 Welcome to this seminar about Taiwan. My name is Håkan Bengtsson and I'm CEO at Rena Group and here in Stockholm. We're a progressive association of single members who runs a tings tank, a publishing house, a daily web magazine and other things. Lately we have been focusing on Taiwan a bit. Last year we published the only book about Taiwan available in Swedish actually, this one. It's out of stock. It's written by Joja Olsson called Taiwan the Unknown and Threatened Democracy. But you can download it free if you read Swedish from our website. So it's created some interest. I think it's true to say that Taiwan has been in the shadow of public international debate for a long time. However, I think it's more on the agenda now than before. For different reasons, maybe development in Hong Kong plays a role here. And in the economist's issue a couple of weeks ago, I had Taiwan on the cover with the headline The Most Dangerous Place on Earth. So I think it's on the agenda to discuss the status of Taiwan and the interest in development of democracy in Taiwan as well. And a couple of weeks ago there was a documentary on Swedish television about Taiwan, which is very interesting for people living in Sweden. You can see it on the play website as well. And one of the key persons in that documentary was Audrey Tang, who is a digital minister for Taiwan. And focusing a bit on your interesting work for democracy in terms of transparency and participation, etc. Which I hope we can discuss now in this seminar, which will last for one hour. And I'm also delighted to invite Anna Sundström, who is the General Secretary for the Louis Palme Institute in Stockholm. And also Chastin Lundgren, who is a parliamentarian for the Center Party and also a member of the Foreign Policy Committee in the Parliament. And one of the speakers of the House of the Swedish Parliament as well. So welcome to all you three. And I think we of course start with giving the word to Audrey. Very welcome. We're very interested to hear about your views on Taiwan and the future of democracy in Taiwan. Welcome. Hello and greetings from the future, like literally. We're in the afternoon now. And I would like to share my screen and we'll see if it works hopefully. So if you see a cute dog, the screen sharing is working correctly. You do? Yeah. Okay. Excellent. So yes, this is the companion dog. The name is Song Chai. It's a Shiba of the Participation Officer in the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Really a mascot of our counter coronavirus effort. We countered a coronavirus so far with no lockdown, with fingers crossed, but so far with no lockdown and counter the infodemic also with no takedown. And in both key areas, this cute dog played a very large role, which is why I feature Song Chai first because you see in Taiwan, when we realized that there is a novel coronavirus last January, we learned it from the collective intelligence from the social sector. In Taiwan, we have this idea that instead of relying on Facebook or other private sector for public collective intelligence, we have our own domestic networks, for example, the PTT, which is essentially subsidized by the state, but run by National Taiwan University student pet project for 25 years. And it's on these pro-social areas where there's no advertisers, there's no shareholders, did the initial collective intelligence, including the remixing of the memes such as Song Chai, appears. So in concrete terms, this collective intelligence kicked off actually in 2019. In December 31st, when Dr. Lee would announce a message and I quote, there's seven new SARS cases from the Huanan seafood market and I quote, gets reposted on the PTT. I'm sure it's also posted across all the world on different social media platforms, but to my knowledge, only on PTT did the result in very quick triaging from people of all the different expertises so that not even 24 hours later, we began health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. And this is to the credit of the Central Epidemic Command Center and the daily press conference that gathered the collective intelligence from the online people and turned those innovations into decisive actions literally every day, every 2 p.m. And so we rely on this toll-free number where everybody can call to contribute their collective intelligence tips and ideas and ask for clarifications. Recently, you can also use this as an SMS number for checking in to places to enable contact tracing. So last April, there was a young boy that called 1922 saying, hey, you're rationing out masks, but all I got from the mask rationing program was pink medical mask. But all the boys in my class have navy blue medical grade mask. So I don't want to wear pink to school. The boy said, do something about it. Well, the very next day, at a suggestion of the companion of his own child dog, the participation officer suggested the Minister of Health and Welfare, Chen Shizhong in the middle, as well as all the medical officers wear pink. And so Minister Chen even said, and I think pink panther was a childhood hero or something. So the boy became the most hit boy in his class for only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes here, I guess, wear. And so this gender mainstreaming is what we call humor over rumor, meaning that instead of amplifying this idea of divisiveness, conspiracy theory or anything like that, we just act in a pro-social manner ourselves and contribute to a more pro-social response. For example, pink is the best color. And for the next couple of weeks, all the leading brands color themselves pink and things like that. So mask become a symbol for self-expression is not just for the public medical purposes. And this is essential because at the time we realized that we need to have 75% of people wearing mask and washing their hands in order to counter the very high R-value of the initial novel coronavirus. Of course, nowadays