 Of course, it's called a reverse. Of course. Yeah, yeah, we've done a lot of those. Hello, good, yeah. Good luck all the time, everyone. Yeah, when I was 14 years old, not 13, in middle school, I convinced the head of my school to allow me to work anywhere, really, to continue my education on the then very new thing called the World Wide Web. And I showed her the printouts of the email exchange that I had with researchers on the ARXIV, the archive network, which is still online, right? And to maintain by Cornell University. And so I think what makes sense to her was that to her, what's important is to make contributions to the society and to the academic community. And once I showed her that I'm already making such contributions, I just want to skip this whole diploma thing. She is completely okay with it and said that she will cover for me, meaning that she will fake the records. And so that really imbued in me this essence of optimism of the innovation capability of public service. And that strange condition has been with me ever since then. Yeah, I think it took a couple of years. Certainly, I didn't have that printout when I was the first year in a junior high. When I did a science fair project that year, the algorithmic compression, actually, it's actually was the IBM patent. But anyway, the compression method that I did the research on, I do it mostly by my own research and I didn't exchange any letters with researchers. And when I'm on my second year in middle school, my science fair project was natural language processing and reasoning inference logic. And for that, because it's a very cutting edge research domain, there's a scarcity of printed books available and most of the research is taking place online for natural language processing. So I had no choice but to learn English and then write to the researchers for my science fair project. So really, I think without the Y-Web community, it would be impossible for me to formulate a case that there is actually something like a institution except, of course, free of admission fee or you have to bring is an email address. Yeah, I think my main inspiration at that time is definitely just the people, random people that I met online. I was fascinated by this research question. Why do people trust each other so easily online and form social movements such as the blue ribbon movement where people exchange links on their home pages or the web masters exchange those links to support for the freedom of speech and so on online, which would lead directly to, well, section 230 currently being debated very hardly in the US and all this community that's brought up from the web is really counterintuitive if you think about it because we've never met each other yet we treat each other as families and so that's very interesting a phenomena and there's really no good explanation and when I want to understand why this work, the only way for me to work is an interdisciplinary approach and the participatory approach means that I have to code up such spaces myself and for example, I participated in the first C2C what we call CoolBit, a eBay-like auction website, the first one in Taiwan and so through this kind of work of interaction design I was then able to witness firsthand what's the pro-social parts in social networks and the antisocial part too. Yeah, my first personal computer was a piece of A4 paper and I drew using a pen, the Q-W-E-R-T-Y keyboard and I would wake up and use a pencil I would press C-L-S Enter and write with my pencil C-L-S and take an eraser and erase everything that I wrote the previous day so that's how I learned programming with just an introduction book I think Apple II Basic or something but with no personal computer Later on, of course, I would actually encounter an actual Apple personal computer as well as, of course, IBM PC clones I lost your voice, you're muted I lost you at... actually That's right, and I don't like touch screens I never like touch screens All my primary computing devices either were through a keyboard or through a stylus so that's PalmPilot, SharpZaurus nowadays I use a Galaxy Note and also Apple Pencil, of course and all this, I think, began when I started drawing my own keyboard, so to speak Definitely I didn't apply for the position we invited ourselves in when we occupied the parliament for three weeks in 2014 in an occupied movement called the Sunflower Movement At the time, the parliament was having a conversation about the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement or CSSTA and the parliamentarian were refusing to deliberate substantially because of their interesting constitutional interpretation Well, the idea is that when they don't do the substantial deliberation people took their seat to do whatever we voted them to do in their workplace, I guess and so people occupied the parliament to deliberate on the CSSTA and more than 20 NGOs each deliberating on one particular aspect for example about whether we need to allow components from the PRC into the then new 4G infrastructure Again, a conversation people are having now worldwide but anyway, we had that conversation back then with half a million people on the street and many more online and through listening and scale through the kind of technologies alluded to through social interaction design we managed to get a very firm set of rough consensus on the street which was then ratified by the head of the parliament and then also the cabinet later on and so that gave us a sense of demonstration not as a protest but as a demo it showed people it is actually possible for everyday population in the citizenry to have a real conversation about a very large issue such as the trade agreement and so at the end of that year all the mayor candidates that supported the open government won, sometimes surprisingly to them and all the mayor candidates that didn't support well didn't get elected and so the reverse mentorship system was instated where the cabinet at the time recruited people younger than 35 years old I was 33 at that year as reverse mentors to members of the cabinet essentially as intense but also showing the new direction of what crowdsourcing, what open data what open government can bring to the cabinet members so I worked with Jacqueline Tsai, a minister at the time and so after Dr. Tsai when became the president I got I guess promoted from an intern into a full-time minister and ever since then I think the main change in the cabinet is what nowadays we call