not just citizens and users, but also facilitators, POs, contracted IT companies and so on. And then we collaboratively redesigned the text wireless system. That's last year's and that's this year's system. So as soon as this is convened and as soon as this is the order lock, as well as all the transcript of any decision leading to this revamping of the text wireless system is published online, people gradually started to anticipate a better solution. And they also understand that their contribution is actually taken into account. And finally, anything that's not so good with this year's text wireless experience, exactly how it will be improved on the next year. And so I think this is what we call radically trusting the civil society. We trust that people who complain actually have something to contribute, even without any supporting evidence at the beginning. But they actually are people who have something to contribute. If we shift a little bit to open data, what is the most important to do in order to publish more open data and more relevant open data? What would you say? I think I did answer that. First by making the data flow part of the administrative workflow and then by changing the procurement rules so that it doesn't take an extra step of processing, but actually it produces structured data just as part of the procurement. Sure, but then also I would like to add how can... Because sometimes when you publish open data, it's not used. It publishes something, but it's not used or it's not used very much. How do you find which data that could be most relevant to publish as open data? Our national open data portal, again, we also accept citizen contributions. So if the government doesn't collect the data yet, we also have civil society and private sector contributing the data, as you can see already with the air pollution thing. And of course they also have their own issues to solve which the government can then play the role of facility data. So that's one way of knowing it. The other way of course is on the data portal, we also have an area where people can just simply request data. And this is just like a Freedom of Information Act. If we have the data, we just didn't know that people want it, then we just publish it. So it's that simple, right? So for things that the government already collects but isn't published yet, at the moment we have a regulation that says it should be open by default. So when people ask, it just gets published. That's one thing. For things that government doesn't collect, we encourage the civil society to collect. And then if its collection needs governmental help, like the sensor thing there from the ITRI, then we have plans to improve the data collection activities of private sector and civil society. What I mean is that open data doesn't, it's not exclusive to government. It's not even primarily government, but the government can serve as a first try example or whatever and is especially setting up a license that's compatible with all the data users. This is open by default philosophy. How did you achieve that? How did you make it possible? Well, I mean our Freedom of Information Law already specify that there's only two things that shouldn't be public or should be public only after internal deliberation. One is the decisional history of a policy before the policy decision is made. So that is, you know, draft data. So that's one set of data. The other thing is that when it's collected, but it touches on privacy or trade secret or any other thing that people would reasonably only allow this data to be used for a specific purpose then other purposes need to be deliberated before it could be published. And we don't even encourage, you know, if it's purely private data like healthcare to produce this open data because conceptually personal data and open data is entirely not overlapping categories. So in our FOIA law, there's already those two conditions. Sure, but even if it is, I mean in Sweden has more than 350 years of openness, so to say, still though you need to go to the government and ask for specific data, then you can get it. That's a completely different, I mean, that's a different thing from having the government, people in government, actively, proactively publishing open data. It's not that different, right? So the traditional FOIA flow is that you ask for data, the government will redact something and then give a copy to you and then saying, okay, you can, you know, read it or you can use it for journalistic purposes. Now the only change is that in addition of providing it to you, the government also publishes it on the open data platform implicitly granting derivative work rights to pretty much everybody and also saves their time because the next person doesn't have to ask them anymore, right? So as I said, it's part of the administrative simplification that that's how we convey the message to the public servant. It's basically saying if you publish on the open data portal, we make sure that the legislators, the journalists, the data scientists, they all know where to look at and they won't bother you again if they want a copy of that data. I think that's the main idea. And the public servants, they are fine with that or are they thinking that the data could be interpreted in a way that makes it sort of not looking accurate? I mean, all data, if it could be mixed, it could be some mismatch. Is this a fear that you feel among the public servants? No, not really, because if they don't publish the data, the civil society and the private sector nevertheless try to collect data anyway. And if they are on a different factual basis as the government policy