with the English variant, this number should be 90%. And we're working on that. But last January, 75% was our goal. But the problem was at the time, how it only manufactured around 2 million medical masks a day. But we have a population of 23 million. So we do have a rationing issue. And to solve this issue, not only did we enlisted our universal healthcare based on universal broadband so that more than 6,000 pharmacists can start distributing the masks, but also the people from the civil society, such as the civic technologists, however, and Fijian County, created a tool without actually consulting the government. They created this tool called a mask rationing map. And so they enabled us to basically display when you're queuing in line once you purchase some amount of mask. The people queuing after you can check on their phone in more than 100 different tools. Exactly how much did you just purchase from that pharmacy? And so it reduced unnecessary queuing. And people can go to the pharmacy that still has some in stock instead of relying on guesswork and queuing in vain. Moreover, this also enabled independent analysts to point out data bias in our mask rationing system. We started rationing in last February, but very soon we discovered that it's not very well evenly distributed. Indeed, this is MP Gao Hong'an. She was VP of data analytics at Foxconn before joining the parliament. So she knows something about data while initially we look at a map and see our population centers and the pharmacy distribution online almost perfectly. And we feel good about it. She pointed out working with the OpenStreetMed community, you can see in the background, in our interpolation that said, well, actually not everybody own a helicopter. So the time it takes for people to travel to a nearby pharmacy cannot be deduced by the distance as seen on the map. So by pointing out the data bias and interpolating, the ministry didn't defend our policy at all. Instead, he simply said, well, legislator, teach us. And so based on this infrastructure of evidence-based co-creation, we adjusted the distribution mechanism the very next day. So MP Gao said, well, yesterday's interpolation became tomorrow's co-creation. And then we introduced, for example, through entrepreneurship, some mask vending machines, inclusion, for example, ordering such masks in the kiosk, in all the convenience stores around the island and so on. So that by last April, we reached the 75%. And so for a long time after that, we've been kind of post-pandemic until, of course, the English variant found Taiwan and now we're reaching for the 90%. So if there is a takeaway from this very short story about mask rationing, it's about engaging the people in the civil society to co-create based on shared evidence and shared data. And it's about investing in the digital public infrastructure, not just for collective intelligence, but also for fact-checking, for finding what's the trending disinformation and push out a funny clarification, 60 minutes after each trending disinformation gets detected. Indeed, the participation office in each ministry, which is in charge of working with, say, the comedians and the emerging hashtags, sometimes we call them the hashtag part offices, they work around the clock to push out this kind of vaccine of the mind that takes some mRNA strands, I guess, of trending disinformation, package that into a humorous, almost comedic package and then spread it out as a viral meme, so that the clarification is even more viral than the original disinformation. So this is one of the earlier examples before COVID. There was a rumor that said the state is going to find you $1 million if you perm your head many times a week. Of course, that's not true. But we posted this with no takedown. So just like the counter-pandemic relying on the public health measures, we also counter the infodemic relying on public mental health measures, which is framing that disinformation in a way that says it's not true, but also something that's more viral. For example, this is head of our cabinet premier Sue in his youth, and with his useful photo he said, I may be bought now, but I will not punish people who look like my youth. And a fine print that says, what we've introduced is a labeling requirement for hair products that takes effect on July 2021. And then the premier, as he looks now, says, however, if you perm your hair many times a week, it will not damage your bank account, but it will damage your hair. Just look at me now for what will happen to your hair. Again, this clarification proved to have a higher R value, a higher basic transmission rate than the disinformation. So by the time that this information reached people, they're already inoculated. There's antibodies in their mind because they would associate this disinformation with the idea of, well, this premier's photo, right? And they will say, oh, it's just for a hair product labeling. And they will stop just clicking share on social media and therefore just like how vaccines work, slow the distribution of disinformation through what they call nerd immunity, not herd immunity. And so this relies again on the civil society, flagging, incoming, spam, right? Or scam or disinformation. But we protect the right to communication secretly. So end-to-end encrypted channels such as WhatsApp or Line in Taiwan is very popular. So how do we tackle the trending disinformation in these venues? Because usually they incubate there before reaching the more public social media. Well, we rely on the community called Covax, which is part of the GZero initiative, GZero initiative. GZeroV is a very simple idea. This is all the government services that ends in something that GOV.TW. If the civil society think they can do it better, they would just do something that GZeroV.TW. So just by going into the GZeroV, like join the GOV.TW as our national participation portal, changing an O to a zero gets you