digital transformation what we understand is that the digitalization is not just about digitization it's not just about turning face-to-face or paper and pen into digits rather it's about making sure that innovation from the society gets governed in a collaborative fashion so that we can include more people and including non-voters and including future generations into the democracy essentially prior to the sunflower occupy people didn't see democracy itself as a digital technology but in the past three years or so eventually we come to see in the entire cabinet and also in the population that democracy is a digital technology like any digital technology it gets better when people participate well definitely I think when we first had our presidential election that was 1996 we are very aware of what it would be like if we have no freedom of press and freedom of assembly because that was the martial law days which continue until the late 80s and so when the martial law was lifted freedom of speech assembly, the press and so on enabled the social sector which includes the social entrepreneurs the co-ops, the charities and so on basically the prototypes of the NGOs that would eventually occupy the parliament in 2014 to gain legitimacy on placemaking and this is a point I think people in Japan would relate that any time there is a major earthquake any time there is a major typhoon of which there is many in the year except this year where we didn't get any typhoon but anyway on average we get many chances for those social sector organizations to work together on disaster relief on humanitarian work and things like that and so that improved the social communication on placemaking because it's everybody's business so everybody helps and that has been like that since at least the 80s and so when the presidential election happened in late 90s the social sector organizations already have more than one decade of a head start when it comes to legitimacy building so even today when there is a natural disaster when the Ministry of Interior publish a number and the largest charity publisher number people tend to believe the charity's number and that builds a legitimate structure that starts with the social sector so that the people in the government no matter which Ministry they work in they always have to trust the citizens because the citizens are seen as more legitimate and the largest NGOs and largest charities more wise I guess because they exist in a like non-election non-partisan influence timescale and it has been able to build intergenerational solidarity something that's kind of difficult for a four-year term politicians to do as I mentioned the social sector really had a lot of very good ideas and the community placemaking is important too for example in a very early on we understood that if three-quarter of people wear this physical vaccine and have good hand sanitation habits then the R value will be under one meaning that the disease will not spread well how do we make sure that people understand really how to use the mask and clean their hands properly we worked with the community pharmacists about 6,000 of them each not only have the professional credentials but trusted by the community and the elderly for example often frequented the pharmacies because they have chronic conditions that they refuel their prescriptions to manage their condition so we deliberately designed our mask rationing experience to be exactly the same as refilling a chronic prescription and so in that sense because the elders really trust the pharmacists when the pharmacists say if you wear a mask make sure you do this this this otherwise the mask doesn't work then make sure they remember it and then just spread the word really to their neighbors, to their friends and to their younger family members that is what enables the community resilience when it comes to the proper mask use but also publishing the availability of medical masks in the pharmacies in real time every 30 seconds is also essential because first it builds trust it's like a distributed ledger people queuing in line can make an account of however many the masks that people queuing before them have swiped their national health insurance card and purchased and checked it on their own phone with a chatbot or a voice assistant or a mob and because of that people believe that each other are acting in a fair fashion and when data analysis experts look at real time numbers they can suggest better distribution strategies for 24 hour convenience store pickup to make sure that the rural places that people pay the same amount of time instead of just physical distance to access the mask and so on and all of those continuous improvements were done not only through parliamentary interpolations or the feedback from the unions and associations of pharmacists but also through anybody just calling the toll free number 1922 and tell us the good idea of the social innovation yeah for example how would we know that people are really washing their hands thoroughly in addition to wearing a mask where you can look at the total water use SCADA measurements in the operation technology and we do actually look at that because it has no privacy infringement worries it is thoroughly anonymous but we do look at how much people are using the water basins and the continuous throughput of that especially in schools and so on and it's very inspiring that people do wash their hands much more thoroughly when we introduce the cute dog a Shiba Inu the name is Zhong Chai and teaching people how to wash their hands properly there's even a song about it but anyway so I think cute dogs really is intergenerational if people see a cute dog and the name Zhong Chai saying that you wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand use a soap, wash your hand frequently this has a very high R value online the younger people is happy sharing this to the older people the elderly people when receive this is happy to share the poster around it has no digital gap because a cute dog well nobody could be against a cute dog and this is what we call humor over rumor I think the COVID has shown that our procurement strategy we instated four years ago which is called an API first procurement strategy has paid real dividends previously in Taiwan we have a long tradition of universal access and accessibility if a system integrator build a website or a service and say this is only for people with sight but if people who work with blind people