 We will continue to talk to Prof. Reiner right away. She is with Audrey Tang, the digital minister in Taiwan. Which is why I'm going to switch into English. A warm welcome to you, Audrey Tang. Good to have you here. Hello, good luck with your time, everyone. You are in charge of social innovation, open government and youth engagement. And you obviously have a lot of projects considering the topic of our talk, which is digital social innovation. Maybe we start there and maybe we start explaining what you, in your opinion, in your meaning and what you're doing is actually digital social innovation. Certainly. So social innovation is everyone's business with everyone's help. And for us, it means innovating from the government, not just for the citizens, but with the citizens. That's social innovation. Of course, it depends on a free society with the freedom of the press, of assembly and things like that. As you can see, we're almost equally free, Taiwan and Germany. And when the society faces emerging situations, for example, last year in May, when we faced our first real wave of COVID alpha variant, instead of concentrating data to a multinational corporation or concentrating data to the state, we asked the social sector, the civic technologist, to come up with the privacy preserving design that could shorten the contact tracing from 24 hours or more to less than 24 minutes, which is partly why, as of yesterday, we still only have 15 daily local cases of Omicron. And it works very simply. Use your built-in camera. It sends a toll-free SMS, so that's it. So just with two or three seconds, everyone can very quickly complete a check-in but a venue owner learns nothing about your phone and your phone telecom operator learns nothing about where the venue is. And so through these privacy-enhancing technology, we make sure that people do not trade privacy or personal data freedom to the public health measures and that enables the trustworthiness to build over time because of the mutual accountability. Everyone can see which contact tracer have looked at, which identities, and so on, in the previous 28 days and downloaded even when they go to this SMS.1922. So because this is designed by the civic technologists, not by a contractor or a state employee, we call this reverse procurement where the social sector sets the norm and we implement this norm. Mm-hmm. Very interesting. Thank you also to show concrete products, which is obviously always very helpful to see what it is that we're actually talking about and to see what we can do. Maybe before we go on, you've spoken a lot about privacy, which is obviously very important. We've had the CIO of Germany today this morning already. We always feel like we're lacking behind in Germany and maybe we actually do. So maybe, can you explain a little bit, how did you get there? Like, what did the government do? How did you basically had to explain it? Did you have to convince someone? Yes. I think privacy is very, very important and it's not just that a government can say, oh, we use the latest technology, the cutting edge technology, so therefore it is private. This would be like saying, trust us, it doesn't work this way. It's the other way around. We need to trust our citizens to inspect, as I mentioned, the accountability trail. We need to, when our citizens tell us that the measurement is off, that there is a data bias and so on, we need to incorporate that very quickly into decision-making. For example, before the pandemic, Taiwan had a lot of primary schoolers and middle schoolers measuring air quality using what we call the air box in their schools or balconies and so on. And together they form a distributed ledger that teaches data stewardship in the schools, but also informs their parents whether they should go out to jog or hike based on the PM 2.5 levels. And so I believe that this is a step beyond the literacy, in media literacy or data literacy, where we just teach the students how to consume the data. This is data competence, meaning that everybody can actually fact-check the three presidential candidates as they're having a debate. Everyone can livestream the counting process when we're counting the presidential ballot. Everybody can measure the air quality and so on, so they understand the technology like Lego blocks. So when it's used then for contact tracing, for counter-pandemic, people understand exactly how it works in the cybersecurity and privacy parameters because they've had experience with these technological components before the pandemic. From your perspective, there will be a lot of Europeans now saying, well, we also have a very high take on privacy and because we do have GDPR, it's considered to be one of the strongest in the world. Meanwhile, it's not coming from the direction that you were talking about, it doesn't come from the citizens, it did come from statesmen and women, obviously. So does that mean that maybe it's lacking on that point that people feel like it's been pushed onto them rather than pushing it themselves? Yes, exactly, as you said. If this is a procurement where the state asks an IT contractor to design things, even if maybe a perfect but a citizen because they was not part of the design process, naturally had fear, uncertainty and doubt about it. But in Taiwan, what we're doing is reverse procurement. It's essentially the citizens crowdsourcing, the agenda, the specification, the human right protection and so on, even before we even started any procurement process. So because the demands, the requirement came from people, it ceased to be a just a demonstration against something like we want to take something down. But it's a demonstration in a sense of demo. People show those small scale experiments like Airbox and so on. And then we have a mechanism that lifts them into national scale deployment very quickly. So it always starts with the not-for-profits, the social entrepreneurs, the civil innovators, but they prove it on a small town or something and then we just lift it to the country-wide scale. So this, let's say, bottom-up approach, does it actually, let's