joined the GZeroV.TW, which is 10,000 people in a Slack channel, brainstorming about how to do QR check-ins better, how to distribute vaccines better, and things like that. So it's a kind of shadow government that works on the principle of open source and open innovation. So Covax is the GZeroV's contribution, so that anyone who looked at this scam or disinformation or just plain rumors, they can forward it to the bot developed by the community. And the bot would just like Wikipedia, post the trending ones for people to independently analyze. It's all open data. So by forwarding it to the bot, it basically says we're contributing, just like flagging something as fun, right? This foreign royalty of which want to wire $10 million to my account or whatever. We contribute that. So the next time they spawn, they reach the junk mail folder rather than the inbox of people. And we also partner with professional journalism people in the Taiwan fact check center, part of the international fact checking network so that they will just focus their energy on the ones that's already trending. So instead of spending time on the ones that are not trending and will just taper off automatically, we focus our energy collectively on the things that require journalistic investigation. But for a long time, this did not work on paid advertisements. Indeed, in 2019, Facebook introduced the honest advertisement network, I think first in Taiwan. How is the first jurisdiction that they realized that it really is possible for the extra jurisdictional forces to influence and kind of bypass this crowdsourced fact checking network simply by paying a lot of money and by precision targeted campaign donation like social issue or political issue advertisements. And so we work with Facebook and other social media. We say, look, the PTT and other domestic social media already adopted this norm that advertisement during the campaign season is essentially campaign donation and should be treated as such. In Taiwan, we publish such donation and expanded to as open data. So we pressured Facebook and they also published the kind of dark patterns of hyperprecision targeting and so on or as real-time open data for investigative journalists to work with. And just like campaign donations, they banned foreign sponsored propaganda on it. But all this without us actually making a new act, a new law, but rather the social sector threatened social sanction if the Facebook is not conformed to the local norm. So this is what I call a people-public-private partnership where the people, the social sector sets the norm. The public sector, the government amplifies the norm so that the private sector implements the norm and we work, for example, with the investigative journalists on such matters. So in the remaining, I guess, two minutes, I'll just show a few real examples. For example, leading to the 2020 presidential election because the Hong Kong issue was the dominant issue. So we see this one having a really high R-value in Taiwanese social media and I quote, Hong Kong flex compensation expert killing a police earns you up to 20 million. How is that even possible? Well, it turns out this photo, which makes it kind of viral, is from Reuters. It's a real photo. But the original caption only said, and I quote, a teenage extraction bill protester is seen during March. It's just that there are teenage protesters there. But the variant that went viral in Taiwan said, this 13 years old thought bought new iPhones and reusing the same photo. But as I mentioned, we're a country of freedom of expression. Indeed, according to Civicus Monitor, we're the only jurisdiction in Asia that enjoys a completely open freedom of speech and assembly and the press space. So we can't take down, but we could do a public notice. So by adopting a notice and public notice, we just displayed on all the social media when people are about to share this frame, a contextualizing frame that said, well, look, this alternate caption was first seen on the Weibo account of the PRC, the People's Republic of China Regimes, Central Political and Law Units Weibo account. So this is not something covert, it's overt. It's something that's taking a Reuters photo, changing this caption and seeding it as a social media viral package. And we notice that once we provide this contextualizing service, people who look at it actually earns more media competence, as we call it, not media literacy, but they earn the possibility to work like a journalist to provide a contextualizing frame to make sure that people understand well, there is something going on that will change captions for photos later. There's also one around voting itself. On the day of voting, there was a training, this information that said, the CIA made invisible inks. So no matter who you vote, your ink will disappear and Dr. Tsai will appear. Of course, that's not true. But again, the solution is not by banning the speech, but rather by allowing during the counting, which is paper-based, the YouTubers of all the major parties. So if you don't trust the other party's YouTubers, you do trust your own party's YouTubers. And when all people can actually record life, the counting process, and they have their own apps, and because of universal broadband access, streaming video and so on, producing contextualizing evidence does not cost any extra money. So when the YouTubers in each counting stations report more or less the same number, again, there's no room for this rumor to appear to spread. And finally, there was a viral one that said about distributing masks and already mentioned what's important here is to make the tools so that people who are familiar with smartphone can use a map or they can use a chatbot or voice assistant and so on to know precisely where the mask is going and where the mask is rationing. And we've been adjusting this system to distribute stimulus vouchers nowadays vaccines very soon and many other