people with blindness and so on cannot access this website if they say oh you have to pay me 10 times more 2 times more for the procurement to work actually they could get disqualified for being unprofessional and discriminate against people with blindness and we piggybacked on that clause four years ago saying that if you build only a website useful for human beings but if you cannot talk in open API that's machine to machine interface as standardized by the Linux foundation and we used open API version 3 at the time still at beta but we say this is going to be our national standard if any system integrator say oh I can only work with human users but not robots well they could be also disqualified for discriminating against robots well we don't quite say that but the effect is that and so because of that all the procurement systems after that are done in a way that already have a API first description so that the modularity of the systems can be ensured so when we for example needed a mask rationing system to work online on the mobile phone we just plugged the API from the national health insurance app into the API of the tax filing software for personal income taxes and in just 72 hours those API match and then you can start pre-ordering in convenience stores for picking up the masks on your phone and when we want to issue the triple stimulus vouchers which essentially enable you to spend 3,000 NT dollars and withdraw from your nearby frankly automated tele-machine to third of that back as a cash back again we can just modify that piece of software and hook in the API of the convenience stores terminals and so on and so all this showed that while the work the demand is more complex if you have good API first building blocks that have already passed cybersecurity inspections, penetration testing defense adapts and things like that then you can just assemble them when the situation costs for it and my job is not actually more complicated because the complexity is managed by those API building blocks yeah and if they think it's not being taken care of we're just 1, 2, 3 number away they can call us saying oh you're giving me pink medical mask I'm a boy, I don't want to wear it to school and then the next day everybody on the press conference will wear pink medical masks and so the boy becomes the most hip boy in the class yeah one example is the mask availability map was initially prototype using the Google map API the places API to be precise which enables such a rapid prototyping the problem was of course the young civic technologist the name is Howard Wu who prototyped this just you know went to lunch and his map went to the national news by the time he finished lunch he already owe Google I think 20k US dollars in API usage fees and so that's a real challenge for him so then he shared on the gov0 g0v.tw which is the equivalent of code for Japan in Taiwan saying that okay I owe Google a lot of money what should I do is there a way to save money and of course people from the open street map community from many other communities chimed in but I'm also one of the civic technologists on the channel so I immediately just called up the premier's office and later on in I think the very next day I would show the premier the work that Howard will have done and say we have to support them no matter what and so what's important is then for Google their CSR department to be precise recognize the importance of this cross-sectoral collaboration not only they waived the API fee but also they supported through the Google developer group in Tainan the development to make this thing work not only in convenience stores but also in pharmacies later on of course there will be more than 100 different implementations including by the HTC team for a line chatbot and also eventually the Google assistant Siri and things like that so all the different enterprise contributors all chimed in because of the great public cost that this essentially a massive hackathon is having on the society but really if not for the Google developer group's initial kindness and the initial recognition of the importance of this community work then it would take Howard much more time and resources to get this prototype started and so I think in-kind dedications such as this is very essential and important Yes Yes Yes Well I'm working with the Taiwanese government but I'm not working for the Taiwanese government I'm working with the people and not for the people I see myself more like an ambassador from the internet community which is a worldwide community even extraterrestrial I hear that they are building 4G telecom towers on moon now but anyway a truly interplanetary community that makes this digital infrastructure together is made in the world and then independent countries of course may choose the terms upon which to negotiate with the internet community but my allegiance is first and foremost to the internet open innovation community and so when GovZero worked with Kofu Japan on the Mandarin translation for the stop COVID-19 Tokyo Metropolitan Dashboard actually I'm just one of the many translators and I'm mostly working in a proof reading fashion because as you mentioned I don't have so much time to work on this but when I noticed that the people who worked on the dashboard did a bulk import of the spreadsheet of the translations they forgot the first row the first row is the name of the languages so the Taiwanese Mandarin for example is rendered as a Nihongo character T which is a different ideograph in Taiwan using much more strokes and so because of that I just noticed this when they bulk imported the translation lexicon and because my specialization is actually in internationalization and localization and so I just found their dictionary JSON file or was it the YAML file anyway it doesn't matter and then change the data structure so that particular character is reflected but it's just a one character change and most of the work were done by the GovZero people which I again consider my primary community yeah sure so GovZero which started in 2012 this brilliant domain hack all the government websites in Taiwan ends with something.gov.tw so the GovZero people register something.g0.v.tw so for each and every government digital service that you don't like instead of just shouting and protesting about it well you can fork it and so the call to action of GovZero is to fork the government important pronunciation fork the government and so for all the digital services