 I'm very inspired by what you're doing with the civic tech movement here in Taiwan. I'm curious how you personally got involved in what drove you to do the civic tech? Yeah, to the civic tech made out of everything else. What is your why? What is unique about Taiwan culture that you think allows for civic tech to thrive? Okay. How long have you been staying in Taiwan? My parents are Taiwanese, but I grew up and I'm involved in the civic tech movement in the US. Okay. Cool. So I spent many years in DC. Ah, okay. That's good. But I also spent a lot of time in California. Okay. Both of us. Okay. And invite extras. Right. I think Taiwan, personally speaking, I remember the martial law as a very young kid. So I'm always interested because both of my parents are journalists in how tech can enable new forms of public communication that's based on listening and just speaking at scale. And because our first presidential election, which is in 1996, is already after the Y-Web. So I also participated a little bit in the initial campaigning. The candidate I supported didn't win, by the way, in 1996. But already people start thinking democracy is a form of technology because we've already have a taste of how, you know, multi-to-multi listening skill could work. So we designed into a lot of our constitutional amendments after the democratization, the sort of listening skill that's enabled by the Y-Web movement. And so personally I got involved in the free software movement later on, open source movement and so on around the turn of century. And then because my day job is just about social interaction design about making things like Slack nowadays. So during the offline movement in 2014, we applied whatever we learned in the past few years with the Silicon Valley, like enterprise software companies into the occupier communication network to pretty good results. So people in town saw that demonstration doesn't need to be protest, it could be a demo. It could show that listening skill actually works even for national level issues that originally like train negotiation should be the stuff that experts, the stressors should be really high, but with good design and everybody can actually get to it much like how in Taiwan without lockdown, we make sure that people understood the epidemiological early informed measures and so on and people can actually co-design such measures to reduce the basic transmission numbers and these were not, you know, within the confines of the central government. So if anyone can help. That's great. What can I do? So I, in the US, I was part of a program, a sole service president of the foundation, of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation, and I would love to bring technologies into Taiwan government. My Taiwanese identity is a huge part of me, and I would love to see, you know, government here use. Do you have a dual nationality? Ah, okay. So you also have a passport here? Yes. So, well, if you are an assistant here, I mean, it's up to you how many months a year are you going to commit to be based in Taiwan and how many months of the year are you going to be teleworking? Do you already know that? Yeah. Are you there? COVID is very... COVID is very strange, isn't it? Yeah. I think a couple of things come to my mind. One is that there's the Presidential Hackathon, which we're going to launch the next month is an annual plan, right? The President gives an award. It's a little bit like the 10 times movement in the, I think, 18F, as well as, right? So the idea, but instead of just... 10X, yeah. Yeah, right. So 10X, instead of just committing budget, which is essentially what 10X does, this is committing presidential power. So executive branch power has a hackathon prize. So every year we give out five trophies, and for each winner we commit the trophies in micro-projectory, but turn it on, it projects the President committing to you. Whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. Wow, that's amazing. Right. So, I mean, maybe you can consider as a mentor or as a participant, why not, because you're a citizen, why not? Yeah. You've been one of the Presidential Hackathon efforts here. And it allows anyone to participate. Exactly. That's really great. 10X only allows your government employees. Right. So the Presidential Hackathon winners, in each team, there has to be at least one public sector person. Yeah. But also, we say it needs to be tri-sectoral. So at least one person from the social sector, and at least one person from the economic sector. So if the team competition wasn't like that in the beginning, if through a new voting method called quadratic voting, every year we choose 20 teams or so, and we incubate them to be properly tri-sectoral. Wow, that's amazing. So recently in the UK, I helped an amount of advisory board program through number 10 that brings entrepreneurs into government. I'm curious if there is a good back and forth between technologists, you know, Taiwan's technology talent, and working in government, and what the perception is, because I know in the US, you know, many people choose like Silicon Valley, hard to leave jobs, and you know, we try to build this integrity of civic culture of giving back and also making an impact. A lot of people are drawn to the mission. So I've always been curious because I haven't been involved in Taiwan government. Oh, okay. Well, we're just launching literally yesterday, the fifth yearly Kofo internship in my office. Wow, that's great. Right. So we get hundreds and hundreds of applications, and we choose say 30 or so every summer to work on service design, to look at the pinpoints of the digital services and make, you know, the whole design process. You probably already are familiar with these, right? So, yeah, I would say it's very enthusiastic. The fact that we've been running for five years and each year with more enthusiasm from the young people, usually around graduate level, I think that's really heartwarming. And for professionals, of course, we're now planning that in the upcoming digital ministry, the competent authority for digital, they're probably called MoDA, Ministry of Digital Affairs, but we don't know yet. Next year around we'll probably have up to 100 people from non-public service backgrounds, but writing that into the foundational