things as well. So people already live under the norm of radical transparency and this less likelihood for things to spread in a way that capitalizes on this lack of transparency. And finally, just as a kind of closing word, I think all these, when I explain it, people sometimes remember it but not necessarily share it. But when the cute Shiba Inu explain the same thing, like when you're indoor, keep three Shibas away, outdoor, keep two Shibas away or wear a mask. Cover your mouth in this when sneezing. The mask are here to protect your face against your own unwashed hand and so on. Not only do people share it, but they remix it in a message that fits their local norms and then this becomes something that we're in it together so that we work with the people, not just for the people. So that's my initial intervention. Thank you very much, Audrey. Very interesting. I just want to say as well, feel free to raise questions inputs in the Facebook flow and I will hope I can raise it later in this hour. And very interesting, Audrey. I mean, Taiwan is one of the positive examples of corona fighting in the world. You've been also involved yourself as minister in developing these digital tools just to talk about. However, there's some more spread now in recent times Can you say something about the overall sort of situation? Sure. So for the past couple of weeks now, we're now in level three. Level three is not a lockdown. People still move freely. There's plenty of people in the street. I just commuted back home, but we do require people wear a mask at all times outdoors. Otherwise, there's a fine. And this is because the new variant, the now demands a 90% not a 75% mask adoption rate and the possibility of aerosol transmission also increases. And so we've adopted a few new measures, for example, a SMS based check-in system, so that of course you can still choose pen and paper, but it's now much easier if you visit a convenience store or something, use your built-in camera on your phone to scan a SMS QR code that literally sends an SMS to the toll-free number 1922 to enable contact tracing. And the beauty of this is, of course, the data is only stored in the telecom of your own number. So there's no extra third-party data processor here. And even people who do not have a smartphone, but rather with a feature phone or something, around 20% of people do have the internet, but they don't know how to install an app. They can still just type in the place code and send it as SMS to it. And so it has a pretty good adoption rate. And again, this is actually designed by the GumZero community in the social sector. We just implemented kind of like a reverse procurement, like the mask map, implement what people feel comfortable with. So these are some new measures. We're now registering in the past couple years a total death of 59 people, I believe, which is a really high number by our standards now in our second wave. But we're looking at an effective R-value that's been more or less stable. So a few hundred cases every day. And we're seeing if the new level three measures can just push down the number. Or maybe we finally go into level four. But currently it's not looking likely because we don't see it going on a spike. So it's just a few hundred cases every day. Maybe we'll remain level three for another couple of weeks. Thank you. I think we have a lot to learn from the Taiwan example here in the future. So very interesting introduction. Let me move over to the question of democracy in Taiwan. It's interesting to see that while the People's Republic of China remained a dictatorship after the turbulence and after 1999, Taiwan has developed to a modern democracy. Can you say something about this development when Taiwan moved to be a democracy and also the development through recent years in Taiwan? I think that's interesting for us to know more of the details there. Definitely. In Taiwan, I personally remember the martial law, right? Everybody 40 years and older, I remember the martial law. So I was born in an environment where there's no freedom of press to speak of and people could be imprisoned or whatever for acting in a way that doesn't meet the whims of the one ruling party. But after quite a few peaceful civil movements of democratization, slowly a room for civil society grew. And finally, in 1996, we had our first direct presidential election. And then afterward, after a few constitutional amendments, we transitioned into a real democracy. But the interesting thing for me is that because 1996 is already a year where the War Eye Web is generally available. So when we designed our new democratic system, already a lot of deliberative participatory democracy elements are in it. So for example, every year, we have a different vote. This year is the vote for the national referendum. Next year would be for the mayoral election. And then next year, the national referendum. And then next year, the presidential and legislature election. And so what? So it's the alternating years between national referendum and mayoral and presidential elections. And there's also a highly participatory system joined the GOV, the TW, which I briefly mentioned that lists more than half a population that sets the agenda on the regulatory issues as well as ministerial issues. For example, there was a very popular petition on banning plastic straws from takeouts of the national identity drink bubble tea. And then when we collaborated with the petitioner, which gathered 5,000 signatures in very short amount of time, we found out she's just turned 17. And when I asked her why are you petitioning this, she said it's our civics class assignment. And so turns out that more than a quarter of citizen petitions are from people who are not 18 years old. So there's a lot of participation from 16, 17 years old. That's the highest demographic group for online digital democracy. The next age group is 60 and 70 years old. So I guess