 Oh, wow. I wasn't aware there were computers 100 years ago. Must be Ada Loveless. It's easy to save money, by the way, doing open source. Easier than earning money. That's right. You can essentially sell fire insurances. I think I lost you, but I don't know whether it's your side or not, because I'm having a pretty good ping. Is this something that fixes itself? Okay, great. I was saying that the ping looks good on this side. Anyway, it may be just the weather. Yes. Just five hours ahead, I'm sure. Not that far in the future. Not far future. So just a couple of things. So while, of course, I'm DigitalMinister.tw, I'm also still a hacktivist. I'm kind of starting new ventures, too, working with, say, Vitalik Buterin and Glenn Wilde, Daniel Allen, and friends in a New York international NGO, the social innovation organization called Radica Exchange. I'm still on the board of the Council of Democracy Foundation in Amsterdam, which started from the 15M Occupy Movement in Spain and many other things. And so I'm a slushie. So DigitalMinister.tw is just one of my titles. But that being said, I do believe that the main contribution I bring to the table, what drove me, if you will, is that when we occupied the parliament in Taiwan in 2014, there was the first massive demonstration. That's not just a protest, but also a demo, in the sense of a demo scene, right? A demo. A demo that shows, with half a million people on the street, many more online, people can intelligently have a conversation with a collective intelligence, or ACI, with listening skills, tools. People who have never been to an internet engineering task force meeting can nevertheless, if well-facilitated, hum into rough consensus on important issues such as the trade deal with Beijing being deliberated on the street at sign. After three weeks of occupying, we eventually agree on a set of demands and which got accepted by the head of the parliament. And so people cannot un-seem that scene. They cannot un-participate from that feeling that actually some sort of participatory democracy is not just possible, it's also fun. And so the value that I bring to the table is mainly to introduce the career public service who are very much into this, because they understand this reduced the risk. If the agenda is set by the whole population, there's almost zero risk for the career public service to implement the will and the mandate of the people. But they were afraid that it would be very time consuming. They were afraid that they'll be sidelined. They were afraid that it become populist and exclusionary. They were afraid that it will lead to polarized communities and so on. And we do have that in open source, too. We had all of that, too. In open source, we had religious wars, right? Flame wars. And we also have some experience in how to merge after the fork. A lot of open source philosophy is just on how to merge after a fork. And that is the value that we bring to the table as a young reverse mentor freshly retired from the business sector into the public sector and as a kind of part-time consultant. And nowadays, of course, I'm ostensibly working full-time, but while in my copious free time also mentoring some not-for-profit startups. Yeah, I went in saying that I'm a public servant to the public service. I'm here to A, save you time. B, reduce your risk. And C, increase trustworthiness. And we can't do everything like all three of them at the same time. But I agree and I promise that I will not increase the risk or waste people's time or reduce people's trust at the benefit of some other people's time or risk or trust. And so these are Pareto improvements. That's the technical term. I make improvements on one of the three axes, but never at the expense of the other two axes. And also the secondment, that is to say public servants that volunteer to work with me but not for me because I give no order and take no order. They understand they have to come up with the ideas, but I will absorb the risk. And so that sort of collaboration, a horizontal team, if you will, is quite difficult to imagine unless you've actually participated in it. So most of my first work, aside from recompiling the Linux kernel so we can run Sandstorm and things like that, was just making sure that a personnel, if they refer to me as minister, I simply pretended I didn't hear it until they referred to me as AU or Audrey. And then we started building the culture kind of from the kernel of just maybe 20 people in the office, but then gradually into a horizontal network of more than 100 participation offices and interns and things like that. So it grew kind of organically and gradually, but I never forced any ministry to associate them with me. So as you mentioned, the Ministry of Defense never sent anyone to my office. I still know nothing about the military. That's exactly right, yes. And the Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn't send anyone for the first year, but on the second year they decided to develop their Twitter game and turns out that there are parts in diplomacy called public diplomacy that really benefits from the open innovation model. So they started sending people to my office. Yes. Well, I would say it's the norm actually in the judiciary branch and it's probably the same for you too. I mean the legal opinions, the regulation text themselves, they are not