talk a little bit about democracy itself, does it help your trust in government from the people in Taiwan? Because what we see in, I guess, in Germany and in most places all over the world, the trust in governments, especially during the COVID pandemic, is going down. People don't trust the facts anymore or let's say a larger amount of people don't trust facts anymore. Does this bottom-up help? Yes, you're referring, I believe, to the infodemic, the overwhelming of information and people simply don't have the mental bandwidth to tell the scientific facts and clarifications, vis-à-vis conspiracy theories and so on. And in Taiwan, what we're focusing on is the open government design where people can literally get ahold of me very easily. This is my office, like literally my office, I just came from there. It's the social innovation lab in the heart of Taipei City and every Wednesday, everyone can book 40 minutes of my time or they simply walk in or a video conference or whatever and then they're allowed to basically bring any innovations to me. The only thing I ask is that they're radically transparent, meaning the entire conversation is posted free of copyright as a transcript online or as a video online in a creative commons. And so people wouldn't lobby for their self-interest at the expense of other people because they would look really bad and then the ideas just add on each other. But of course, if you can't travel to Taipei or book at 40 minutes time for each and every issue that warrants this kind of listening process, we also have a AI or assistive intelligence-powered conversation at Polis.gov.tw. So it's an infrastructure that is pro-social, unlike the other more anti-social media. This social media is designed to be pro-social, so you're looking at the actual clusters of the UberX case in 2015 when people deliberated about what to do with the UberX phenomena. Now, people very quickly after three weeks agreed on a lot of things, which is quite surprising that everyone agreed with their neighbors on most of the things, most of the time. And that's because the design of the system was that we don't reply to each other, we don't shout each other down. Rather, this measures the plurality of feelings and people have to agree or disagree on each other's feelings but convince people of different groups, different clusters, in order for their ideas to become binding, that is to say to be said as the agenda. So because of this pro-social space, we eventually just legalized Uber as a local taxi company, but a local taxi union, social entrepreneurship, local temples and churches all benefit from this because that's pretty much what everybody agreed on. So my main message is just that there are digital equivalent of town halls and so on, that we can actually get this listening at scale. How does it work in collaboration with companies? You, like, transparency is definitely something that citizens do want and it's good for them. The companies tend to not want to be as transparent because obviously they do have a for good reason, you know, they have secrets that they don't want to share. How does this actually work together? How do they interact? Yes, so I call this people-public-private partnership, where the people, the social sector, sets the norm and the government, as I mentioned, amplifies this norm. Now, if you are Uber or if you are a town taxi or some other taxi companies and you already see that your own drivers and other competitors, drivers and passengers all already agree on not undercutting each other's meters on registration, on insurance and things like that, then really the only thing left to do is to come to our stakeholder meeting, live-streamed and see exactly how that you may implement such social norm. And so I think this is a way for the private sector to work within the norm that's set by the social sector. Another example was in 2019 when Facebook and other social media companies agreed to publish all the political and social advertisements who funds it and also ban foreign-funded advertisement leading up to our election and so on, not because the state passed a law, we didn't pass a law on that, but rather because there's an implicit threat of social sanction if they do not conform to the local norm that's already agreed upon by the local social media. Okay, because you've just mentioned the elections, I want to stress one point, when you are as digitalised and as transparent, is it a threat that you're more vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, especially when it comes to collection, there's a lot of fake news and there's a lot of, well, state sponsors, hackers who want to influence whatever is happening, is that a threat for you that's concerning you? Yes, of course, since that we both share a polity that is very committed on the freedom of speech, of course there could be disinformation and information manipulation and in Taiwan we choose a strategy called humor over rumour that is to say, whenever we detect that there is a viral disinformation that's going in rampant, instead of taking it down, we simply post a public notice to it that does contact tracing, like finding out where exactly did it come from and also to counter it using very humorous visual communication and so on, so the communication that is a clarifying effect actually goes even more viral than that disinformation itself. I can't go into detail because of time, but if you search for humor over rumour, you'll find a playbook. Very interesting approach, I definitely do will have a look into this. There is two questions from the audience and then I have one or two myself again. The first question from the audience is, the most European politicians spend most of time for paperwork in terms of digitalization, how many hours do you spend with paperwork daily? I think close to zero because I automate all my paperwork, I literally recompiled the Linux kernel as my first action when I become digital minister in 2016, so that because I'm a teleworking minister since 2016, anything that is paper-based must be digitalized in order for me to have a