both sides have more time on their hands and care more about public welfare rather than their individual businesses and so on. So there's a strong deliberative culture. There's also participatory budgeting, sandbox applications, presidential hackathon, many ways to make sure that democracy is not just about uploading 3 bits per person every 4 years, but rather in a continuous fashion and in that sense calling into 192 to also count as democratic input. Can you say something about the sunflower movement which sort of changed the political scene? Sure, certainly. In early 2014, we occupied the parliament for around three weeks. And the demonstration was not a protest per se. It's more like a demonstration as a demo because at the time the parliament were refusing to deliberate substantially a trade agreement with the Beijing regime and people just I guess took the MP's office because they were on strike and worked their job. And so we demonstrated to half a million people on the street and many more online that with the right tools for listening and skill it is possible to form an informed, good enough consensus about a very complicated trade deal. More than 20 NGOs talk about more than 20 aspects and they were livestreamed, transcribed, translated and so on. For example, there was one side of the parliament that deliberated whether we allow the PRC Beijing components into our then new 4G telecom infrastructure ecosystem where there are real private sector or they're all defective state-owned winter times cons. I'm sure everybody else is now having this conversation around the world on 5G in the past couple of years in 2014 we already explored that argument and formed a social norm that says no. That says there's no economic sense does not make sense because we will have to evaluate a systemic risk every time there's an update or something to see whether that so-called private sector has been de facto captured by the extra market fares of the PRC regime by switching leadership or some other ways of influence and if we have to keep assessing this the total cost of ownership is much too high and therefore we might as well work on our own infrastructure like with MediaTek and so on and also work with the likes of say Qualcomm or Nokia or Ericsson and things like that. So the point here I'm making is that for each aspect of the trade deal there is a similar good enough consensus and at the end of the Occupy these were ratified by the head of the parliament, Wang Jinping and so the Occupy was a victory and around the end of that year in 2014 they voted in all the mayoral candidates that supported the open government and the sunflower movement sometimes surprising even to the candidate himself but all the mayoral candidate that supported more a top-down authoritarian governance well simply lost the election and so after that the political norm in Taiwan became one of open government as I just explained and it become a non-partisan issue that is to say all the four leading parties now in the parliament competes on how more transparent and participatory they could be nobody seriously argues for authoritarian regime. Interesting. I think we'll come back to that and also the international context in the region of course. Now I'd like to give the word to Anna Sundar general secretary of the parliament center in Stockholm who's been engaged in is engaged in international solidarity and fight for human rights as well. Anna, please. Thank you very much and yes, my name is Anna Sundar my representative of the parliament international centre which is the Swedish labour movement's platform you could say for international cooperation and solidarity and I must just begin by saying that I'm very inspired listening to Audrey because I think that this open government idea is also something that so many of us can also learn from because we of course see how democracies challenge all over the world and that the right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise and we also see polarisation well basically threatening also quite stable democracies also in our region here in Europe and we often talk about well when sort of internet was introduced you mentioned it also coinciding in a way with when you started the democratic process in Taiwan it was also something that would bring more democracy and so on by the time when social media and so on has created the echo chambers we sort of many times find ourselves in discussions on how to regulate this and how to well hinder freedom of expression and so on but what you have been doing is to really embrace the positive sides and I think that this is the right track to go and that we as I said many of us can also learn from this because the discussion on whether or not internet is a tool of democracy or not is not that interesting to me to be honest but rather how can we make sure to use this tool to strengthen democracy and I think that your country has really done a remarkable job on this not the least to mention then this whole idea of open government and I think it's also what you've finished by saying that it's so very interesting to then hear that this has caused sort of a competition rather in how to be even more transparent and even more open and I'm also very inspired by what you said and sort of a vision to work with the people and not only for the people I think that this is for all democracies to really challenge ourselves in finding these ways of inclusion of the people and to work with the people and of course representing an organization compiled with a number of civil society organizations working with their counterparts around the world to strengthen democracy this is of course something that we very much well agree with the importance of including grassroots movements and the importance of listening to people and to build ways of inclusion to strengthen democracy one final remark from my side of course when it comes to then someone wrote