 or as a transcript after co-editing, it's your call. Okay, perfect. That's wonderful. That's great. So look, what I wanted to do was just very briefly talk about just about your own motivation for going into government and really about the work that you've been doing to improve participation there and then post the pandemic, how that's helped and what that means. Okay. Great. So I guess the first question is what motivated you? What made you make the switch to move into government? Well, I'm working with the government. I'm not working for the government. So I'm at kind of this Lagrange point between the social movement on one side and the government on the other. And the movement, so to speak, has a certain gravity and the government also. And I'm on this kind of balancing point just to make sure that I take all the sides and make sure that the people communicate and listen to each other more effectively. So I guess it's mostly fun that motivates me because it is joyful to me to get people who previously not on speaking terms to be able to see each other side of things. And can you tell me a little bit about the work you've been doing to improve transparency and to improve participation? That's right. So in various ways, we make sure that people, because in Taiwan, we're broadband as a human rights. So anywhere in Taiwan, you have 10 megabits per second, not just download, but also upload is of no marginal cost. Like every month is just a flat rate of 16 US dollars. And in that sense, people don't have to rely only on this media literacy idea where people listen just to radio television, but anybody can just start broadcasting their thoughts. And so this is what we call listening at scale, meaning that we tour around Taiwan, we listen to the people in their natural habitat and do ethnographic or just hanging out with people. So I tour around Taiwan, participate in those town halls, and I use digital means, for example, to broadcast with virtual reality or with a high definition video to make sure that people in the capital city and Taipei as well as in other municipalities join the people in the more rural or indigenous or remote areas to meet kind of face to face and talk about their problems in a very transparent manner. And I tour around every other week or so. And on Wednesday, I'm in the social innovation lab and the lab is an open space where anybody can drop by and talk to me for 14 or 40 minutes if they're pre-booked it. And it's a very interesting place, very creative. And I was just looking at a photo where the Prague mayor is in the clip at the pirates. He just visits Taiwan. He's actually in Taiwan now. I'm going to have lunch with him today. And so as you can see, it's a very creative place. They all just climbed on this blocks inside. So basically it's a place that prompts creative thinking and because everything is on the record. So people who come here to lobby me don't make arguments based on selfish arguments. They have to make argument based on the global goals, the sustainable goals that you see the mayor was holding. And the idea was that people can just add to this kind of puzzle to complete each other. It makes no sense to argue from a purely selfish viewpoint because you know that a lobby in the transcript will be made online. And there's also e-petition where 5,000 people in the e-signature can get the ministry of responses and we often meet with petitioners. And this is particularly useful for people who are around 15 or 16 years old who are not of age to vote but they can start movements. For example, to ban plastic straws and things like that kind of Friday for future Taiwan style. So instead of go to the street they would go to the internet, start a petition and work with the circular economy people to make sure that even for our national identity drink the bubble tea. We use carbon neutral or even carbon capturing materials for circular design for those straws and things like that. There's many more design like presidential hackathon where the president gives five awards every year to people with ideas that change the society for the better and basically say whatever you did in the past three months it could be a app like Pokemon Go that encourage people to refill their bottles instead of using plastic bottles that are a throw away. And we say in the next 12 months the president is going to make whatever you did in the past three months a reality by focusing on it as a policy. So it's presidential power as a hackathon award just many, many more designs like that. I just cover maybe one fifths but you get an idea. That's wonderful. And so what have been some of the big wins so far? What's come out of it that has ended up as government policy? Well, a lot. I mean, we did ban gradually plastic straws and of course there's this, I guess there's also plastic product but anyway, it's the medical mask and it's thanks to the citizens initiative as civic technologist, who showed this map that shows availability of medical masks everywhere in the pharmacy. So people can rest assured that there's plenty of medical masks available near them. And so they can just go to a nearby pharmacy, swipe their national health insurance card and see on the how or who and many other people at Fingian County there's more than 140 different visualizations that the people killing before them can swipe their card. And nowadays it's nine medical masks per two weeks or 10 if they're a child and you see actually the number of decrease on the mask map. And so everybody come to trust the infrastructure because people trust the numbers from the government but actually they can verify before their eyes just by checking the numbers while they're killing its participatory accountability. So that's reached more than 95% of the Taiwanese population. So we basically develop a vaccine before they're saying biological vaccine we have this physical vaccine of course that's a big win. Yeah, that's wonderful. What have been the challenges? This is quite a radical sort of approach. Has there been pushback along the way? Well, on this record there's usually two arguments whenever a digital democracy like this is thrown out one is easier to address is about a digital gap. People would say what if some people in the more rural places they are not used to digital means of deliberation what if they don't have broadband connectivity what if they don't have tablets and things like that. And of course our solution is simple broadband is a human right you can get a tablet fresh as of the last three years from your local digital opportunity center or library and you don't have to go to our website we come to you to listen to on the town halls. And so I think the municipal and more rural like township governments eventually see it as something that's augmenting the face-to-face deliberation is not trying to replace the face-to-face relationship. So that has been one of the pushbacks. And another one is that many people will see this kind of deliberation crowdsourcing ideas and say hey doesn't it make the representatives of the lead the legislators previously in 2015 or so kind of wondering like are we trying to from the administration make the legislation of the lead because we will prove that we have the people's mandate and they come on you know how might we questions and the possible solutions. So what about the department? And so we're basically saying design thinking terms what we're doing is just exploring right discovering what people's positions and feelings are and defining what are common concerns like prioritize the agenda but actually the development and delivery that is still the parliament's preview because they're in charge of allocating the actual budget and making sure that the laws and regulations work harmoniously with one another. So in a sense we're just preparing this