 Greetings, I'm Oji Town, Taiwan's digital minister. I'm really happy to be here virtually to share with you some thoughts around reimagining democracy. Our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, in her inauguration three years ago said, Before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values, but from now on democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values. Indeed, in traditional thinking, people representing technological advances on one side as well as people representing social justice on the other. Or people thinking about economic prosperity on one side and people thinking about environmental sustainability on the other are kind of the different knots with the different representatives, MPs, ministers with a civil service in between as they're built. However, nowadays with hashtags, hashtag me too, hashtag climate strike can mobilize tens of millions of people who are of very different sectors, very different backgrounds to a common cause. And in this way, there really is no way for the traditional bureaucracy in a chop-down way to find out who are the representatives and what trade-offs to make. Rather, we need to ask a different set of questions. We need to ask, given our various positions, are there still some common values? And given the common values, are there innovations that can deliver on those common values without leaving anyone or itself? So this is my office, the social innovation lab in Taiwan. Anyone can come here and talk to me for 40 minutes at a time under the idea of radical transparency. Every Wednesday is my office hour. And so anyone can come to me with new innovations that they want to try out with the society to build and design the social norms. Here are some self-driving tricycles from MIT Media Lab. They came to me two years ago saying, Minister, would you like to write on one, even though we're still working on it, it bumps into things all the time. I'm like, are you sure? And they're like, this is really slow. So if it bumps into people, if it bumps into buildings, there's no harm done. It's not even as fast as a person running. I'm like, okay, so what are these things being useful? They're like, no, let's just have a heck of fun. Let's just ask the people nearby what you make use of it. And that is a norm-first approach. We invited people around the social innovation lab nearby the Jianguo flower market. So there's an elderly couple that walks from the Jianguo flower market with lots of pots of flowers. And they said, hey, Minister, what are you doing with those shopping carts? I'm like, these are not really shopping carts. And they're like, they look just like shopping carts. And so can we put our orchid flower there? And so they started brainstorming and imagined a way that these self-driving tricycles can follow them around on the flower market and they can just put the flowers into it. And once they're done shopping, maybe the vehicle is full, the vehicle can summon another one for them to continue to the jade market, which is also nearby. And by the end of it, they can hop on one and they'll just drive them home. But to make these changes is actually very difficult to imagine from Boston. It does take the type attack as well as many different people around the hackathon site to change the hardware, to change the software, to analyze the data. But fortunately, because these are open source, open hardware and open data, it equips everybody with the capability to tinker, to hack, to fork these designs into something that's embraced by the society. And with these social norms firmly in place, then we can design the market policies. We can design then the technological architectures to protect what people treasure. And then finally, maybe laws and regulation. So here you're looking at a real right with these self-driving tricycles with me on it and you can witness that there's two eyes, that you can read emotional responses from people, you can read hand gestures and you can also emote back. So this kind of code domestication is much preferred than a tap down approach of imposing these technologies into people's lives. So in sustainable development goal terms, this is 1717, it's about building partnerships across different sectors. We have another design called presidential hackathon that emphasizes the flexibility of the bureaucracy. Anyone working in public sector or private or academia or social sector can go and submit an idea into this wishing well every April. Last April, there was a repressed people in the Taiwan Water Corporation. They maintain one of the longest water pipes in the world and they say we're choosing a site called Jilong and we're going to test a new algorithm. Previously, they hired people to listen to those leaking pipes and it takes an average two months between a site that's leaking for someone to detect it and most of the time those repressed people spend the whole day listening to the pipes that are not leaking. So it's kind of a boring job until they found a leaking point where it becomes creative. Now their idea is that how about let's build a chatbot. Whenever a repair person wakes up, they can look at their phone. The chatbot would say, hey, these are the three nearby sites that may be leaking and why don't you investigate them first? So after three months of co-creation, they delivered a solution with the help from the private sector, from the academia, from the executive union, the administration and they found a formula using deep learning that analyzing the water pressure and flow data, they can actually shorten the detection from two months to two days. Now, after this, they won the presidential hackathon one of the five teams. Each team received a trophy from our president but there