makers, it actually creates more issues. It's just like after a meeting, if the meeting doesn't have a transcript or a record, journalists can still ask participants what happened in the meeting. The problem is that the three journalists asking three different participants, they get three different versions of what happened in the meeting. And it's not like there's no confusion if we don't publish the meeting's transcript. The published meeting's transcript, on the other hand, makes sure that the three journalists at least is basing their report on the same factual basis. They can still provide their perspectives. But then at least we don't have to address the confusion and the rumors and whatever. So I think the idea is just to make factual data spread as fast as rumors. And then we don't worry about rumors that much anymore. Taiwan was ranked as number one in the Global Data Index, but you said that it should be taken with grain of salt. That's right. Why? Because it just measures the very basic data sets. It's just like every household should have water, should have electricity, should have public roads leading to it. So it doesn't really mean much. It means that there's some basic facilities, but beyond those basic data, the Open Data Index doesn't even say anything. So for us, this is like primary school level exam that you pass, but it doesn't really say much. Do you want to see any alternative? Do you want to see another index? Society is already doing their own research using the Open Data Barometer, for example, or other qualitative or more impact-related assessments. And we do look at those. We don't think that we should just fix on one particular measurement. We look at all the different reports from the independent, like Transparency International and Open Culture Foundation and whatever, and then react accordingly. But we don't think that we should just focus on one particular index and base our policy on staying number one of it. Although it's been two years running, we don't play that much importance because for us it's just primary school level stuff. You say that you don't work for the government, instead you say work with the department. The government only pays your salary. Can you just elaborate why do you have this approach? That's because the work that I'm doing, for example the Persuasion Office of Work and things like that, I relinquish any and all copyright to it. We actively work and publish papers and so on. For me, Taiwan is just one of the places of a global pretty connected cities. For example, people in Iceland, people in Paris, people in Barcelona, in Madrid, in New York City and in other places, they are all experimenting with this kind of transparency, inclusive participation and things like that. So for me, they're my colleagues and we're just working in respective labs, for example, and essentially sharing the best practice or better practices. And so when, for example, Iceland has a petition system, user experience redesign that works really well within a month, you see Taiwan adopting it and things like that. So I think if I work just for the people in Taiwan, the influence or the participation base is actually pretty limited because Taiwan, after all, is pretty new to this democracy thing. But if we take into account the wider community of all the people working on participative democracy, then we get a much larger constituent base and can provide better constituency value. So I don't think my work is limited to Taiwan and I actually get a lot of users of this kind of system methods outside Taiwan, even adopting it faster than the Taiwan regional governments. Yeah. And this leads to a question about local, global countries, regions. Yeah, how or maybe I should ask why or if a national state should earn revenues and make companies stay in the country when the payment, labor and trade will, you know, flow around and be more global. Okay, let me rephrase or let me ask you the question. What's your opinion about, so to say, having a country or state view? How important is it? Well, for open data or open source or open culture in general, you don't see many licenses that restrict its uses to particular countries. For things related to encryption or whatever, there used to be some regional restrictions, but they're not very popular anymore. So nowadays, the Creative Common License, the major open data license, the major open source licenses, they don't even refer to countries. They're universal in the sense. And so for this kind of work, I would say it is not at all important for nation states or countries as artificial boundaries. It may be more relevant for people who work on the same community to look at, you know, shared time zones just because, right, of whether you use email or Skype, right, or shared, you know, computer languages or natural languages. That still makes some distinction. That still makes some sense as the border to form community perhaps, but I don't think nation states play any part in the open data or open source culture. Do you see that when the world is becoming more global, do you see that people will be more equal and the poverty will be reduced and people will be more equal in the world when this is happening? Or what do you think? Well, I mean, Internet was kind of designed with that in mind, right? That's the Internet's idea. It's a protocol that networks across different networks. That's what the Internet means in the Internet. And of course, so far it's been working pretty well, but there are, of course, people who want to reinstall nation states into the Internet with ideas called cyber sovereignty or things like that. And so