listening as scale away in a way to augment the legislators work. And so that plus the referendum laws and plus the four different major parties in our parliament now all signed up. It's a very recent thing like last month's on the open government partnerships, open parliament ideas this manifesto. They're also now working on their national action plans open government. So after four years or so I think the parliamentarians no longer see this crowdsourced agenda as a threat to their work but rather as a kind of assistance augmentation of their work, but it wasn't the case in 2014. Are there any other countries in the world that have similar approaches that you know of to collaborate with any other countries? Of course, of course we work very closely with many other countries because I see myself as just a kind of working with Taiwan but I'm also on the board of international NGOs that works on this. I'm on the advisory board of Gov Lab in New York and also right here exchange as well. The Council of Democracy Foundation in Amsterdam but they originated in Madrid and also the Digital Future Society in Barcelona. And also we have a colleague that also works in dark matter labs and working closely with St. Nesta in the UK, our E-Petition System I just described was a blatant copy of the better the Kavik from Iceland our AI based listening skill device called Polis is from Seattle, I can go on but this is international movement. Okay, that's great. And what's next? Yeah, so what's next? I think two things, right? My main focus is on getting the more disenfranchised people and I use people very broadly, a say in democracy. So I think this year we're pushing to lower the kind of age of consent in order to I guess vote in referendum and things like that. In Taiwan it used to be 20 years old where you can vote and it's within the constitution but we're now lowering everything to 18 but even before 18 we're working on the ways that are maximally inclusive. So people as I mentioned, 13 years old, 12 years old and so on have plenty of ways to participate and also people who are not born yet, right? Future generations. How do we make sure that they also have a say of course by representing their stakes just like trees and forests and rivers and mountains and so on. They didn't used to have a say so it's quite possible that in a traditional represented democracy people will work for the benefit of the current generation to the detriment of future generations and so we're exploring ways like through virtual and augmented reality like speaking to trees, having trees vote, well maybe not that quickly but anyway to include a more ecological ways in this conversation so that's why. And the other is that we are making sure that in Taiwan we're building a kind of national identity I guess around participatory democracy and that has a diplomatic repercussion as well because we're basically saying you don't have to sacrifice human right and democracy in order to counter coronavirus or work on public health because we counter coronavirus with no lockdowns and actually the democracy deepened because of the rapid iteration cycle. Similarly we countered this information with no takedowns. You don't have to do a takedown which is to hire some professional comedians and do a humor over a rumor making sure that our clarifications are hilarious and people share it more than the conspiracy theories and these playbacks basically we share for example the co-fact project, Round of Zero that works on this end to an encrypted line channel like WhatsApp that enabled this humor over a rumor possibility and is now also running for a year now in Thailand in their own line community we also share the mask map with Korea people in Korea I think many of them are just 12 years or 14 years old work on the same kind of mass availability map we're also with Japan and so on so in a sense we're solving not only our local problems like our presidential hackathon to solve like water leakage or shortage problems but we also document this index and with sustainable human goals and share it say the Wellington Water Company and so on so this also has a diplomatic angle in addition to ecological angle. And you touched on this but I guess my final question was really going to be around after the pandemic around the world people have been willing to trade in freedom for public safety and Taiwan hasn't had a lockdown but many other countries have I mean how do we use these technologies to make sure that this incursion into people's freedom doesn't become permanent? As you said how can people use sort of the keyboard rather than the street to safeguard our rights? Well we also use 5G so not necessarily cables but anyway so the 5G phone right there is at times a more actually faster and lower latency than cables by the grace. So I think there's two things going on one is that just like in Taiwan we say no to lockdown not because we're particularly averse to lockdowns intrinsically but because we had lockdowns in 2003 during SARS 1.0 and so during SARS 1.0 we had to unexpectedly surprisingly lockdown an entire hospital with no determination point and so it was very traumatic for everybody over 30 years old 37 people died directly 73 people died indirectly because of SARS 1.0 and because of that the constitutional court charged the legislature to develop new laws and regulations and so on because they say this locking down is just barely thinly constitutional it's almost unconstitutional and so we need to find better ways that's why we developed the central epidemic command center which then developed the digital fans and things like that all to avoid lockdowns so I think it's important for the society post COVID to have a conversation that we had in 2004 and 2005 to make sure that when SARS 3.0 comes again because it very much is a possibility right when SARS 3.0 comes again then people can rest assured that there is like already yearly drills that is already people's understanding around proper mask use the good ideas for example do wear a mask to protect yourself from your own wash hands that links mask use with soap use is just common knowledge for people and so on so I think the societal inoculation societal mobilization around better alternatives need to be a societal white conversation as we did right after SARS and we can help that is one thing and the other thing is that because I don't think people will go back to purely face-to-face meetings even after COVID because people now start to see that video conferencing really is a preferable alternative in many cases right and so I think devices such as this which is also a 5G device which doubles as a virtual reality device it doesn't have a controller I can wear it for hours I can just control it with my hand gestures so it's very natural for everyone to use and it has this camera that if I just go around and scan my room it creates a digital twin of my room so I can invite other people in my room and so I think the augmented and virtual reality and co-presence that's enabled by 5G technologies is going to take us more into the mood of being really in the same living room as other people but in very different jurisdictions and times and so on so that we do not forget the solidarity that the entire globe is working on a common issue together and we can use this then to work on more structural problem that affects the entire globe such as climate change of course disinformation I mean other things Wonderful okay well look thank you so much I know we've run just a little bit over time so I'll let you get on with your busy day but I really appreciate it Okay so you're okay with us just publishing this to YouTube? Yes yeah no that's fine and I'll write this up and share it with you as well Okay thank you Wonderful okay Thank you Thank you, thank you Live long and prosper Bye Jim Bye