subject to copyright because if it would, only very wealthy people have access to justice. And then the proceedings, unless it's for reasons that pertains to privacy or trade secret, usually the court proceedings are in the public domain as well. So I would say the entire judiciary branch all the way to the constitutional courts work on the open innovation model that delivers the legitimacy because of the radical transparency. And in Taiwan, our parliament wasn't that transparent, but after it gets occupied it becomes really transparent really quickly with live streaming and all. And so in a sense this is the executive branch, the administration catching up to the legislation and judiciary branches when it comes to the radical transparency. When framed this way, people because in Taiwan, we only have our first presidential election in 1996, which is after the war web, that means that in people's mind there's no hundreds of years of Republican or Democratic tradition. From the very beginning it's intertwined with the web. So people think, yeah, sure, why don't we reconfigure our constitution as our kernel? Why don't we recompile it five times? That's five constitutional amendments. We're deliberating one right now. And so everything is, you can change it like the software design or integrated circuit semiconductor design, which of course the M1 chip did pretty well, I guess with the TSMC. And so the constitution and the regulations around it are seen as technology, democracy is seen as a technology. And I think this is important because for many people if the like 200 years or more of Republican or Democratic tradition is already like in the ancestors, then it tends to fossilize. But in Taiwan, this is always in our lifetime as to remember the martial law. And so it means that it is maximally hackable, if you will. That's right. Yeah, as a, of course, pioneer or as research. But on the other hand, 23 million people isn't really a small country. It's actually quite large population-wise. And so I think we have the best of both worlds. We have a kind of easy to travel landscape. The western part of Taiwan, especially from the northmost to the southmost is just barely 90 minutes by high speed rails. So people can experience each other's realities quite easily. But then we have 23 million people. So any model that worked here is much more likely to scale to other jurisdictions as compared to maybe just a 2 million people jurisdiction. And so I think the kind of R&D advantage of Taiwan lies both in the shared reality but also in the larger population. But they all have broadband. If they don't have broadband anywhere on the top of Taiwan or on the small islands as we refer to, if they don't have timid bits per second both ways at just 16 euros per month, that's my fault personally. Yeah, it's broadband as human rights. Yeah, I was born in martial law, as I mentioned. And so we understand how it's like. People were encouraged even in my parents' and grandparents' time to even snitch on each other. It's a very bad state of surveillance called the white terror. And I think it extends for like four decades or something. So the world's longest martial law period. And so we understood how bad it was. And so we don't want to go back there. And that is why the Civicus Monet human rights group rated Taiwan really as the only place in the whole Asia of the only jurisdiction that scores completely open when it comes to the rights of assembly, right of speech and right of press and so on. And this is important because this is built upon the kind of negative liberty like freedom from state surveillance, freedom from nowadays multi-national corporate surveillance and things like that. So I would say that both the positive and negative liberties are highly valued. And whenever people want to start an argument based on the kind of instrumental value of convenience or things like that, is a non-starter. People would just say, the counterargument would be, do you want to go back to white terror? And then people are like, OK, of course not. So that's how we, for example, fought off the pandemic with the heuristic saying, the state must never collect any data that we were not already collecting before the pandemic. So not using the pandemic as a data collection excuse. And that's how we fought the infodamic without resorting to things like without due respect, less DG. So we didn't take anything down for the infodamic so on and so forth. For people around 40 years old or older, yes. The younger generation doesn't remember martial law anymore. Yeah, definitely. And actually we just had a negotiation with Facebook on the topic of advertisement during election. And last year, I think Taiwan is the first jurisdiction that they really published the advertisement library in real time as structure open data for independent analysis so that dark patterns will be uncovered in real time actually and also they ban the foreign sponsored advertisements during our election season as well. So all the advertisement pertaining to political or social issues need to be domestic in nature just like our campaign finance law. And the remarkable thing is that we did that with no jurisdiction over Facebook at all and we didn't change or pass any acts related to that. We just basically said our campaign donation expenditure or even accounting process is to be made