is no money. There's no prize money. The only thing we design that this trophy is that there is a projector on the bottom. When you turn on the projector, it projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you. This is very useful. If your director general thinks, oh, there's no budget, you just summon the president and low and behold his budget. If your minister thinks it requires cross-ministerial coordination, you just summon the president and they'll get a meeting because it carries the presidential promise that whatever the people have piloted during those three months, any team with the trophy are guaranteed to have their idea scaled out, deployed to the entire country within the next 12 months. With the presidential promise, many people started brainstorming about ways to improve our society and indeed the water savior team because they save water, also visited New Zealand for three more months to co-create a solution, a local AI that fixes the problem for New Zealand which are just beginning to encounter water shortage because of climate change. So the idea here is that it is not about a top-down approach. This is about a peer-to-peer approach of people donating their data. It could be open government data, open citizen data, open private sector data and together this data collaboratives relationship ensures that people hold each other accountable by having a common idea of what is the reliable data around our vicinity, around our air quality, water quality, around disaster prevention and all things like that. So if you go to the data collaboratives.org there are many, many ways for people to collaborate together using data as a common platform. So one example, in Taiwan we have this air box initiative that's entirely initiated by the social sector. People just volunteer to put us very cheap less than 100 US dollars air boxes to their back and into their school, there's many schools that having this as environmental curriculum basically donating the PM2.5 measurements that they have to a common public legend. And with this public legend people can rest assured that nobody can change each other's numbers and academia Seneca makes a last network that analyzed the air quality based on their citizen science data. Now it's more than 2,000 sites. It actually threatens the legitimacy of our environmental protection agency a few years ago because the EPA even though have higher precision sites there are only less than 100 in Taiwan. But the great thing about Taiwan is that the social sector always has higher legitimacy compared to the public sector. And so the public sector always said okay we can't beat them, we must join them. So the EPA asks the citizen scientists where are the places that you wish that there could be an air box but they couldn't? Well it turns out that industrial parks are private property. But it also turns out the public sector owns the lamps in the industrial parks. So then the EPA helps them to install the air boxes on the lamps that's owned by the public sector. And so this kind of collaboration ensures that the social sector controls the governance of the technology but the public sector through the idea of data collaboratives can fit in the places where people feel there must be a complementary action by the public sector. And so in SDG terms this is SDG 74 which is an educational material using again open source and open hardware by people around the world anyone can download these boxes either their hardware schema or their software code and run it locally and participate in this air quality measurement network. So this year in the top 10 of presidential hackathon we have four teams that are a combination of AEI and CI that's assistive intelligence and collective intelligence. So the air box team also wrote out a water box that measures the waterways in maybe arable lines and those lines because if they have plants on it that pollutes the water this year we pass a law that the central government cuts the water and electricity supply to those plants. So everybody is incentivized to just buy those very cheap water boxes and install it in the waterways to prove that they are not the one that pollutes. And so using this way anything that requires a public sector attention for example telemedicine telediagnostics and so on after trying out for three months for everybody to see that against the trophy it means that everybody approves of that idea we use popular voting in a new voting system called quadratic voting to ensure that it really reflects the social preferences of the stakeholders and the general population. So how do we discover those teams how do we encourage them to go to the presidential hackathon Well it turns out every Wednesday I have an office hour in Taipei but every other Tuesday or so I also have a virtual town hall the idea is that I travel to the most rural indigenous offshore places and because we in Taiwan have broadband as human rights even in the most remote places 98% of them now have 10 megabits per second and even in the top of Yushan 4,000 meters the south most Pacific islands of Dongshan and Taiping you all have 10 megabits per second so when I meet with the local people in the places that they are using to meet for example an indigenous gathering place or a town hall in the local vicinity I spent a night or two nights in an ethnographic hanging out with the local people because everything is also radically transparent they want to lobby for their personal interests rather in this kind of meetings people talk about things of public interest and potential innovations to solve them however it's not something that's only local using broadband we connect them to the four municipalities to people in the social innovation lab that's 12 