 So, without further ado, let me introduce the first panelist, Audrey Towne. So Audrey is Taiwan's digital ministry in charge of social innovation. Before acting as the minister, she had served as a committee member of several government agencies. Beyond public service, she is also renowned open source practitioners and a civic hacker, contributing to many projects including V-Taiwan, an e-ruler making process and platform. So now let's welcome Audrey. Good local time, everyone. This is Audrey Towne, Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation, youth engagement and open government. It is my great pleasure and honor to be here virtually at the 2021 Open Government International Virtual Forum and share some thoughts with you about Taiwan's Open Government National Action Plan. But first, as our moderator said, the COVID-19 pandemic threw the world off balance and brought drastic changes. In many parts of the world, we've seen symptoms of democracy in box light, as some authoritarian regimes have tried to impose measures of state surveillance and restrictions in the name of public health. Now a few days ago, I met with a delegation from the European Parliament who visited Taiwan for the first time. And they were very interested in learning how we counter the pandemic with no lockdowns and also the infodemic with no takedowns. And my answer was open government. Now when faced with pandemic anxiety that has stoked the flames of disinformation instead of using top-down centralized initiatives, Taiwan focused on a decentralized all-of-society approach through participatory fact-checking, the humor-over-rumor tactics, and so on, which gives public empowerment to laugh and reflect at non-factual information. In basic education, we put an emphasis on media competence instead of just media literacy, such that, for example, middle schoolers can become contributors to independent media and fact-check our presidential debates in real time. So compared to the non-democratic censorship and takedowns, I believe this, the Taiwan model, is a longer-lasting pro-social solution or vaccination of the mind to the ongoing challenge of polarization on the more anti-social corners of social media. So when we say Taiwan can help, what is our core message to fellow democracies in the open government partnership? As I mentioned in yesterday's OGP Academy keynote, my answer is really simple. It's to trust our citizens, because to give no trust is to get no trust. Now the first step towards such mutual trust is transparency. A great example is last February's face mask mobs initiated by social entrepreneurs such as Howard Wu and Fijian Kian working with the decentralized community at G0V a group of civic technologists in Taiwan. To prevent the panic buying of medical-grade masks, we instituted this national rationing scheme. But at the same time, we also released an application programming interface or real-time open data to provide the public with real-time location-specific data on mask availability. And within just a few days, more than 100 different mobs, chatbots, voice assistants were created so that people can look at the details of where masks are in stock and their numbers. And just a few weeks later, Korean civic technologists would also adopt this system in March 2022, I think 2020, sorry February. So in line with this real-time open data, we are now committing as part of our first national action plan, the high priority data sets, subjects to advanced data standards and quality. What's high priority, of course, is subject to a public consultation mechanism. And the National Center for High Performance Computing will also provide ample computation powers, especially around the civil IoT, that's to say air quality, water resources, earthquake disaster prevention, and other areas environmental and climate science. We are committed to revamp the Personal Data Protection Act, guaranteeing the rise of data subjects and also privacy impact assessments. We're committed to look at the Charges and Fees Act to streamline the freedom of information process to enable more access, and also the integrated access environmental data platforms, including offshore wind power, sea areas, and also solar panel areas, and so on. Now about participation. Another great example is the one-stop online civic participation platform called Join The GOV. The TW, where anyone can file a petition and participate in policymaking. Phase-to-phase cross-ministerial collaborative meetings are held twice monthly to explore ways to incorporate ideas from petitions with more than 5,000 signatures into policymaking. And literally anyone, not just citizens, but also residents, people too young to vote, can all play a role in the decision-making process, and so far we've held more than 100 collaboration meetings, as you see here, where we co-create a tax filing experience. As of October this year, there have been close to 30 million visits to join the GOV, the TW, in a country with population of only 23 million, it's a lot, and of course our open government national action plan commitments themselves were co-created on the join platform. So on the participation pillar, we're committed to co-create policies with the young people through the let's talk endeavor, and the agenda setting is not just about the policy about young people, but also policymaking on a national level, crowdsourced by young people. For example, this year, they're focusing on mental health care reform. We're also committed to facilitate the formation of labor unions, including on the post-pandemic new normal, teleworking, and many other new working conditions. Of course, we're committed to revitalize our regions, again through use direct participation, and they integrated platforms such that those crowdsourced agenda of how to revitalize the economy and society in those areas can be shared around the world. We're also committed to introduce electronic joint signatures in our national level referenda, and also to integrate open government principles in our basic education through empowering the teachers, especially in a civics class in a curriculum, but also many other classes as well. Now, the inclusive pillar. Of course, people around the world know Taiwan as the country first in Asia to legalize marriage equality, and also more than 40 percent of the members of our parliament are women. But behind those achievements, of course, is this gender mainstreaming work, the Gender Equality Committee co-created exactly the same way as our open government national action plans during committee, have from the civil society, have from the government. And so these ways of inclusive policymaking is, of course, not only related to gender inclusive value and engagement, and we are committed to also apply the same model to empower immigrants in the decision making about indigenous people's international linkage, and also public engagement, deepen these engagement in our HACA issues. Now, finally, the accountability pillar. What's pictured here is the 192 to SMS system, basically the same community of people that co-create a masquerading map. This may, when we faced our real first wave and only wave so far of the pandemic, the early measures to record the contact information of those entering or leaving public venues led to the quick developments, again, not the government technology, but civic technology of an SMS based