immediately open like open data and because of that it creates a social norm, a social expectation and those advertisements on Facebook back in 2018, mayoral election, these kind of become a bypass because we analyzed the data in 2018 and very few, if any, candidates filed their social media campaigns as campaign donation or expenditure. So obviously it's a way for foreign interference to enter without any auditing or accountability. And so we basically said to Facebook, look, there's two choices. You can either publish the same as we do for the campaign finance and treat it as campaign finance or even if we have no jurisdiction over you you may face social sanctions and there are legitimate alternatives such as the PTT which is the social sector maintained by national talent university students alternative to the Facebook and so on. There's also D card and many others and because of that Facebook eventually shifted their mind and then they started doing advertisement transparency. I used this very long example just to say that when we say people, public-private partnership we always put people and therefore the social sector first. Well, it didn't have that much influence during our presidential election so we didn't have that conversation but if it proves to be an issue in our next like national referendum or election session then of course we're going to have the same conversation. Oh yeah, definitely. That's what we occupied the parliament for. That's one of our demands. One of the consensus that we formed on the street which essentially said there is no private sector vendor. Private sector vendor coming from the PRC and if we get into 4G using those components then every now and then we'll have to do a systemic risk assessment whether there has been a de facto takeover by the party from the PRC side and a mortise that's going to be much more expensive than just going to Nokia or Ericsson or develop some of our own and so the decision was made then to exclude PRC in all the procurement not just telecoms but also anything pertaining to sensitive data or cybersecurity or national security or things like that and by 2015 I think we erased all the components from PRC so that's five years ago. Yeah, of course. In all our procurement tenders this is making sure that the PRC supply chain do not take a hold in any of our ICT facility. This of course only pertains to things in the data pipeline so I don't know about, for example, the medical masks. I mean we produce a lot of medical masks locally but we're not banning PRC medical masks. They're still quite helpful. Like 5G and Tina or entire Raspberry Pi. I've seen this video. It's getting easier nowadays though and I think nowadays the Taiwanese companies even when they manufacture some of their parts in the PRC they aim to do so for primarily PRC audience PRC customer, more and more customers elsewhere in the world are asking for a different supply chain configuration and this trend has been accelerated during the COVID and during the few months where the PRC was not at capacity so yeah, I think this trend is increasing. We see more and more manufacturers essentially maintaining two supply chains. That's exactly right. Yes. Oh yeah, yes. Yeah, one is primarily for their productions that's ultimately targeting the PRC market and the other one that's for the non-PRC market. Well, at this moment the Taiwanese public service is free to use whatever word processing software as long as it produces open document, period. And so I'm sure Office 365 also produces open document. That's my position. So in essence what we're saying is that we want to do everything to ensure the freedom from vendor lock-in, especially in education sectors where if the vendor lock-in sets in during people's like digital competence curricula then essentially it creates a generation of people beholden like locked in to particular vendors and we can't have that. And this is not just about Microsoft, it's also about pretty much every other proprietary software vendor. Now I don't have anything against PowerPoint but I will simply say that if we lock people into particular features of PowerPoint that can't be expressed in liberal office then we are in real trouble because then it builds a kind of vicious cycle. Yeah, as I mentioned the literally first technical thing I did as digital minister four years ago was to recompile the Linux kernel in the government cloud so that I can run Sandstorm. And later on I would get the best and brightest which would went on to win the second place in DevCon the next year in DevCore in Taiwan to do a thorough penetration testing of the Sandstorm system which they file three CVEs. And after that we're pretty sure that this is secure because it's a security product. It's safely sandboxing pretty much all the productivity software the spreadsheet part, the EtherCalc I personally maintain and into the office workspace. So Sandstorm while it's not like centrally developed nevertheless pieces together sufficient amount of new innovations like the HackMD which is also a Taiwanese team and then we just repackage it into code EMD within the Sandstorm system. So it's a cloud service of course you want to collaboratively edit markdown or reach text it has to be like cloud hosted but it doesn't mean that it's just service as a software substitute if anyone can fork or clone