act that says, you know, these people can actually become part of the public service within the MoDA. Wow, that's really great. So in the U.S., I worked on election security under President Trump, and I started under Obama. But I was under, you know, very interesting times where the authority of elections ground zero of the infodemic. Of the infodemic, yes. So I spent a lot of time on online disinformation and border influence operation, but I'm curious about here in Taiwan, you know, there's obviously a lot of controversy with China, with other issues. How do you maintain integrity in election security infrastructure when it comes to disinformation? Very simple. Our tallying process is paper-based, 100%. And you don't have states. And all the different parties have their own tallying app. And we allow observers to take films. And so like for each count, like literally the various different parties just count in tandem in real time. So each person, while they probably don't trust the YouTubers on the other parties, they probably trust the YouTubers on their parties. And by making sure that it's a fun participatory, more than three quarter of population did vote and very interested in looking at the tallying results. And if the apps in various different parties do agree with one another, there's simply no room for rumor to grow. And so it's not like we didn't have rumors such as, you know, the CIA, always the CIA, printing invisible inks, ballot papers. So no matter if we vote, your ink will fade and President Tsai's ink will appear and so on. So not unlike what you have saw. But these do not spread. These do not have a higher value because if there's alleged controversy, very quickly the YouTuber responsible for filming that particular tallying and in all different camps do publish the full video of what was actually happening. And actually they're counting the members of parliament that votes not, the presidential votes, and there's no invisible ink. So the fact that they counted that the fourth candidate, while there's only three presidential candidates, it was because it was for the MPs and so on. And so it's like a counter-spawn network, right? People flag incoming email and spam for a spam house to check. So here people flag like online, which is Android and crypto channel, as disinformation and for, say, the tile effect checker, Michael Penn or the Gulf Zero network cofax and so on to cross check. And it's a real ecosystem. So many people in store, or not really in store, invite the chatbot into their chat rooms such as Trend Micro bot and as an anti-scam, anti-virus store, which can also scan incoming images. So counter disinformation is just one of its many functions, right? And it's also counter-fishing among other things. And who's called, which is a pretty popular startup, also have their own, like Mei Yu Yi and so on. So there's an ecosystem of real-time fact-checking going on and it's crowdsourced and therefore gaining its legitimacy by the fact that people of all different political parties do participate in this kind of cross-checking in their lives. No, that's great. I'm currently working in building a better decentralized one. Oh. And I'm curious about your thoughts about government intervention and the decentralized web movement of open source developers that are currently working on that. I'm currently working on a project called Filecoin that's built on IPFS. I love that, actually. Oh, great. So I'm just in general very curious because this is a big debate. So what role are you playing in the Filecoin? Oh, I run the foundation. You run the foundation? Yeah. Oh, wow. And you're in Taiwan? That's great. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, I think the Civic Tech, GovTech binary distinction is a drawback. It's a false binary. And in Taiwan, almost all GovTech started as Civic Tech. And we call it forking the government. So forking with the intention of merging back. So a soft fork, I guess. And that's essential because that ensures people don't just disappear when they go into the GovTech ecosystem as we see in other jurisdictions. Rather, they maintain very good connections with their Civic Tech roots. The GovTech merely adds penetration tests, saying integration, API design and things like that. That any large organization have to do anyway as part of the due diligence in incorporating open source software, but it still stays open source and we do contribute back to the Civic Tech ecosystem. I think government as an early adopter really helps a lot in legitimizing emerging Civic Tech technologies. But it should not actually take over and make a state-owned Civic Tech. Okay. So I guess in terms of the centralized web and when there's lack of centralization in certain information bodies or certain files, in the case of file flying rates in data storage, what is the role of government? Should they play hands-off? Should they try to continue to prevent bad things from happen to be guided in some way? I mean, if the ledger space, because I'm also a Slash, Digital Minister T.W. Slash board member in like seven different international NGOs. Oh, okay, great. So on my radical exchange cat, for example, whenever Vitalik and the Ethereum friends come up with quadratic votes and we use it as a presidential hackathon, when it comes up with zero-knowledge range proof, we use it in the national insurance house and things like that. So the idea is that it's not about a hands-off or hands-on, it's about the public service does not consider ourselves as confining the public space, but also we're also part of the social sector. And so when the social sector innovation, the social innovation, the technologies come up with something new, we can actually contribute to it as a social sector person, right? So for example, I help translating the counter-disinformation quite a bit, I'll say, website from the Digital Ambassador, Henry Vettia of the French Foreign Service, but I did that as a GitHub request contributor, right? Not as Digital Minister T.W. But it did get merged in and there's a traditional Chinese and Mandarin version of that website now and the translation itself is actually quite political, right? Just the fact that it's in French, English and traditional Chinese speaks volumes. And so that may be seen