contact tracing system in just three days. It's very intuitive, app free, so you can in the lock screen of your phone, just swipe, point to your QR code, send an SMS, and that's done. So, of course, it's an easy way to check in at public places without any compromise on anyone's privacy, but why I want to highlight the accountability part. Anyone can look up who has accessed those records from the contact tracing offices in the past four weeks, and of course, it's rotated away after four weeks, and the accountability coupled with the secure multi-party design ensure that privacy is preserved while we shorten the contact tracing from more than 24 hours for each confirmed case to less than 24 minutes. So, here are our commitments in the accountability pillar. We're committed to enhance political donations disclosure and also to enact and strengthen the whistleblower protection, also to build a procurement integrity platform, but also on the economic sector, the beneficial ownership disclosure, as per the international standards, and also in the social sector to promote the financial disclosure of religious groups to close anti-money laundering. So, there's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in. When faced with the shared challenge that confronts the global population, I believe an opportunity emerges to form shared goals, bringing all hands on deck to crowdsourced for idea that unlocks our collective intelligence and connective intelligence to march toward a transparent, participatory, inclusive, and accountable future. In the last minute to conclude, I would like to share with you my own job description when I joined the cabinet as digital minister, because as we know, digital without open isn't legitimate, but open without digital doesn't scale. So, my job description goes like this. 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, well, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you all for listening. Live long and prosper. Thank you, Audrey. This is a very beautiful point and your talk. Okay, so we have our next speaker, Maria Baron. Yes, here we have her. Let me introduce Maria Baron here. Maria Baron is the lead civil society culture, OGP steering committee. Maria is a journalist and has worked in civil society organizations in both Argentina and the world with the end of reducing unethical practices of the legislature and public officials. She has many roles and titles. The global executive director of directorial legislative, sorry for my bad pronunciation of Spanish. And she's also a full-gride APSA congressional fellow and a founding member of the Latin American Network for legislative transparency. Maria is also the winner of NDI Democracy Award for Civic Innovator. She has many publications related to transparency, anti-corruption, and open government. So that's welcome, Maria. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. And I want to thank Lulu first for searching me around the world to be able to come up to this interesting event about open government, which is one, of course, one of my favorite issues to talk about because I think we share with all of you, especially with the people and colleagues that I share the panel with, which that open government is the way forward for better and more just societies. Also before starting, I want to thank the embassy of Taiwan or the presentation of the government of Taiwan and Buenos Aires who also reached out to me to be able to be here today. And so I hope that you're listening too. I want to talk about three different elements tonight where I am at. It's an at night. So I think it's an interesting, somehow sad moment, but I think it's an interesting moment to sort of do a balance of this community and debate, public debate about open government in the world. You know, that OGP, the open government's partnership started in 2011. So that's this year we're going to make it the 10th year. And you know that next month we're having the 10th year summit, which is going to happen in South Korea. And I think it's a really, like I said, interesting moment to stop a little bit and think about firstly how different the world was 10 years ago. So many of the eight presidents that were the founders of this initiative were talking about transparency, accountability, openness today in many parts of the world many more than we want to account for. We're talking about civic space, which is in many of the freedoms, which I'm going to stop there a little bit later, that we thought that we had guaranteed have been reduced in many parts of the world. And in some places even we're talking about how to reconquer free and fair elections. So it's a very different, a very difficult world today. And I think it's really important to see how we are approaching together as a community, governments and civil society about how effective we've been on and what are the new threats that we're having today in the different parts of the world. And just to share with you a couple of very significant and very global numbers. The area of the world that I work more, which is of course Latin America. Since 2011, the year OGP started up until today, the countries that are members of OGP passed 150 laws and decrees that are about transparency and accountability. These are access to public information laws, a beneficial ownership in some cases, lobbying laws in others, etc. 150 is a lot. And just to give you maybe a standpoint, maybe we don't have 150 laws on education in the region. So it's a lot. And I think the headline of that is in Latin America and many other parts of the world, we have a sort of a debt in a way that there's a gap between all the commitments and all the laws of the formalities that we have, and then the implementation part of that. And I think going to Mr. Tang's speech, I think Taiwan can help. I think Taiwan can help in that. And there's, we need to get really creative, which is a word that you'll hear more in my intervention today into how we can do that. And also another number, maybe a globe number in Latin America, many of the countries, there's a measurement that we do is called the Civic Space Guardian. And many of the countries during the pandemic reduce the civic space freedoms that we used to live in and enjoy with many of those freedoms are access to public information, of course. But also, as Audrey was mentioning earlier, one of the pillars, digital privacy with all of this contact tracing and management of the data that the governments are doing. And there's a lot of surveillance, of course, around that. And there's a lot of initiatives on those that want to back it instead of prevent it. So that's a little bit, so the first headline of what I wanted to talk about, a little bit of what the balance has been. Of course, of course, it's a counter factor, but I believe that this initiative, whether you're in OGP or you're not, this global initiative is better to have happened than not have happened. And I don't know where we would be if all this community, I know this many, many people in the world, governments and civil society working towards the same. The second thing that I want to share with you is sort of three sorts of efforts that from the stream community or from the civil society community, we have approached. And I think in this, like I said, in this difficult world, we have had to become, like I said, more creative because the single