any of the greens in Sandstorm and modify the code and even publish their own apps it's called citizen developer except now it's more like public servant developer and they can develop their own applications knowing that the single sign on the cybersecurity are all taken care of and so one of the most trendy apps in Sandstorm here in Taiwan public sector is a simple form to order lunch boxes together which we use practically every week and anyway we have this photo of all the lunch places around the cabinet office but anyway I digress so the point is that one does not have to give up control just to go to cloud enable it just means that one needs to work more with white hat hackers with penetration testers yeah I know and that's something that we kind of overlooked during the fork from free software movement to the open source movement because we were kind of worried about the market adoption of freedom one and two and three which is the freedom to fork collectively but really freedom zero which is the freedom to use it for any purpose that is actually something that we're now defending much more nowadays in the time of software and service or service instead of software but preferably service but also software that's right that's right yeah sure so we're now entering the second phase of the national digital strategy and which is called DIGI digitization innovation governance and inclusion and I would say that the digitization the first pillar and all that we're pretty much there there's of course still room for improvement but we're pretty much there the innovation with the enabling like sandbox acts presidential hackathon and things like that there's a pretty good room for growth but again according to the world economic forum time has been for the past couple years one of the four super innovators in the world so we're doing okay so the focus for the next couple years is going to be on governance and also inclusion because we do not want AI to become authoritarian intelligence we're wanting to become assistive intelligence and for that all the 20 different national languages need to be on equal footing instead of just forcing people to speak perfect English or perfect Mandarin right so that's the inclusion part the governance part we are seeking and almost getting GDPR adequacy I think the only missing piece in the puzzle was the dedicated independent data protection authority we do have data protection authority but not a single independent national one we were more like Japan in that regard so we're going to I think within a month or so stand of a kind of foundational acts for a independent DPA and we look forward to implement not just GDPR but also parts of the currently being deliberated the EU Data Governance Act specifically about data collisions and collaboratives that is the part that we're also very interested in California too although it's not yet a country okay sure yeah I think disruptive innovations to me is best when it disrupts the technological sector rather than disrupts the society because things that are disrupted to the society usually have a large impact but negative with a minus sign to it while the truly disruptive but to the technology sector but beneficial to the society innovations such as for example just today right Ethereum switched from this old carbon dioxide burning proof of work to proof of stake for the mainline Ethereum 2.0 it's really good but it's disruptive I guess mostly to the Ethereum developers but it is just an environmental friendly gesture to everybody else actually the term open source itself was such a disruptive innovation by the benefit of the community so in that vein I would suggest that in the next few years we'll probably arrive to the point where the co-presence of realities can enable the liberation at scale even without people taking high speed rails to enjoy each other's company that is to say face to face like meeting and flying past it we'll enable us to talk not just about the episteme not just about the knowledge as we are doing now but also about the affect the feelings the ambience and things like that which at this point is unable to transmit over two-dimensional glasses such as this very one I mean we can project some gestalt to it but it doesn't really work and so some sort of co-presence technology I think would be quite inclusive in addition to disruptive that's right that's right okay definitely definitely we'll I mean I have XR space.io classes with me it's just in the next room and it's pretty good as VR glasses go and I also try magic leap although the viewing field could be larger that's definitely the place to go the VR one it doesn't have this problem because it's essentially taking lives in and reprojecting that's what XR space is doing no no no the XR space is really lightweight I can wear it for like three or four hours and it doesn't use a controller it's purely gesture so I think it's pretty good it really redefines to me the VR experience because previously I was like you I can't do this more than one hour but with XR space which is like built in 5G really lightweight and gesture only I can do this for hours awesome sure I'm going to clap to catch up yes definitely and I'll send you a copy of my local recording and if you can send me your local recording too that would be awesome okay thank you cheers live long and prosper bye