as a diplomatic move, but it's actually done by social sector in collaboration. And the same goes for, for example, the Tokyo Metropolitan, the Deputy Mayor, I think, worked with COVID Japan to make sure that the coronavirus strategy dashboard is done in GitHub and all it does is that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government gives it's a government website domain name. And so it subsequently gets forked into many different municipalities because kind of the Mayor of Tokyo bless this civic tech into Gabtech without taking control of it. And so we in the Gab Zero movement also help translating it. And I help translating one kanji from the language selector, which got noticed and Harusaki-san, leader of COVID Japan, tweeted and then City Councilor retweeted and then the Mayor of Tokyo retweeted it. So again, it looks like diplomatic, but it's actually just GitHub collaboration. Yeah, no, it's great. What do you think is the general digital literacy of most people here in Taiwan? We don't use that word anymore. Okay, that's great. Learning a couple years ago, we switched to the word competence. Competence. Right, so because literacy is when you're a reader or a viewer, right? Competence is when you're a producer. And because in Taiwan, broadband is a human right that's bi-directional. Anyone can start a livestream anytime. In that sense, everyone is media. And so it's media competence, not literacy. Because literacy is when there's asymmetry. There's broadcasters and receivers. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, I guess my last question for you is where do you see civic tech protect ten years from now? Ten years from now? Yeah, ten years from now. Yeah, by that time, we'll finish the sustainability long goals. All the goals. Yeah, that's right. No goals left behind. And I think civic tech, instead of people thinking that technology is mostly natural science and industrial applications, I think by that time, people will recognize that social science is also science. Open space technology is also tech. I mean, it says it's tech. Nonviolent communication is tech, right? So anything that organizes the society differently towards decarbonization and so on, these are also tech. So our association with the word tech will fundamentally change and will take a civic first association with the word tech. And only then will people see that if accountability and measurement mechanism is mature enough so that people can see all the externalities that we're making as part of the industrial application of technology, then people will make civic-minded choices kind of by default. Instead of now, it's a little bit like playing, you know, putting out fire. Are you working in this information countering space? You know what I'm talking about, right? So it's a civic by default. Yeah, no, that's great. Sorry, I actually have one last question for you. That's always been top of my mind. Sure, of course. I grew up in Silicon Valley and saw a lot of innovation happening around me and a lot of it is venture backed, right? And we're seeing a movement where there's more and more gov tech startups that are uniquely standalone. But a lot of times, most companies, enterprise companies especially have, you know, government clients as an afterthought as a person. So what are your thoughts in general for uniquely civic tech or gov tech related startups thriving in this future of what you just described? Yeah, I think right now the U.S. is having a conversation that we had in 2016 about the word infrastructure. Right, where we move from incentives to equity, right? Yeah, exactly. And in 2016, we convinced the National Budgeting Office that even though something that's not concrete like literally not made out of concrete is still infrastructure. If it is part of the commons, if it's the digital equivalent of a national museum like the digitalization, the like photogrammetry and videogrammetry of all the heritage sites and that's national museum, but on the digital space, right? The kind of deliberative space we just talked about that qualifies as the digital equivalent of a town hall. And this metaphor can be used in many ways, right? The National Park could also be digitalized and so on. So this digital public infrastructure we argue are worth the special infrastructure bills, infrastructure money, even though it could not be classified as a traditional infrastructure investment because it's not made out of concrete. And we eventually got what we wanted. So in our forward-looking infrastructure plan, the digital chapter is shaped very differently and doesn't have to be a concrete investment, but still we can use public money to say broadband is a human right, to do all sort of things that make sure that the access to health, access to education, to telecommunication and demographic participation actually is higher in rural places than in urban places, like flipping the construction priorities around and so on. And that's all because it qualifies as infrastructure. And so I think when I talk about civic first, I have in mind that those ventures should be backed by a structure more like funding academic research. Indeed, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit or PTT is funded by national universities and our academic network. So it's subsidized, but the state doesn't control it. It's like public radio or television. The public governing body and everybody on GitHub really because it's open source and co-governs controls PTT, but PTT doesn't have to answer to any advertisers or any shareholders, which is partly why Dr. Lee Valence's message got triaged so quickly on PTT and was lost in the noise in other and social media around the world. It's because, well, polarization may sell there, sell advertisements, but here we don't have advertisement in such public spaces and so we don't have to do the democratic collaboration in the digital equivalent of a nightclub, very loud shouting, addictive drinks, private bouncers. We actually do have a civic infrastructure. So just fund them exactly the same way we fund local parks and national parks would be my suggestion. Oh, no, I love that. That's great. Well, thank you so much. Cool. It's wonderful. Yeah. I was going to say, can I get a picture with you? Sure, sure, of course.