idea of the formality of creating or co-creating action plans that are composed of commitments. And many times those commitments don't get so much implemented if somehow for many countries and for many civil society cohorts of many countries, a little bit frustrating. In some cases, they get implemented, in some others they don't. But this year, there has been sort of a very, very big effort with from the government of Korea myself, which because we're the chairs of the stream committee of OGP, we have made a big, big effort on civic space and anti-corruption. And so this year, you will see many commitments in the action plans of the different countries around that, around the ESCASU agreement, around beneficial ownership, about open contracting partnership, a procurement about many issues, about beneficial ownership, which Audrey was already was also mentioning before. And so those are the sort of the global initiatives that many people have been making a big effort to see in the action plans. But then sort of the other side of the same coin is that creativity that we've had to see, you know, nothing is perfect. So we've had to work on what we call a call to action, which is asking the government to do more. So raising the bar a little bit, everything that you were supposed to do or that you had committed to do, please do more. Our societies are going through a very, very rough time. So what else can you do? And this doesn't have to be necessarily through action plans or through commitments in action plans, but other initiatives as well, maybe a commitment to a reaction plans behind or before never got implemented, or maybe a space that you had committed to do with civil society never got called for or maybe a law that you had promised to pass is missing a very relevant article. So we've had to see in every one country the specifics behind those big titles. And so from the string committee, we have tested ourselves and we didn't know if this was going to work, frankly or not. And so we randomly chose six countries. And so what we did is went to talk to the organizations of those six countries at the national level, we talked to them, we prepared an agenda of these little things that they thought that the countries or the governments had to do during this year. And we went back to the government's share that agenda committed them to do those things. Sometimes they said yes, sometimes they said no to two or five or six things, they said yes to two or three. So it depends on each country. But we wanted firstly to test ourselves, what else can we do to raise the bar? What else can we do or could we do to close the loop? And so those countries have been during our work during this year. So they are France, Italy, Germany, Nigeria, Kenya and the Philippines. So it has been a really, really interesting initiative, not only because of those relevant points that we wanted the governments to address, but also as engagement, as creating bridges and connecting sort of the national debate to the international debate as well. Sometimes there's a disconnect there as well. And lastly, another line of creativity, I don't know if it's a good thing, but we had to react as student committee members to the different emergencies that the world has gone through. For example, and now going back to what I was saying at the beginning, it's not only about civic space, we're talking about democracy again. And one of the examples that you might have heard is El Salvador, where the organizations in on the ground are feeling that they're being surveilled by the government. People are being surveilled through cell phones, some people feel that other people follow them, they're being threatened through the social networks. And so what we've done is we have put together a statement from the student committee and we have committed the governments, usually these statements of course come from civil society organizations. And this time we have committed the governments of the student committee, which are 11, to sign a statement. And you know, when that happens, there's a lot of diplomatic issues that the countries never want to address. And this time they did. And so they felt a little bit pressured to, on behalf of El Salvador, or on the side of El Salvador's government. And also, just to give you another example, the situation unfortunately in Afghanistan has been a really life or death moment for many government officials, which are champions of open government and civil society organizations as well. And so the international community has put together a lot of effort, diplomatic effort, money into taking many of those champions, more than 100 to another country to save their lives. And now they're living, sorry, in another place where they can get a better life. And I'm sure that they'll take it from there and go anywhere else that they feel that they're safe. So, you know, going from the transparency debate into saving the lives of, or trying to save the lives of the champions that have worked on transparency has been sort of part of the time that we dedicate, or we dedicated this year, or these past years in the debate of OGP. And then to conclude, just wanted to mention that in spite of this, of all these sort of back clashes that we've seen and felt in the different governments, even in the countries where there's a lot of need and frustration, there's also little spaces, little windows that they can go forward in open government. We always said governments are not monolithic, so they can be at the same time shrinking the civic space where the organizations work, but also they can be advancing gender issues in different communities. And those two can sort of live together. And so we have to be as micro and as detailed as we can be to be able to not frustrate the good things that are happening in those contexts. And so I think my time is up. Thank you. Thank you very much again. Thank you, Maria. This is very important to hear about the challenges we are facing now and also to hear that all the efforts you are doing and the little hope, even though this is a little hope, that we are still trying to hold on to and like make it happen. This is very important. Okay, so next we have our next speaker, Ms. Scott Bosby. Scott Bosby is currently Acting Principal Disability Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. He has been working on migration, refugees, and human rights for over 30 years, including serving on the National Security Council in the White House and the Intergovernmental Consultation on Migration, Asylum, and Refugees in the U.N. Among many other important agencies. So please join me to welcome Scott Bosby. Thank you, Ms. Sean. And many thanks to Taiwan and to Audrey for the opportunity to join this important discussion. The U.S. is a co-founder of the Open Government Partnership and thus has lots of experience working on transparency issues, although not always with ease. But I thought we would share some of those experiences with you today. While on its face, open government may sound like an academic term or something that does not have immediate impact on the everyday lives of citizens, the truth could not be more different. As the panelists before me so elegantly described, the extent to which a government is open and transparent with its citizens has far-reaching implications on countless economic, social, and political issues. It can