timely turn around and once they're digitalized, if it's entirely routine, then of course I just write some scripts to automate it and it's been more than five years, so I've automated, I think, 99.9% of it. Did you have to convince your colleagues to follow up on this? Or did you... Well, in Germany, I promise you one thing, there would be a huge discussion about it and there will be people saying it's not going to work and this whole transformation topic will be a huge discussion. Yeah, and it was something like that. Back in 2016, I think the major media did a poll and only slightly over 60% of people support me in my teleworking and so I think less than half supported this general adoption by public servants, so of course there are people who feel that it's much more comfortable if they see each other in the same room and see the handwriting on the paper and things like that and my position was always that I'm not here to replace these paper-based analog technologies, I'm just here to show that alternative is possible but you don't have to use those and it's very consistent, it's very predictable that when we roll out anything that is digital, for example, the SMS-based contact tracing that I just shown, we always say that you can still continue to write your way in or you stamp your way in and keep your analog way of recording contact tracing detail, we never replace it by a top-down order, so that's why I think it was possible for people to gradually come to terms with digital transformation without being felt as forced to. Before I come to the last question, because I feel like that's a very good question for the end of our talk, I want to ask you about broadband because obviously, broadband connection in Taiwan is well, it's regarded as a human rights. In Germany, we have been talking about this for years and depending on who you ask, obviously telecommunications companies say we're actually quite advanced, other people say not so much. Everyone was really surprised this morning that the CIO actually was able to have a video conversation in his car and I think the surprise fact of that shows where we are. So, to have a digital social innovative, where are you in terms of actually connecting people? Do they feel connected? Is everyone actually able to be online? Yes, and that is because we make sure that no one is left behind, even on the top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high. You're still guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second for just 15 euros per month, unlimited data. Otherwise, it's my fault, like personally, people wrote me emails saying they're in this Yangming Mountain quarantine place, they spend half a day to send this email, the signal is weak, they can't watch streaming TV and they're suffering from human right violation. And then, I made sure that within just two weeks, it's fixed. There's a repeater that was set up and the person, of course, is already out of currency, but they made a point of driving back and measure problem speed and posting on social media to hold me accountable. So, that's the kind of commitment that one needs to take and also the kind of participatory nature of our citizens in ensuring that we're actually being held accountable. Maybe when we come back to a real innovative factor, there's a question, what does your digital lunar new year looks like? Will you celebrate it this year still at your home or in metaverse? Yes, I always make sure that I participate in some creative activities, not just in lunar new year, but in my off time in general. Sometimes, I would just put on my XR space glass and visit with some artist friends many time zones away and go to some, like, high mountain or the space station and so on and just meditate a little bit there and also do some creative work there. I think the last artistic co-creation we did was virtually on the Matterhorn mountain. I think it was in Alps, right in Switzerland. Okay, that sounds really nice. I'm actually super curious to see when I'm going to be first time in metaverse because there's obviously a lot of talks around that here. My last question actually would be, you've talked about a bottom-up approach. You talked about that there needs to be a value for the citizens, a value for the people who use technology and then obviously they're going to use it more and then that's going to be more transparency, more trust in democracy, more trust in the government, everything. It sounds so obvious that I'm sometimes surprised that we're not actually there in other countries yet. Why do you think that is? I think that is because for a society to see that the technologies are there to connect people and people instead of just connecting people to machines or machine to machines, we really need to phrase our technological terms a different way. That is to say, instead of when I just became the digital minister in 2016, I said that, oh, my job description is just those SDGs, effective partnership, reliable data-opening innovation. Our HR people told me that ministry is not going to work. You need to speak in plain language that people actually use to speak, which is why my job description is now a prayer, a poem for the past six years now, which I'll read very quickly, which is a translation of these in plain language, which goes like this. When we see the Internet of Things, let's make it an Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, we need to always remember the plurality is here. So, embrace plurality and social innovation will follow. Perfect. Perfect, last words. Thank you very much. Very inspiring, and I think that's definitely something that we're going to take on for next discussions coming up, but also for other discussions that are going to be with us throughout the year. I hope to see you again soon. I actually booked a flight to Taiwan in April 2020, and obviously that never happened, because then COVID hit, but I'm still hoping forwards to come and look at... to come to Taipei myself and have a look at it myself. Thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you. Live, lie, and prosper.