in the chat I saw one in the chat of China which was also the name of the documentary Hocken mentioned in his introduction and one of our member organizations is the trade union confederation LO here in Sweden and they have their sister organization Hong Kong CTU the Hong Kong Congress of Trade Unions in Hong Kong well experienced a lot of repression during the last few years and I think that the situation and how things have involved in Hong Kong is also a lesson to be learned also in our relations and in our support and cooperation with Taiwan our friends in Hong Kong for many many years said warned about the developments that was about to unfold the international community did not react enough and also not soon enough to say the least and this is really a lesson that needs to be learned and just then coming back to Hong Kong CTU as one example we now have the Secretary General in prison and the Chairperson of the organization also being charged with multiple sentences or tribes will see how this evolves of course but this is also a lesson to be learned for the international community and I think you also put it very well that the sort of the economic gain is not a gain it's rather a high cost and it's in this sense I think that we've been maybe well too naive and not counted on the full costs that this kind of relationships serve us to see only the economic benefits whilst we must also look at other aspects such as for example democracy and human rights Thank you very much Anna, Audrey will have the possibilities to answer soon or comment I will give the word to Kerstin Lundgren a parliamentarian for the Center Party and also a member of the Foreign Policy Committee Welcome Kerstin Thank you and I hope you can hear me I have some problems with the connections so partly Anna's remarks have been lost for me I'm sorry for that but I managed to get you Audrey and I saw the media you had a film in the Swedish television and it was great to see and to follow and getting your examples also now is impressive I must say and you are when looking in the region as such and the pressure that Taiwan is feeling from your big neighbour I mean that is amazing to see how you manage it and how far you have reached in your track to democracy, human rights and the rule of law society and I think we have a lot to learn and we are in the Swedish political life I must say we are now in different ways but still more looking into how to support Taiwan we have seen what happened and we have seen Xi Jinping's moves and the way he is where he is heading with the society and also have a lot of discussions of course about how to manage the new era in the society in the global era when we see that we are moving into a new level of intelligent societies, smart societies and possibilities to in a way rule them from authoritarian dictatorships and of course for me it is also interesting to see you mentioned Ericsson for instance as a way to find your way of doing things in Taiwan for us as homeland for Ericsson it is interesting to see how you look upon it because we had just a couple of days ago a debate if Ericsson is really pushed by the Communist Party to hand over information or to make some kind of installations in the systems for getting the Chinese interests on board, will they do it or can they stand up against it and that is a big issue I think globally making sure that as you mentioned civil public and private we are all linked together in this and must make sure that we can build strong strong some kind of guidance making sure that we are not tracked or backtracked into a system we don't want to see so it is also interesting to see how you manage because you are a role model for us in that sense due to that you have experienced Hong Kong have experienced and you can see and you follow and you are smart in your ways of doing it so I am really interested to hear and learn more about the way you are working and also how you are cooperating with other countries for connecting and finding ways to counter the Chinese actions and moves so and of course the issue of solving or helping people to stay healthy and not getting Covid is also impressive the way you have done it and we have a lot to learn from that as well and we are pushing for Taiwan to be working inside the World Health Organization as we are pushing in also other areas to make sure that you are involved and included in the way possible into those international structures and I think that is something we are trying to reach out and be helpful to get to know that it is not easy as we all know but pushing is something needed really so I will stop there thank you Thank you very much Justin a message from the parliament I would say your latest comment there Audrey are you with us some comments Thank you for the contribution to the conversation and for the support of Taiwan's meaningful inclusion in WHO and other meaningful assemblies of nations and we do see that there are more and more people who are willing to support Taiwan in such a manner and we also built for example the global cooperation and training framework and we are working to open government partnership there are many international organizations that is predicated on its membership being democratic politics and we find more willingness to engage with Taiwan if what we call mini-laterals but OGP is 80 or something countries are not really mini but smaller multilaterals that are more focused on human rights, democracy and good governance I think these are very fruitful venues for us to work with and with regard to the idea that social media and the polarization of conversation especially in democracies I think that really is true but we witnessed that we can actually build what I call pro-social media meaning that instead of relying on Facebook to talk about public issues we build our own infrastructure like the PTT which are open source and stay subsidized by run independently so