define the relationship between citizen and government, solidifying trust and allowing a crucial avenue to promote government accountability. Open government can be the means by which we seek to resolve intractable issues, promote innovation, and refine government operations. For that reason, President Biden has sent a clear signal regarding the critical importance of transparency, not only as a means of strengthening our own government operations, but in preventing and countering corruption and in beating back the tide of authoritarianism. We look forward to advancing our efforts on transparency through the upcoming Summit for Democracy in December and the year of action that will follow. We are proud to count on Taiwan's partnership in that event and look forward to using it to deepen our relationship. Within the United States, we have used government transparency and our participation in OGP to address both long-term and difficult issues. For instance, through the Open Police Data Initiative, we have enabled police departments around the country to proactively collect and publicly disclose policing data, resulting in the creation of a centralized database spanning over 130 jurisdictions. This data is used to identify long-term trends in policing and provide insight into ways that U.S. law enforcement can minimize the use of force and officers involved in shootings. We have also used transparency to catalyze scientific advances and innovation, including by requiring more than 20 U.S. federal science agencies to make reports and data from government-funded research freely available to the public. As a result, more than 2.4 million articles from U.S. government-funded research have been placed online in designated repositories since 2015, with thousands more being added each month. Participation of scholarly publishers has enabled millions more articles to be made freely available, more than 7.3 million in the biomedical and life sciences, for instance, with a growing number available in forms that allow machine analysis to accelerate discovery and use. Our science agencies continue to coordinate and improve implementation of their efforts through the National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Open Science. While these efforts seem and indeed are academic in nature, their application to the daily lives of citizens could not be more direct than it is now during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a call to action by science policy leaders within the U.S. and 11 other nations in March 2020, more than 50 scholarly publishers agreed to provide immediate free access to journal articles related to COVID-19 and the broad family of coronaviruses. Within weeks, a collaboration among several public and private sector partners assembled these articles into a growing collection that was available for artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques to help the scientific community answer high priority questions related to COVID-19. Launched as a set of 29,000 full text articles, this effort called the CORD-19 Open Research Dataset has grown to encompass more than 275,000 articles and preprints. It has been downloaded more than 131,000 times and served as the basis for two major text mining challenge competitions hosted by private and public sector organizations that attracted more than 1,500 unique contributions. This example points to one of the key intents of government transparency, to democratize knowledge so that it can reach all who may be able to use it, thereby empowering citizens and other non-governmental stakeholders to play a growing role in society writ large. By striving towards this end, transparency also seeks to lift the veil on governmental operations and in so doing build the citizen trust and engagement that Audrey talked about in her presentation. As Minister Tang's remarks today made abundantly clear, these goals are shared between the U.S. and Taiwan. It is these shared beliefs and values that make us such strong supporters of Taiwan's open government work and of your meaningful participation in the open government partnership. Indeed, we believe that all OGP members can learn from Taiwan and we commend Taiwan's bold steps in January of this year to develop and now implement independently produced national action plans for both the executive and legislative branches alongside civil society organizations. As the U.S. knows very well, these are difficult and often time-consuming endeavors, but the positive results of Taiwan's work on open government are clear. From the presidential hackathons to the innovative mask map project and the join platform, Taiwan's transparency work has deepened the relationship between government and its citizens and improved delivery of services and government accountability. We also commend Taiwan for hosting the upcoming Open Parliament Forum in Taipei on December 2nd and 3rd, and we are excited to support that event via the nonpartisan DC-based National Democratic Institute. The issues to be explored in this event, including trends in open parliament, strategies for addressing disinformation, and how transparency can assist in government emergency response, are extremely relevant to the challenges democracies face today. In addition to many high-level U.S. speakers, we are happy to see heavy participation in the event from many global partners, including Australia, the European Union, Estonia, France, Germany, Georgia, Japan, Lithuania, the Philippines, the U.K., and high-level staff from the OGP itself. As we have in past OGP events, the U.S. strongly supports Taiwan's attendance at the OGP Global Summit, and we applaud Mr. Tang's upcoming participation in the OGP Academy this coming week. That convening hosted by the OGP, South Korea, and the Korean Development Institute School of Public Policy and Management is a tremendous venue in which to share Taiwan's substantial open government expertise and experience. Where possible, we encourage Taiwan officials and civil society to attend relevant events, including as a means of developing long-term connections with OGP participants in both government and civil society. However, it is also important for us to look beyond this year's Global Summit to evaluate other means for strengthening Taiwan's participation in the OGP. We should continue to work together, both within the OGP umbrella and independently, to advance awareness of Taiwan's prowess, its ingenuity, and its dedication to transparency, to build relationships between Taiwan and the international community, and to expand our collaboration and exchanges so that we can truly benefit from each other's experiences. Separately, we believe we should continue to press for Taiwan's participation in regional events in 2020 and beyond. While there are currently no major events on the calendar for next year, we can only assume they will occur and should be ready to highlight Taiwan's work and our shared value systems. In closing, allow me to reiterate the U.S.'s strong support for Taiwan and our admiration for the continued excellent work being undertaken by your government and your champions of transparency like Digital Minister Tang. The United States will continue to support Taiwan with OGP and we look forward to working together as we move forward. With that, I'd like to turn it over to the Honorable Christian R. Ablen, Undersecretary of