far, I think people who actively work on the core Internet protocols still have not adopted the cyber sovereignty view. And so it still has this liberalizing or equalizing forces, as I said. But I'm also aware that there are thinkers and policymakers who want to rein in Internet in its cross-country or even anarchistic participatory nature and try to rein-reinstate the Internet as part of the state's apparatus instead of something that is orthogonal to states. So this trend and its counter-trend birth exists. I'm not denying that it doesn't exist, but so far it seems to be still working. Do you think that this and also automation in general will finally lead to some basic income? You mean like universal basic income? Well, as experiments or as smaller-scale test fields or as referendum subjects, we see more and more of that popping up. And so if you ask this question in the idea of within a century or within 500 years or in one of the planets in the galaxy, I'm pretty sure that it will happen in one way or the other. But I don't really know where it will happen first, but I do know that we need to separate the idea of work and tasks in order for this to happen. If people identify with particular tasks and the skills associated with that task and take too much pride into it, then universal basic income will be seen as an attack on this kind of proudness of a working-but-really-task-performing person. But if people see work as completing life's work or are doing something that has a positive social impact, then any automation is just fuel to this life's work and then people will be much more accepting of universal basic income. So there's a culture change that needs to happen before the economic change could happen. Then there has been recently a big talking about, especially in Sweden, about the Me Too movement, you can call it. One question I got from the crowd to ask you was how the Me Too has been in Taiwan from your perspective and how Taiwan is handling sexual harassment in workplace and both physical world but more part of the online. Well, Taiwan is, I would say, pretty advanced, especially in Asia, due to marriage equality and other very progressive views held both by the current president and the previous one, they're both ahead of their parties when it comes to this kind of equality and also representation, gender-fair representation is also constitutionally protected. So that gives us some head start because for each and every regulation, for each and every law, there need to be a gender impact assessment made for the regulation or the law and there's also a growing awareness of the idea that cyberbullying or whatever has been given space by a blaming the victim activity, for example. And so I think all this has been pretty much dominant culture even under youth or teenager culture in Taiwan. So it gives a relative safe space, especially when we just talk about the scope of Asia. And so as a transgender myself and have many LGBTQ friends, of course it's not optimal at the moment as people just don't care about gender anymore or people just don't have any Me Too moments anymore but at least when there's a public incident, when there's a public discussion, the social justice people are always the mainstream. Opinion and there's of course counter-opinions but they are strictly in the minority. And due to the marriage equality case, the conservative or I would say so-called conservative forces are mobilizing and not gathering and that is true. And so we see more overt expression of gender stereotypes or whatever that's happening but I think that is just part of the storm working into the ratification process of marriage equality. And I think our administration's strategy of dealing it as a right and privilege issue instead of a religious, spiritual, cultural issue has its merits because then people see marriage as something spiritual but something that is just part of the rights and privileges basically a contract. And so by reviewing line by line exactly what is being granted was being enjoyed it secularizes marriage and it also makes it much easier for people with different ideologies or different religions to talk with this in economic terms and once you get here, it's much harder for gender stereotyping, for harassment, to grow because then it becomes an economic argument and it's not very gender based at this point then. Because in Sweden, it has affected so many industries the Mitu movement has a really huge impact. That's why, because I'm curious how it is in Taiwan did it also have a big impact here or was it just a smaller thing that passed by and because you already have... Because people generally trust that there is a systematic approach to report and handle sexual harassment and it's like a paracord system that handles this kind of workplace harassment and misconduct and indeed in one of the sexual harassment cases happened in the university that doesn't go through the usual arbitration channels that becomes a scandal. So people I think generally have some trust in this kind of arbitration channels that's been around for quite a few years. Also when we talk about this, how is it to be being a transgender in politics? Is it challenging in a certain way? People don't care. Also a question about the sustainability thing What do you think is the next step that digitalisation can take on sustainability issues? What do you think, how can digitalisation help? Sure. As the ministry in charge of social innovation and social entrepreneurship we do see that a large number of young people and also people who are retiring we call this cross-generational startups and innovators they start