that people can have meaningful conversations without resorting to the more anti-social corners of social media this is another example this is called Polis it's invented in Seattle but now deployed as a permanent part of governance infrastructure in Taiwan at polis.gov.tw and we are looking at the actual conversation in 2015 that talk about UberX issue because UberX is a labor-right issue and people see that the sharing economy is actually a gig economy but some people say it's a platform economy it's very difficult to have a real conversation around that in 2015 but using AI or assistive intelligence we make sure that people share around the same facts just their feelings you feel happy about this statement I feel unhappy and it's okay there's no right or wrong about feelings but after three weeks of sharing feelings online the good ideas that are good enough consensus emerge and then we can hold all the stakeholders to account by for example pointing out everybody feel passenger liability insurance is very important if you agree you move toward the person proposing this if you disagree you move farther away there's no reply button so there's no room for trove to grow and so every time after we run a polis conversation for three weeks or so we see that divisiveness is very much quarantined like five ideological statements people agree to disagree but people spend far more calories on this which means most of people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the things most of the time it's just that anti-social corner of social media doesn't highlight this enough and so after we hold these to account and say let's just talk about fear payment to drivers not undercutting existing meters allowing existing co-ops even church and temples to start their own multipurpose taxes then it's a one it's made a new rule possible and now Uber is a low abiding taxi fleet in Taiwan the Q-taxing and the local temples and churches and so on the self the rural areas are also made legal by the new multipurpose taxi law and so this is a small example said to us instead of relying on Facebook which is like holding a town hall in a nightclub with very loud noise shout to get hurt, addictive drink, private bouncers I mean with audio respect there are roles of nightlife in the society but the role is not one of town hall we need to build a digital equivalent of a town hall for town halls to happen lots of questions one question I would like to raise is the development in Hong Kong has been sort of a big part of the agenda and my question is how has Hong Kong development influenced politics and the position for Taiwan lately? Yeah as I mentioned in our early 2020 presidential election it's the dominating factor whatever illusions people had around one country two system what was shattered because Hong Kong was offered as a kind of demonstration of the so-called one country two systems design and we see that there's no two systems at all a systemic takeover happened before our eyes and we've got people flying out of Hong Kong some even took the boat and going on exile in Taiwan we offer them of course the safe space to talk to international journalists to hold author of freedom forum and so on and to me personally it's very interesting because when I was a child in the 80s it used to be international correspondent in Hong Kong review the human rights violations in Taiwan for the international community to pressure the government in Taiwan to do better but now the role is entirely reversed and we've seen the international correspondent flying out of Hong Kong many of them are now based in Taiwan There's some question on Facebook I will raise some and then also give the word to Anna and Shastain as well Pontus Besterholm asks that in Europe the question regulating the sector is a big issue we have the GDPR legislation etc how is Taiwan handling this integrity questions as I mentioned we've had social sector alternative for 25 years now to Facebook so it's not like Taiwanese people don't use Facebook there's probably more Facebook accounts than people in Taiwan but we don't use them as town halls as I mentioned the binding decisions on e-petition and participatory budgeting on referendum and so on they don't take place on Facebook people understand Facebook is a place like the Nile Life District but it's not a place for deliberation for a town hall like discussion that has binding effect on democracy itself that is to say we don't confuse private infrastructure with civic infrastructure and therefore the civic infrastructure sets a better norm for Facebook and Facebook I think one of the whistleblowers in the Facebook civic integrity group went on the record a couple months ago signed in the jurisdiction such as Taiwan where they would suffer a PR backlash they actually respond to the election and so on in a very quick manner in the election that they did not they don't anticipate such a strong check and balance from the social sector while they didn't allocate sufficient resource to it and for us it's like a backhanded compliment to our social sector activity so Facebook simply cannot ignore the negative externalities sort of like environmental pollution that they did to the ideas sphere I guess around public discussion and so for things like the transparency around advertisements for things like transparency around foreign meddling and sponsorship and advertisement and many other things Facebook did actually work with the local social norm simply because they know there is a viable alternative and they will face social sanction credible social sanction even before we made any laws for that. Thank you. I have a question to Anna and Shastain both of you all over the world also Sweden has had a low key relationship with Taiwan it's a course for historical reasons a problematic question what do you think about the future should Sweden and other countries be more active in developing context with