Presidential Communications Operation Office for the Philippines. Thank you, Mr. Bosby. Thank you for showing that so much value of transparency and democracy that we and the United States both have. And I'm so glad for that to hear the support from the United States for us to join the OGP and other international events. Okay, so next we have the speaker from the Philippines. Mr. Christian Ablen, let me introduce you. Christian Ablen is the Undersecretary for Administration, Finance, and Freedom of Information for the Presidential Communication Operations Office in the Philippines. In the office, he has late efforts to implement and ensure FOI principles for the government, including producing a model FOI manual for all agencies, reviving the open data program to complement FOI, and so on. Chris is also a lawyer with over 15 years of experience in government and public policy. He has served the government in various capacities as a solo sector, local legislature, and policy advisor. Chris was awarded outstanding legislator for the use by the National Youth Commission in 2009 and a New Zealand Asian Scholarship Award in 2013. Let's welcome Christian Ablen. Thank you, Mei Chun. Good morning to everyone attending this Open Government Virtual Forum organized by Taiwan. We are very, very pleased to be invited and discussed with you from room to tomb of an Open Government Partnership commitment in so far as the Philippines is concerned. So hopefully we will be sharing a few tips with Taiwan when it becomes a member of the OGP. Next slide please. All right, so we are showing you a snapshot of how we did our step-by-step from OGP, Open Government National Action Plan, to the commitment implementation, the Philippine experience. As mentioned by Mei Chun, I am an Undersecretary at the Philippines and we implement the commitment on freedom of information. The Philippines has been a member of OGP since 2011. It is a founding member of the Open Government Partnership. Next slide please. The agency in charge is the Presidential Communications Operations Office. Our counterpart in other agencies is called the Ministry of Information or the Department of Public Information. Specifically, there is a project management office called the Freedom of Information Project Management Office. And let me just show you the national action plans that the PCO has been active in for the past years. We have been active for in the fourth national action plan from 2017 to 2019, as well as the fifth national action plan. Now because of the COVID pandemic, we had to revise our national action plan, and I will be sharing with you the reason behind it in the next slides. Next slide please. This is our fifth revised national action plan. The timeline has shifted and as mentioned, most of our activities are on capacity building. And since the pandemic required us to go on lockdown and community quarantine, we had to shift to online mode of activities. And we've also adopted COVID-19 response and recovery efforts. Let me now show you our commitment status report. Okay, so from the very start, you have to have a commitment. And in so far as the PCO is concerned, our commitment in the Philippine Open Government National Action Plan is the passage of our Freedom of Information Law, as well as the localization of our FOI program. Next slide. Under the commitment, you have commitment milestones, and you also have our commitments to gender mainstreaming and inclusion indicators. Our support to civil society advocates of FOI and other transparency and participatory activities milestones conducted during the reporting period. Next slide please. Okay, so under the commitment, you have to write down what are the particular milestones in order for you to achieve that OGP commitment. So for us, our milestone number one is to draft an administration version of the FOI bill and to lobby to our FOI champions in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. Our second milestone is to certify FOI as an urgent legislative measure by the office of the president or the inclusion of FOI as part of the president's legislative agenda. Our third milestone is to at least conduct four public consultation activities to gather feedback on the FOI bill. So in coming up with milestones, you really have to detail and describe what activity will the agency or the country be doing in order to reach the commitment. Next slide please. This screen just shows you that we actually followed our first milestone, which is to draft an administrative version of our FOI bill. Next slide please. And also with our milestone number three, we conducted outreach activities with our presidential legislative liaison office, also with the House Committee on Public Information, also online courtesy meetings with the Senate, attending public hearings, and also the technical working group. So we made sure that we followed our committed milestones. Next slide. Okay, so this just shows you the other public consultation activities that we organized with civil society, national government agencies, and members of the technical working group. Next slide. And this slide shows you our partners in civil society in the Philippines. We have a coalition called Right to No Right Now Coalition, Makati Business Club. We solve a youth alliance for FOI and on the right side you see the different national government agencies we've also participated with. Next slide. Milestone number four is to lobby the issuance of 50 local FOI ordinances through a local FOI acceleration program. Milestone number five is to conduct 10 capacity building and consultation activities for local governments. And milestone number six is to monitor and evaluate the FOI implementation of local governments with their ordinances and their executive orders. Next slide. So far our capacity building efforts for local governments have resulted in 58 local government units scattered around our archipelagic nation who passed their FOI ordinances. So currently we have an executive order. It has the force and effect of law, but it is not law and it is executive order number two and that applies to all of our national government agencies. Local governments, since they enjoy independence and autonomy, they have to pass their own local legislation. And this slide shows you that we have 58 scattered around our country. Next slide. This is just a enumeration of our local governments. It ranges anywhere between provinces, which is our biggest local government to cities, which includes highly urbanized cities and municipalities. Next slide. We've conducted FOI conferences for local governments because of the pandemic. We've had to shift this from in person to online conferences. Next slide. Other capacity building consultation activities for local governments includes FOI localization workshops, FOI program orientation, online executive coaching sessions, and Barangay FOI, which is our smallest political unit consisting of a few hundred citizens. And so we really go down to the grassroots to make sure that access to information is cascaded down to the people. Next slide. Milestone number seven, and I am wrapping up my presentation, is our adjustment for COVID-19 response and recovery efforts. And Milestone number seven is to facilitate proactive disclosure of all COVID-19 related information from national government agencies per cluster. We detected that a lot of information being