different ministries each one sending a section chief or a hire to respond in the here and now to all the inventions, all the ideas all the innovations that's brought by the local social entrepreneurs and the great thing about this arrangement is that for the public service there are no longer anonymous people can see that they're really brainstorming and figuring out cross-ministerial ways to solve people's problems so they can bond together and form a team in presidential hackathon and if their ideas doesn't work, if the local people is angry, well you cannot hit someone over the internet I'm the only one in the vicinity and so I absorb other risk and everybody share the credit and that is how our social innovation tools encourage people to form data collaboratives in SDG terms this is target 16, 7, a real time not every 4 years but a real time every couple weeks way for people to be included in the policy making process and sometimes there are just very emerging innovations that basically is not foreseen by the law and sometimes the MP will take an interest for example in fintech in self-driving vehicles platform economy, 5G all those different emerging technologies so we have both a general regulatory sandbox as well as a specific law level sandbox for fintech and self-driving vehicles the idea very simply put is that anyone can propose to break the law to build an alternative of the existing laws and regulations and try it out for a year as long as it's not about money laundering or funding terrorism everything is fair game from every ministry and when people try out for a year for example currently in the national Taiwan University people are trying out shared economy rentable e-scooters for a while so even though it's not legal in the rest of Taiwan the lawmakers, the regulators all have one year of witnessing how the social norm gets formed around this new technology if people think it's a bad idea well we thank the investors we all learn something however if people think it's a good idea then we change the regulation to fit if the MPs need to deliberate for 3 years, for 4 years that's okay but the initial proof of concept including the business model continue to be legal so this is like a limited time monopoly until we figure out how to codify those norms into laws and regulations so that everybody can compete but only on the platform on the boundary under the sandbox that we figure out that it doesn't hurt the social and environmental sustainability so how do we actually know if people are okay with it that people can live with it well we use AI powered conversations and this one is called Payless the Payless design, very simply put puts your avatar among the people who feel like you on a common objective truth the objective fact, again is only attainable by kind of puzzle making from the open government data open citizen data, private sector data and so on but looking at the same facts, for example this picture was about UberX looking at the same facts, you may feel happy they may feel angry I may feel relaxed there's no right or wrong about feelings but the great thing about including feelings is that then when we brainstorm the ideas in design thinking terms we're having a simple common how might we go forward question as evidenced by the resonance of people with each other's feelings and then we can ratify them into new regulations so everybody holding a phone can see a fellow citizen sentiment for example this one is I think passenger liability insurance is important you may agree or disagree but there's no reply button so there's no room for trolls to play now if you hit agree or disagree, there will be another statement that shows on and your avatar will gradually move toward the people that share your sentiments and after 3 or 4 weeks of consultation we always end up like this and this is the most important part of this slide if you can only take away one slide I would like it to be this one it turns out there's only a few divisive statements a few ideological statements but most people agree with most of other people on most of the things most of the time so why don't we just table the discussion of the most divisive issues and just put into regulation a policy that people's common feelings across different ideological groups and using AI analysis we can find out exactly the principal component of what people feels like and have the best idea be the one that takes care of most people's feelings and so people crowdsource the agenda that let us measure the success of our policies instead of the top-down KPI the bottom-up KPI that makes sure that whatever we're addressing is out of the common will of the people and only in this way can we deliver innovations that are truly delivering on the common understanding and common values among different positions and so using this Venn diagram of sustainable development goals my work as digital minister is in the middle the 17th goal binds the environmental the social and the economic together under common data that everybody can form a collaborative under cross-sectoral international partnerships and finally under open innovation that we don't reserve they copyright the patent of those intellectual property quote-unquote issues that prevents those ideas those innovations from becoming truly social innovations for only when the gov tech is based on civic tech can the public sector and the citizens co-work and co-design on common solutions that works for everyone now finally as a conclusion I'd like to read you my chapter description also written three years ago it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beans 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 that is always remember the plurality is here thank you for listening