Taiwan in terms of political relationships recognition of the Taiwan as an independent state etc Anna first don't forget you. Absolutely I do think so and I think that not the least also as the world develops as it does we need to find ways of cooperating more among the democracies around the world and also of course to keep dialogue and to support also these drives for democracies that also evolves in an authoritarian way and to find ways of also supporting the democratization processes in also in these countries so absolutely yes that would be my short answer Thank you and Shastain Yes I fully agree we need to work out a new model of cooperation and I have for instance Swedish office in Taiwan is now a business office but I have requested and suggested House of Sweden to be operating in Taiwan making sure that we are upgrading our relations and our cooperation not only in business area I mean they have a little other things as well but making sure that this is a message of cooperation and working together in a stronger way and I hope this will be possible Taiwan is a very good island for cooperation in the region and for us to learn and work out together also when we are talking about the systemic rival China how to handle this equation May I also add that I think that it's also important for Sweden to take an active role in pushing for this in the European Union because of course it's also important for us to do this together because that would also mean be much stronger signal and voice when the European Union also acts together you mentioned of course the tensions around this issue and if we would have more of a joint effort I think that would also be very meaningful Yes of course it is but I mean we can also I think we have to join forces many many clubs and many laterals and we have many EU as well inside and we have already European countries with house of Austria house of Netherlands and so on and I think we should add up and moving not with balloons and all other things like that but making it visible in a smart way and by that building up cooperation because we have a lot to work out together with Taiwan and other countries Australia and others in the region South Asia Thank you there's lots of questions in the Facebook flow I have the time to raise more than I only want to say that Ulle Westberg who is working on democracy development for the Swedish government in recent years he says that Taiwan is impressing in terms of giving people a voice in committing to political decisions between the elections tell me more about this please and that will be the final comment from you and we have just three minutes to go I guess I will just go through a few quick slides but I have done a TED talk actually three TED talks about this so more on the TED talk so for example every year we run a presidential hackathon this year there is an international track that focus on climate action and I welcome you to check out presidential hackathon Taiwan and you will see the idea and the idea really is very simple for people who work on for example better algorithm to detect water leakage in the water pipes they can actually co-create across sectors on a small prototype in a small region and then they contribute a code for the cross sectoral collaboration they want a trophy every year we hand out five such trophies that is shaped like Taiwan with a micro projector underneath and when you turn on the projector it shows Dr. Tsai Ing-wen our president handing you the trophy so it's a very meta trophy and what it symbolizes is that we commit the presidential power to turn your social innovation from being just a small district into a national wide roll out usually within 12 months and that means that the social sector ideas and innovations became national agenda very quickly thanks to the collaborative and so instead of kind of the civil society fighting the government on one another on issues instead of democracy being a showdown between opposing values we encourage co-creation so that it become a conversation between diverse values this is my office quite literally my office the social innovation lab so people can have a real conversation here for whatever sustainable development goals related issues and we always keep this conversation on the record either as a transcript or as a movie and because the kind of future is watching we always publish people always talk about their new ideas in the canvas of effective partnerships instead of the short term short sightings of the shinies because they simply look very bad so by becoming a good enough ancestor in this role of radical transparency we make sure that we build the innovations based on the norms the social needs and then we get the sectors together so when I became the digital minister in 2016 because I'm the first person to hold a role of digital minister the HR asked me also how to describe a role I'm like I'm just 1718 1717 176 in terms of the sustainable goal targets reliable data effective partnerships and open innovation and they're like not all Taiwanese people memorize the 169 targets by mind right have to translate it and so I'll just conclude by reading my job description which is about using technology bringing it to the people not the other way around and goes like this we see the Internet of things let's make it the Internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a share the 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 the singularity is near let's always remember the plurality is here thank you for listening thank you very much order that's a perfect ending of this very interesting seminar thank you for joining us it's wonderful that we can have this conversation when you're in Taiwan and we here in the north of Europe a special thanks of course also to Shastin and Anna Sundstrom thank you very much and we will be back on Taiwan questions in the future thank you very much thank you live long and prosper