cascaded down, fake news or rumors, and we thought that FOI can be used in order for us to straighten things out with the information as regards to government assistance insofar as COVID-19 is concerned. Next slide. And so we created a COVID-19 FOI dashboard on our FOI platform, where citizens are able to access the latest news and updates and government information about our response, like grants and financial assistance. Next slide. We've also posted all policy, policy papers we call interagency task force resolutions, which inform the public of the alert levels as well as the classifications and actions needed for them. Next slide. In terms of gender mainstreaming and inclusion indicators, next slide, we have done the following. We've organized online webinars with women in the LGBTQIA plus sector back in March. Next slide. We've also organized Open Government Week in May, also discussing women and LGBTQIA access to information issues. Next slide. And most recently, we've held another webinar for other vulnerable sectors, particularly our indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities and the senior citizens or adults. What we do here in our webinars is we try to bridge these sectors with the government agencies that possess very important information for them. Next slide. Okay. Next slide, please. We also have held training for civil society organizations down in the grassroots back in February. Next slide. And also a bridging series with our CSOs. For this particular CSO, which is called FILSA, we bridge them with agencies such as our disaster risk reduction agencies and our climate change agencies because they were interested in that, as well as our housing agencies. Next slide. And finally, other transparency and participatory activities conducted in the reporting period, we continuously onboard agencies on our portal. We've created and we've actually revised our portal. You can check us out at foi.gov.ph. We are still aggressive with our capacity building. We have shifted from in-person to online and hopefully because of the lowering of our alert levels, we will be going back to in-person in the following weeks to come. And we participated in international events such as this one. Next slide. These slides just show you the different transparency efforts that also have commitments in our Open Government National Action Plan. We have Project Dime, which is a platform for monitoring infrastructure projects. This is with the Department of Budget and Management. Next slide. We also have a similar application called DevLive, which is another citizens monitoring tool for small-scale infrastructure projects. Next slide. We have the Government Procurement Policy Board Technical Support Office website to monitor procurement of COVID-19 response equipment such as PPEs, face masks, face shields, alcohol, and other paraphernalia. Next slide. We continuously upload data sets on our Open Data website, data.gov.ph. Next slide. And of course we have our FOI portal, foi.gov.ph. Next slide. Those are our activities. Next slide. In support for our commitment in the Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, and I hope that has been educational and informative to our participants here in this virtual forum. Thank you very much. May June, back to you. Thank you, Chris. Thank you for introducing us, the efforts in Philippines of implementing Open Government Partnership. So now please, Wicheng, can you put all the panelists on stage? Thank you. Okay, so you can see the slide or any questions here. And let me speak to the audience. Please, if you have any questions, please post them on Slido. You can find a link in the YouTube chat room. Okay, so maybe we should start from the first few questions that people push up. Let's see. So the first question from Anamist. When we build systems for civic inclusion, how do we ensure that all get included? How can Open Government make measures tackle inequality? Sorry. Okay, sorry. I think just a lot of people push like just in that moment. So let me change my first questions. The first question would be the one with four likes. Okay, so looking forward, what does Open Government mean in the post-pandemic new normal? What can we learn from the pandemic and take forward? I think these are questions for all of our speakers and we want to go first. Should we go by maybe the order of the speak? Maybe, Audrey, do we want to go first? Okay, I'll be very brief. So the lesson we learned from countering the pandemic here is that people put trust on the data collection points with known privacy and cybersecurity parameters that exist well before the pandemic. So during the pandemic, it is not the time to introduce new data collection apparatuses, but rather we need to maximize the appropriate use of what existed like SMS, QR code, national healthcare before the pandemic. And now we're in post-pandemic or at least post-pandemic. That means that in order to prepare for the next SARS 3.0 or some other Greek letters, we need to invest now in more digital public infrastructures of trust because during the pandemic, that's not the time to make such investments. Maria, do you have something to talk about? Yes, thank you very much and I'll be brief too. I think I want to say three things. The first is sort of OGP put together a big campaign during 2020 and 2021, which is interesting how they named it because they called it recovery open response, meaning that the answer to anything that happens to us is openness. And I really believe in that. So that's the way forward. And also Mr. Tang was saying it earlier about that's the pillar that Taiwan is putting forward as pillar number one is the transparency, how to address any of the problems that we have, also poverty, also environmental issues. So that's the first thing. The second is the back, we call it the backpack. So what we brought to the pandemic already, what were the problems that were already there that we brought in and made it worse. And that's the case of what I was saying earlier that I see one of the questions around that too, which is the gap of the implementation. So the idea, mythology of an idea and then the practice. And when there's a big gap, the people that lose more are the people that are at the basis of the pyramid, the people that have a lot of vulnerability and frustration. I don't want that of course in the world. And the third thing I think is really, really relevant, which is something that I think all of the members of this panel mentioned it and it's about trust. So how collaborative are we with trust? How do we trust our, the people that live in our society? So I guess and Minister Tang was saying it earlier too. So the best practices in the world that I know of were the practices that were collaborative, that all of the members of the society had something to add. And I think that's at the core of open government. So the dial of the space to collaborate between us because no one has the reveal from God with the answer to all of our problems. I think that the answer comes from the togetherness. That's it. Thank you. Scott. Yes, briefly. I mean, first we need to look at the origins of this pandemic, where the lack of transparency and the behavior of the PRC significantly exacerbated the speed with which the pandemic spread and the sort of disinformation that existed from the beginning with the pandemic. So I think we've