for example the national participation portal is join the Gov.tw if you change O to a zero then you get into the shadow government which is always more fun and open source and relinquishing most of the copyright so when the government think hey it's a good idea to visualize the budget or to visualize the regulatory pre-announcements and so on when it's prototype of zero at any given time the government can say okay it's a good idea let's merge the fork and just take it and become the mainstream government services which is exactly what Gov.Japan did for the Tokyo metropolitan government because they just built a website on github and all they ask is an official domain name which eventually they got from the Tokyo metropolitan government certainly so when I first become the digital minister there were no digital ministers in Taiwan before so I kind of have to write my own job description so always start with a good job description because you only have one chance in writing that and in the job description the most important thing is to make sure that people understand that digitalization is about connecting people to people IT or ICT information and communication technology is connecting machine to machines but that's just the means the goal is to connect people to people which is digital so to make sure that people understand the difference between IT and digitalization my job description is literally a poem which goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it the 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 when we hear the singularity is near that us always remember the plurality is here so if I'm having an advice for the Japanese equivalent maybe write some I don't know Haiku or anything that makes it easy for people to remember definitely in Taiwan we have more than 20 national languages the majority of which are indigenous also the sign language is a official language too the reason why that we take so much so much time to get the national languages act right is that we want to make sure that there is nothing that we do about people without the people's participation so diversity is what you see on the surface but the value is really about inclusion about making sure that even people who are previously accustomed of having a conversation in Mandarin or understand mathematical logic behind the everyday algorithms and so on can all using whatever tradition they have maybe is an oral tradition about the spirit of the mountains and the rivers and they can use these metaphors which is great for sustainability actually to make their own arguments and to make sure that in the councils in the legislation and so on there is sufficient number of assistive intelligence around that will resonate their ideas with everybody else and so when we have a trans cultural view on any emerging phenomena it's far easier than to settle on universal common values that are fundamentally human values but if one culture dominate over the others then it's very easy to make biased choices in the name of progress while sacrificing alternate points of view so just like biodiversity cultural diversity is important if you want to make your work sustain across generations a lot of people think that for the new immigrants in Taiwan we need to be even more friendly and I totally concur there is also people who argue that the younger generation are getting more and more comfortable with English so even though English is at the moment not a national language in the national languages act maybe 10 years down the road we can make English a working language too and so we can always use more diversity and while of course we are the first country in Asia to legalize marriage equality it's not all about marriage only there is also the right of intersex of transgender people and things like that of course we are continuing the way now it's the values that they need to instill in us because it's always the younger generation showing the direction of the future and the older generation I'm older than 35 now I no longer qualify as a reverse mentor so I have my own reverse mentor younger than 35 now showing me the direction of the future and I think what's important is that even for people below 18 years old below the age of consent or voting age actually these are the people that care the most about the future because they will be at the receiving end of climate change and other systemic issues and so they tend to have the most ability and motivation to mobilize and that can be seen in our national participation platform the most active group is people around 15 years old and then the next one is around 65 years old I guess these two groups both care about the next generation and also have a lot of time on their hands apparently intergenerational solidarity is important and the other thing is that we need to make sure that the younger people think themselves not as consumers of media or consumers of narratives or of data and that's why starting last year we removed the term literacy from our curriculum for the K-12 because when you say media literacy you kind of assume that it's the adults the people who have power to make TV series to make radio stations and things like that and the younger people just listen or just watch and that's what literacy means because it's a kind of one way flow but nowadays because in Taiwan broadband is human right each and every young person anywhere in Taiwan they're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second broadband both ways are limited for just $15 a month otherwise it's my fault so each and every one of them are capable media producers anytime they can just start a live stream and they become essentially news workers and so because of that they need to learn everything that a news worker learns which is journalistic and so on and all of this cannot be taught by a standardized answer way all of this need to be learned in a way that is participatory for example fact-checking each and every presidential candidates during our presidential debates and forums last December and this January a lot of middle schoolers and even some presidents they need to learn a lot of middle schoolers and even some primary schoolers participated in the fact-checking team working with professional media workers and so that is what I mean by media competence and the same goes for data if they can produce data curate and steward the data on air pollution water pollution everyday measurements then they also learn