with the explicit goal of tackling one of the SDG one of the sustainable development goals and I think that that's a very good sign because that means that Taiwan sees the society as something that can solve problems not just caused by poverty or regional disasters or issues but also issues caused by technology you know, isolation, cyberbullying rising in quality due to automation and things like that there's plenty of social innovators who start with the explicit goal of transforming how people look at handicapped people how people look at blind people how people look at people who deal on the street in a wheelchair and things like that and so there are concerted efforts to make not just social influence but social impact when it comes to those development goals and it is also our goal in the national government to provide as much as possible regulatory leeway to those people because when those people discover a new way to have social impact they usually more often they not run into existing regulations but because they share the government's goal of furthering public good of solving sustainability issues we give them precedence in trying to harmonize the regulations in their favor and trying to redo our interpretations of laws so that they can innovate or even designing sandbox laws where they can be illegal and run counter to rules for 6 months for 12 months and then writing a report and then proving to the society that this new approach actually is beneficial to the society and if it's not of course it just pay the tuition for everybody else afterwards but if it does work then it gives a very strong case for the regulators and the lawmakers to adjust laws in their favor and so purely for profit companies doesn't really enjoy this kind of priority treatment May I just change the microphone? Sure, of course because now please it can still be here just be used now we would like to ask a little bit more about economy more financial economic news Taiwan is Taiwan is sometimes referred to as the Silicon Valley of Asia but what's the difference between Asia's Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley in the United States? Well, I don't know where you got this Asia Silicon Valley idea but when I get into the cabinet my first contribution is to rename Asia's Silicon Valley in Asia into Asia's Silicon Valley Asia dot Silicon Valley meaning that we're a hub that links the Asia people and a hub that links the innovations from the Silicon Valley and the innovations here in Asia so we see ourselves as a connector of talents, of resources of regulations at times but we don't see ourselves as a Shenzhai or a copy of Silicon Valley in Asia that would actually be absurd and so that's one of my first contributions going into the cabinet is just renaming the Asia SV plan into the Asia dot SV plan How can the digital revolution affect the global and local economy? First, there's not just one digital revolution there's many digital revolutions one riding on the wave of another if you just look at the hype cycle there's a bunch of revolutions coming up but I think by far the most important thing is that it enables people to think about equality in a way that is currently imaginable but just 100 years ago was unimaginable when we talk about for example regional balance or equality of education for example people wait on high speed rails or waiting on roads going to their homes and so on it takes like 5 years 10 years and it's very difficult to take into the equality into every rural area and so on but now with a lot of education services, medicine even deliver over the internet in Taiwan we actually have one of the highest percentage of internet penetration rate and mobile use and also gender equal use of services online so whereas before the promise of equality and actual delivery through physical or analog ways always leaves something to be decided and at the moment it's actually very easy or at least attainable for our president to promise broadband as human right access to AI as human right access to whatever basic education ICT as part of the curriculum as human right and actually delivering it in a matter of a couple years and so it would be almost impossible without additional technologies since I've got my child since I've got my child so yes okay also I know we talk about several digital revolutions but from your perspective how is it how is this shift affecting the business relations in Asia Taiwan and the rest of Asia and the European Union well the digital services and digital goods of course creates a harmonization issue between every different countries lost for example when Uba first came to Taiwan it classified itself as just another app but for many other countries and other people they are a kind of rental car service and that creates a dissonance between people's different interpretations of over broad terms such as sharing economy and things like that so first that it creates confusion and from the confusion creates fear because people will fear that their jobs getting displaced, automation taking people's work away their dignity away and then from there people also create doubts because there are people who say algorithms are more efficient than laws so we don't have to obey laws anymore and so on so it also corrodes trust in the government and the government system and also legitimacy of any nation states and so we see all that dynamic happening and Uba is just one of the many cases in Taiwan we try to address that by bringing the open multi-stakeholder system which is the same system that how internet government has been working to govern issues such as cross-country protocols, security