come to see how important transparency is globally in addressing any pandemic. And hopefully the international community can insist on that when future pandemics might arise. I think we also see, as was reflected in my remarks, that the value of open sharing of information research is extremely important. And thirdly, you know, one of the things we've learned and Audrey can speak to this from her own experience and Taiwan's experience is that disinformation is a serious problem when it comes to addressing a pandemic. And we need to come up with strategies in advance on how to thwart such disinformation, whether it's humor over rumor, as Audrey described, or other techniques. But we certainly need to think carefully about how to address disinformation when future pandemics come forward. Over. Thank you. Nice. Can we have Chris? Thanks, Meijun. For us here in the Philippines, open government in the post pandemic, New Normal means for us to be more aggressive, to be in the digital space. During the time when we had lockdown, it was difficult to reach our citizens because we cannot physically meet them. And so we had to do all of our communication efforts online. The problem with that is there are still a lot of areas in the Philippines being an archipelago made up of 7,000 islands that do not have internet access. And so what this means is we have to be aggressive in providing free public Wi-Fi access to our citizens in order for us to provide them with the necessary information the same way that Scott and Audrey mentioned, fighting fake news and rumors. Thank you. Thank you. So you all talk about this trust, transparency, and also you found something about the challenges, including misinformation, disinformation, and also digital infrastructure, which is very related to our next question, which is, okay, Maria spoke about the difficulty of implementation and gaps between proposals and final results. What do other speakers think about challenges of implementation? So I think it's also a good opportunity for you to talk more about these challenges and how to conquer them. Should we go by the order, just like this? Audrey? Sure. Yeah. So I believe, of course, having space for the kind of infrastructure of trust for a dialogue between the citizens and the government's public servants, the quality of the dialogue will affect how we see those gaps. As I mentioned in my opening, there's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in. So having a high-quality dialogue, I believe, is a strong predictor that we can then take those gaps into improvements. Case in point, a lot of the conversation structures around our this particular national action plan was actually the result of the kind of zeroes, right, open government national report from the civil society co-author, I believe, Meijin was one of the co-authors, and that brought the space on which the civil society engagement can help to set an agenda. But this time, as compared to four or five years ago, we believe that the IRM recommendations will be our strongest booster in our this round of NAP, the first real round of NAP, not only on content related, like how to make more ambitious commitments, but also process related recommendations so we can build such spaces for stronger collaboration with civil society. And next we have Maria. If you want to add something to your comments or you want to pass. Okay, then Scott. Yes, no question that the challenge of implementation when it comes to open government or anything else for that matter that involves government is significant. I do think establishing clear metrics from the get go is very important so that both the implementers and the wider public can measure progress on implementation and then having accountability tools or mechanisms built into the implementation program is critical. Again, so that civil society and other interested parties have the clear opportunity to say to government, gee, you are not living up to your commitments in implementing what it is you promise to do. Thank you. And Chris. Yeah, May Chun, in so far as FOI implementation is concerned under our commitment under the National Action Plan, we have a lot of challenges in implementation. It's one thing for us to be able to promise an open government partnership that we will have an FOI and as long as it's under our control, we can do that, but there are things outside of our control. You know, there are people out there are legislators who are against access to information. So it's very difficult for us to implement the commitment if there are other people who do not share the same sentiments. So yes, we do have our challenges here. Thank you. Thank you for all of you that mentioned about the challenge from both within your domestic situations and also maybe from the global perspective of the challenges. And I like how our question is going because the next is asking, okay, how the OGP as an alliance can help to, sorry, let me start from the very beginning. So every country now faces such different challenges. How can groups like OGP promote best practices for such different contexts? Can countries learn from each other and how we share experiences between each other? So maybe, Audrey? Yeah, sure. Well, the OGP is a Maria question, but I would just say that Taiwan, of course, learned ample best practices from each other, from our nearby and not so nearby, but planetary communities around open governance. The example that I chose to show in my opening keynote, the JOIN platform, it's directly adapted from Kansu and Desidim in Spain and also Beteria Kavit in Iceland. So many of those participation mechanisms didn't originate in Taiwan. The presidential hackathon has its origins in the prototype fund of Germany, not to mention Polish AI, facilitated the conversation from Seattle and so on. So already our open government work benefits tremendously from the open government practitioners in all other jurisdictions. Thank you. And I think Maria must have a lot of to say here. Yes, I want to say two things too. One thing is to learn from each other from best practices. There's thousands of initiatives that were initiated in one country and then, for example, the platform beside Madrid from the capital of Spain was implemented, I think, in 55 countries. That initial idea and it's about participatory budgeting. So there's thousands of those ideas that can be sort of taken from one country adapted to another specific context. And I think that really at the core of OGP, there's even like excels going around on specific themes or at national level or at the local level, especially at the local level where there's a lot of camaraderie around the different governments that work together because it's an inception sort of program where they have a lot of connection at the national level, not so much. But then and also civil society is also sort of the connector. We are working in the networks that you name, networks on budgeting, on open contracting, on climate, on transparency, on extractives, whatever. And so we are in the one those in us we're acting sort of like bees, connecting one idea and taking it to harvest in a way to another country. So I think that is happening. Maybe we wish it would happen more, but it's really, really happening, especially when civil society is really networked. But then I would I would sort of bring in also the other side of the same