what does it mean to have a joint data control a ship what does GDPR really mean what does it mean to be able to teach unless you are in a data steward position and so just build competence and let them lead away and they can instill the newer better values in us the older people yes and that is reverse mentorship we invite them in to the cabinet and also to each and every city council and ministry and so on so that they can at any given time themselves with 20-some things running the show and inviting teenagers to the workshop and just as you described to surface any local like economic issue or a global climate change issue or labor conditions or plastic waste anything that they care about they can hold up such a deliberative workshop and not only are those workshops funded by the use development agency in our ministry of education but actually we would ask the public servants to respond point by point to the consensus information that is scattered by those deliberative workshops so this has been going on for quite a while I think for at least a decade and it really instilled in people who are not even 18 years old this feeling that democracy is something that they can participate and they can change and so not only do they vote more but also they know that it's not just about voting for people it's also about choosing the budgetary items about innovating the sandbox system about getting a team running on the presidential hackathon about starting a citizens initiative on the joint platform which is nowadays also a civics class assignment from many different middle schools and so on and so all this makes sure that they become citizens even before that they reach the age of 18 yes and that's every Wednesday every Wednesday I'm in the social innovation lab making sure that anyone can walk into the park is essentially a park because we took down all the walls and just talk for 40 minutes at a time the only thing that I ask is that it's radically transparent meaning that it will always be on the record as either a transcript or a video or radio, maybe I should do radio so this is the social innovation lab and people do come in and because as you have seen this is very creative architecture public art made by people with Down syndrome so people who come in automatically become more creative and get inspired for example the mayor of Prague city when he first visited his cabinet just climbed on the structure it's not designed for climbing by the way and because they're so inspired they just do that and fortunately it's very sturdy material and then people who see for example shopping carts really self-driving vehicles can work on the digitization innovation governance and inclusion of the co-domestication and together solve the alignment and accountability problem for the self-driving vehicles and so on so the open office office is an invitation for everybody in the society to think about what kind of ideas if spread and understood by a majority of people like wearing masks can have a systemic change effect on the society for the better oh it's very diverse I think the oldest group was a group of 5 or 6 and the average age in that group was 80 years old if not older and they work on the framing of calligraphies so I still have some calligraphies that they send me as a gift and they are very happy that we have a universally accessible elevator and an air bridge and so on very very friendly for people in wheelchairs and so on and the youngest group I think is around 6 to 7 years old kindergarten and also first year in the primary school work with their teachers to interview me and they have some very good questions yeah one of them asked what would be the future of humanity if we think outside of earth one of them heard that there's a group of people building embassies for aliens and they want to know my take on it are there extra terrestrials and to which I responded of course just look at the international space station there's quite a few ETs there and so on right but they are very creative definitely I think in particular around digital learning and digital working are the two transformations that because of covid has rapidly accelerated in both Taiwan and Japan I remember the workshop that I held I think it was last year before the covid on teleworking and people were kind of pessimistic about whether Japan can truly adopt teleworking even with 5G technology but nowadays I'm like wow Japan has really embraced teleworking and it has become a norm and all this kind of lingering ideas about for example having to travel all the way to the office to apply the official seal now has kind of faded away because of covid people understand that electronic seal or electronic signature is actually much more safe and more fun too because we can get more variations and because we had that change for the seal and also teleworking starting 2015 and finished the transformation by 2017 or so I mean we lead the way that's true but not too much we still remember very vividly how it was 4 years ago or 5 years ago so there's a lot of ways that we can work together now for telecare that's something that Japan leads the way because well your aging situation leads ours to enable people who are very senior to still contribute meaningfully to the society through assistive technology that is something that Taiwan can definitely learn from Japan but for these two things to work across distance but also still feeling very close and to learn with each other including for lifelong learning for the very elderly to teach but also learn from the younger people this I think are shared values by both societies and both society agree that it's ultimately the society 5.0 need to lead industry 4.0 and that is also something that we can collaboratively share with the world because nowadays the world is caught in a kind of dilemma between surveillance capitalism on one side and authoritarian intelligence on the other and the people powered way the collective intelligence way the society 5.0 way I think is not just a middle ground it is actually not left wing it's up wing it's something that will really lift the humanity up and that argument Japan and Taiwan should make together to the world yes sure I always quote my favorite poem from Leona Cohen and I will quote it again and it goes like this ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there is a crack a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in and I wish you all live long and prosper thank you