 Good local time, everyone. This is Audrey Tong, House Digital Minister. It is my great pleasure to be virtually here at the opening session of the 2021 Tsukuba Conference for Future Shapers. Now the theme of this year's Tsukuba Conference is inclusive innovation for the new normal, which I believe is very timely at this moment. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and many parts of the world have endured more than one year of closures, of lockdowns, and other pandemic restrictions, we're now facing with a very real possibility that this scenario may eventually recur and become the new normal. Now we need to continuously find ways to deal with the challenges that confront the global population. Well, there is never an easy way to tackle these emerging challenges, but I do see opportunities arise among the biggest global crisis of our time. One of the lessons that a pandemic has taught us is that instead of striving for the most cutting edge technologies, like stronger, faster, higher tech, it is more important now to bring everyone together. Digital technology is coming handy during the pandemic era, and of course beyond. As the digital minister of Taiwan, I have some interesting experiences to share in this regard. Since the end of the Second World War, Taiwan has transformed itself from the relatively simple agricultural society with all powers monopolized by one dominating ruling party to today, a state of a vibrant social, cultural, and political pluralism. The first direct presidential election was held in 1996, and that was just the year where the war well became really popular. The small islands of Taiwan proved to have major advantages in deploying internet connectivity with our size just a little bigger than the US state of Maryland, and a population approximately the same as Australia. Since 1998, Taiwan has been planning the digital government and has successfully completed various stages of digital government programs. And today, this idea of broadband as a human right is firmly at the core of the government's policy. President Tsai Ing-wen announced a platform of Digital Nation Smart Island during her first election campaign in 2016. And the very next year, we launched the Digital Nation and Innovation Economic Development Program, or the DIGI, DGPLUS. And this year, we've operated to the Smart Nation Program with the vision of a Smart Nation for innovation, inclusion, and sustainability by 2030. Now, our vision of a Smart Nation 2030 reveals a new direction for our digital governance policy. Any innovation in our modern world must be pluralistic and inclusive with sustainable development as its goal. And this means that it is no longer the case that the government is formulating policy from the top down. We're no longer dictating new development paths for industries or directing people to shiny new public services, but rather we must be receptive to building ecosystems of what I call people-public-private partnerships. To address problems, we need to be guided by the needs of the people. And indeed, in our pluralistic society, people's needs are ever shifting and regardless of whether governments are willing to address them timely, there will always be civic technologists willing to tackle new problems with digital innovation. So ever since the establishment of my office, the public digital innovation space, or PEDAS, were a policy lab in Taiwan's cabinet. Since the beginning, we have been dedicated to not only work with the public service, but also work with the citizens so that we can work in the public service through social innovation. For example, we held collaborative meetings around a hundred of them to improve, for example, the online text declaration experience. We also worked with the National Pulse Museum to build the new ticketing system. But more than that, we have implemented this into a program called rescueactionbyuse.gov, or REI program. For five years running now, we invited young people year after year to participate in public affairs and encourage them to enhance the experience of our digital services from the perspective of citizens. And this citizen-centered design thinking method have a dedicated annual event called the presidential hackathon, where the winners every year receive a trophy from President Tsai Ing-wen, that carries the promise of realizing their ideas on a national scale. So what we're aiming to do is to establish a mechanism that builds mutual trust based on dialogue between the public sector, the social sector, and the private sector partners. This long running spirit of inclusive innovation plays an important role also in our ongoing fight against the COVID-19 virus. A good example is last year's face mask map. It's initiated by an entrepreneur working with the community called GovZero GZeroV. It's a group of civic technologists. Now, to prevent the panic buying of medical grade face masks, we instituted a national rationing scheme by anticipating that the policy would be insufficient to avoid runs on the pharmacies. We have released a application programming interface, or API, to provide the public every 30 seconds with real-time location-specific data on mask availability. Now, this eventually enabled the creation of the face mask rationing maps. This subsequent 192 to SMS contact tracing system is another brilliant example. We had a wave of infection this May, and we announced a national wide alert level three. So various new mechanisms were invented to minimize public exposure for contact tracing. Businesses introduced their own apps for contact information registration, and the government looked into the experience from the public and the private and the social sectors. And combining their experiences and innovations, we eventually rolled out the SMS-based contact tracing system. Although it's not compulsory, it soon became part of people's lives. And this innovative app-free design by the Gov Zero Civic Tech community proved invaluable. In Taiwan, we have dedicated ourselves to bring technology to the space where citizens live, rather than expecting citizens to adapt to the space of technology. So what we're striving to do is to allow these completely different ends of the spectrum ideas and with markedly different positions to come to the table, to discuss and also to collaborate. So for May, inclusive means taking all the sides. If it's not possible to take all the sides at a moment, well, at least we can listen carefully to all the sides and come to a good enough rough consensus. One practice worth mentioning is the establishment of the one-stop online participation platform, or join the Gov.tw, where anyone can file a petition and participate in budgeting. And face-to-face collaborative meetings are held by the ministries twice a month to explore ways of incorporating ideas from the petitions with more than 5,000 signatures into policymaking. So it is a platform to make sure that literally anyone, not just citizens, but also residents can set the agenda and participate in the decision-making process. In fact, more than a quarter of these initiatives were started by people under 18. For example, the petition to ban plastic straws gradually from our national identity during the bubble tea, well, it was created by a 17-year-girl. So when we're faced with shared challenges that transcends borders, people from various sectors need to work together to explore ways to adapt to the new normal and also to thrive in the new normal. And I believe inclusive innovation is the way to achieve this. And moreover, I do believe that inclusive innovation is going to be the new normal. Finally, let me share with you my job description when I joined the cabinet as a digital minister. 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 whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you all for listening. Live long and prosper.