coin, which is countries. I think there's a need for governments to help other governments, so governments that are doing in some cases well, that can track the others into a sort of third world that we don't see that much, or sort of pinpoint the countries that are not respecting the values of open government. Those we have a lot. And we don't have so many countries that are willing to publicly say, yes, of course, that law that you just passed limits the freedoms and contradicts your constitution, or you can't close a specific, you know, access to public information, autonomous agency, or you can't kill journalists. So we need the more champions from governments that can sort of step out of their own happy place and maybe help the others, maybe not bilaterally, maybe through specific institutions, but bring them into sort of the values and the process that they have already signed to. And we have many of those. And yeah, just stop there. Thank you, Maria. I'm very happy to hear about that. We really have some like initiative and network is helping now. And you also point out very important issues that how government help each other. And I think this is probably the questions Scott might be help. You want to say something about this? Just very briefly, yes, every country has its own challenges. But some of those challenges are common, like the challenge of corruption. While corruption takes many forms, it's fundamentally the same thing. And so the techniques for addressing it, I think, are often very similar. You know, like the issue of beneficial ownership, exhibiting or demonstrating, making known who it is who owns certain assets. That is a fundamental principle by which one can get at corruption, whatever form it takes. So I do think, despite the differences among countries, there are some common challenges, common experiences that countries can learn from each other. Thank you. Chris, do you have anything to say about this? Yes. While I think that every country faces different challenges, a lot of countries also face similar challenges. And we really learned with our exposure in OGP, ever since we started attending the OGP in 2016, we met a lot of like-minded individuals and organizations, and we learned from them, we took their best practices, and we tried to implement them back home. The good thing about being late is that a lot of people have already committed the mistakes and corrected them. And so we did not repeat those mistakes and we actually learned and implemented them back home. So while there are many differences, there are also a lot of similarities. Thank you so much. So it's actually about time, but I think maybe we should go for the last question and then to end this panel. Is that okay for all of you? Okay. So the last questions today will be about inclusion, which I think is super important at this time for the pandemic. When we build systems for civic inclusion, how do we ensure that all get included? How can open government, make sure, sorry, how can open government measure tackle inequality and this infantile assessment? Sorry for that. Sure. Maybe. Yeah. So in Taiwan, our philosophy really is to bring technologies to where people are instead of asking people to come to the space of the technologists. And that means, for example, I introduced the SMS based QR code contact tracing method. But if people, 20% of people in Taiwan are not that easily navigating a smartphone app or any QR code scanner, so they can always text the 15 digits to 1.2.2. And even for people who don't have smartphones or any phones at all, still the pen and paper, even stamping their names into public venues, that is still available and people do innovate on that. So I think the point here is not to stop from trying to create more digital public infrastructures, but always build the community networks that can link such participation. And sometimes a phone call is all it takes calling 1.2.2, for example, a periphery number always pairs you with not a voicemail, but somebody with a lot of empathy, either in a call center from a charity that can brainstorm with you and relay the pains from the front lines and so encounter pandemic measures into our policies as short as 24 hours after someone makes the call. So I believe such connective infrastructures and also assistive technology to bring those decision making in open government infrastructure to where people are paramount. Thank you, Maria, from civil society perspective. This is a very interesting question because it's a more philosophical one and we always discuss it within our colleagues in OGP and it's one of the questions that you don't have a real answer to in the sense it's the same discussion or similar discussion to the poverty and discussion. So we never when we discuss poverty we never have poor people amongst us and that is a mistake. We do that in the open government debate about equality or about vulnerable population. We talk about including them but we never effectively do and so the debates about inclusion are not included are not with those included and so there's been a lot of efforts especially in the gender and sort of avenue with a lot of effort especially when Canada was the chair of OGP and while they were chairs they declared themselves as a feminist government you know that and they sort of impregnated this idea in OGP that has been going on since then but still there's a lot and a long way to go and especially like someone was saying earlier and we have for many years trying to make an effort to bring those populations to OGP as opposed to us doing or going to to those communities to ask instead of tell so that's my answer. Thank you Scott you have something to say. I think Audrey and Maria have laid things out nicely I would just say that once you do undertake outreach efforts it's important to see whether they're succeeding you know to collect the data on who you're actually reaching to you know verify that you have reached all the different citizens and all their diversity so I think just important to stay attuned to who's being included when you take your efforts as well as the techniques themselves. And Chris I think this is very important question for you. Yes in so far as the Philippines is concerned while we do have our online presence on foi.gov.ph We also do our outreach we do a lot of capacity building and in order for us to find out if we're doing it correctly we do have feedback mechanisms. We had feedback mechanisms on the website and also when we do our outreach we also have feedback mechanisms there. We also tie up with them to do practice projects wherein they actually ask for information and then they criticize us on our weaknesses and so we are able to improve on our processes. So we try to close the loop between government and the people so that's how we ensure that there is civic inclusion. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us here. I'm sorry I have to wrap up the opening panel here because it's already over time. Instead we don't have enough time for every question but I'm sure the conversation will continue in different occasions and places. All right so we now have just three minutes break before our next talk by Keith Abuz. Okay please stay online and we'll come back very soon. And thank you for our great panels. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Thank you. Live long and prosper. Thank you very much.