issues and everything that relates to internet governance without the idea of states or without the idea of sovereign control so the idea is that we ask people that ok we share the basic facts we also cross source data from everybody and then we ask people what are your feelings, what are the feelings that you see when you look at those numbers when you have this uber driving experience what are your feelings really, what are your doubts and fears and joy perhaps everybody has different feeling and the good thing about a feeling oriented consultation process is that there is no right and wrong everywhere in different parts of the country people can participate just on their mobile phone and share their feelings and then what we see is that with just the right design we use machine learning to cluster people's feelings and we say that if people can propose a subtle or a nuanced feeling that resonates with the super majority then we give them binding power meaning that we bring them into the political agenda and use it to talk with uber, with taiwan taxi with the taxi drivers union and so thousands of people contributed and finally have a set of seven consensus items which we then check one by one with all the stakeholders and then translate it into law so this is what we call crowd sourced agenda setting and I think this is one of the key things that really needs to happen if we are to harmonize the digital services and products across so called nation or country borders because people who are affected by any technology across different countries they have more in common in each other than people who just happen to live next door but it's not affected the same way we see the same thing with climate change people who live very close to the ocean and you know are seeing their house being perhaps destroyed within the next decade have more in common with each other than people in the same nation but doesn't live in the same elevation so we really do need ways to get more solidarity, more familiarity with people in those feeling with the same feelings and also a way for the existing regulatory system to take into account those stakeholder feelings and then translate it into regulations and laws that everybody can live with and so that I think is the digital revolution's main impact on governance and especially on cross-country or cross-border governance Taiwan was very early with the semiconductor much of Taiwan's wealth is built on semiconductors and then it started to shift more to still lots of semiconductors but then more and more software about where will the future be how will the future growth be for Taiwan well I think a semiconductor of course is still a very important part of Taiwan and we see it as the driving force because there are many AI related or IoT related applications that does require creative chip design and especially when we work very closely with people who are working closer to human beings, the service designers the user experience designers we don't arbitrarily say these are software people, these are hardware people my own experience working with Apple for six years is that everybody listen to designers and designers listen to people so instead of shipping products or designing products I think we are more and more in the civil society and the private sector in Taiwan seeing this just as a service design part of the ecosystem and the hardware people and the software people are just there to respond to the demands of society because we see it as a product design then we will worry about there is a new technology why isn't the adoption rate already 80% and those very arbitrary competition based views for particular technology and we did that with Weimax and with other technologies it didn't really do us much good so I think the idea is not just locking in to particular new and exciting technologies but instead using Simboxes, using social innovation hubs and things like that for every new technology to have a way to connect to existing software and hardware and service and every other ecosystem and collaboratively break some laws break some regulations do some experimentation and try to figure out how the society can reconfigure itself to everybody's benefit and if it doesn't work well then we design the way so that the risk is absorbed not by one single public servant or one single innovator but instead the whole ecosystem just takes the course more than and then do something better so I think the idea in Taiwan is to have a more holistic more integrated ecosystem and I think Taiwan because of our absolute freedom expression you can't say anything that gets you arrested unlike many other Asian countries there are many other law-breaking ideas that we still look forward for our local innovators to propose and combine different fields and different disciplines together instead of just looking at one or two industries and say this should be our national direction we're now promoting social innovation or different industry especially merging those different fields and disciplines Thank you very much I think I've asked all the questions I would like to ask or do you feel that there is something that you were thinking of that you should mention that you haven't mentioned? No, it's good Because now I will stop here and demount everything and I will do some editing I'll send you a transcript also Perfect Thank you so much Could we just take some pictures? I noticed at the door here all the other ministers they have dark doors with small windows you have very big windows and we see a lot of post-it notes With post-it notes? Yeah, exactly Maybe I can just take some pictures