 Greetings, friends at GEZ 2018. I'm Autry Tang, talents digital minister. I'm very happy to be here virtually to share with you some stories about social innovation in Taiwan. In the spirit of participation, I would like to ask you to enter this website on your phone, on the browser, slido.com. That's S-L-I-D-O.com. This website will ask you to enter an event code. Please enter 418. That's today's date. It's also my birthday. Once you're in, you can ask me anything. If you see a question from someone else that you would also want me to answer, you can like that question. I will answer the questions right after this talk, starting with the question with the highest number of likes. Unlike many people today, I'm an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the web and my textbooks were all out of date. So I told my teachers, I want to quit school and start my education on the wild web. Surprisingly, the teachers all agreed with it. A year later, I founded a startup working on web technologies and I get to join this fabulous internet community that runs with this crazy idea and open multi-stakeholder political system that runs the internet still today. Today, as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm putting into practice the ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old. Rough consensus, civic participation and radical transparency. Surprisingly, it's working and it's transforming our society. Two years ago, our president, Tsai Ing-wen, said an inspiring statement in her inauguration speech. She said before, democracy was a clash between two opposing values, but now democracy must become a conversation between many different values. Indeed, in conventional thinking, social benefits and business profits, for example, are often opposite forces and contradicted each other, forcing the government to make trade-offs. However, the idea of social innovation brings a brand new way of thinking. For people working on social innovation, the core objective may be achieved by developing business model to address social issues or environmental issues and the government's role has changed. Instead of being the arbiter, torn between different sides, we're now asking a different set of questions. We ask what are our common values despite different positions? And we ask, given the common values, can we find solutions that work for everyone? And this is the spirit of co-creation of social innovation. And civic technology, the branch of technology that enable millions of people to listen to each other instead of just one person to speak to millions of people, is a core ingredient to the social innovation. And indeed, in the past couple of years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked the top country internationally on open data, on internet participation, on women's digital access, digital inclusivity, et cetera. And all this was because we've been adopting open data crowdsourcing as the national direction since 2014. And this was catalyzed and epitomized of an occupied movement that year. There was a live demo for 22 days where we occupied the parliament and did a large deliberation that involved half a million people on the street and many more online. At the time, the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement. And so the occupants got into parliament at night and stayed there. And for 22 days, there were over 20 NGOs participating and we deliberated line by line this agreement with the whole society. We supported this deliberation with a radically transparent broadcasting, live streaming logistic system, which we exported to Hong Kong later that same year and was powered by this community called GovZero. GovZero is a civic tech community with the call to fork the government. By fork, we mean we take the government website and services, which all ends in gov.tw and make better open alternatives and donate into the public domain that ends in g0v.tw. For example, the annual national budget is 100 pages long in the PDF file and it's very hard to read. And the GovZero community's very first project was budget.g0v.tw, which shows the national budget in a way that everybody understand and can drill down to each and every budget details. Today, the system is adopted by seven city governments and you can just get into the part of the budget that you care and engage in a real-time conversation with public service. And as of this month, we have also officially adopted the system to the project tracking system today in the central government joined the Gov.tw so one can merge back this contribution from the Gov.Zero community into the national government. So why are there so many severe hackers in Taiwan that at the time of Occupy said to my clients like Apple, Oxford University Press, saying, okay, we have to take a three-week leave because democracy needs me? I think it's because our generation, M37 today, we are the first, first generation that enjoy the freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship. The freedom arrived in 1989, the year of personal computers. So for us, the personal computer revolution and freedom of speech occurred in the same year. Our first presidential election by popular vote in 1996 is also the year that the World Web got popular. So internet and democracy, they're not two things. It's one and the same thing in Taiwan. So for the past 30 years, when we see free software, we always think of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom from censorship, freedom from surveillance and never free of cost because we know that freedom is never free of cost. Our parents and grandparents generation paid the early for the freedom and we need to use the freedoms, the software freedoms to keep it free. And the movement caused a revolution at a peaceful one. There was a radical transformation of social expectations at the end of that year. And many occupiers found themselves elected mayors when they do not expect it. Because of this, there's a new premier at a time that says from now on crowdsourcing and open data, they're just going to be the national direction. And the civic tech people who supported the occupiers, such as yours truly, were then invited as mentors and advisors to the public service to solve new emerging social issues like Uber. Uber is very interesting because it is a innovation that is also a meme, a virus of the mind. At the time it's called sharing economy. And it says that algorithm code dispatch cost better than loss. So we don't have to obey loss. And the meme spread through apps from drivers to passengers to drivers, it's just like a flu. And you can't really argue with the meme, just like you can't argue with the flu because it's not the same category. So there's protests that taxi drivers surrounded the Ministry of Transport demanding negotiation. But how do we negotiate with the virus of the mind? For us, the solution is through a deliberation that involves thousands of stakeholders. And the idea is that thinking deeply about something together is a effective vaccine against PR, against virus of the mind. When everyone, passengers and drivers, academics and public servants listen to one another and form a consensus, we can collectively find our common values in a way forward. A proper deliberation with a focused conversation method involves four stages. The first stage is Fox, where we collect evidence, first on experience and objective data. And then after that is confirmed, we move to collect everybody's feelings about those in Fox. You may feel angry and I may feel happy and it's okay. So after people converge on their feelings that resonates with everybody, we talk about ideas. The best ideas are the one that address the most people's feelings. Then we translate those into legalese and sign them into law, into regulations. However, if the decision making process is not transparent, then people on the street will have a different set of facts and speak a different language than people in the policymaking process. So they're not even agreeing on basic facts, let alone each other's feelings. In that situation, ideas often become ideologies, an even more potent virus of the mind that they can blind people to new facts and to each other's feelings. So our first step is open data that's making all the facts available and ask the private sector and the civil society to share what they have. And next, we created an interactive survey using a AI dialogue system called PELIS to ask about how citizens feel. Four groups of people soon emerged, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers and other passengers. The PELIS system automatically shows each group how their shared sentiments are received by other people and other groups. And the interesting thing is, it lowers people's antagonism because you see all these people on different sides. They are your social media friends and you just didn't talk about this over dinner. So at the beginning, the people were on the different corners, pretty polarized, but because we say we give fighting power to anything that people can propose that convince the majority of all the different groups. So participants converge on feelings that resonate not only with like-minded people, but across the aisle. So instead of distracting people using only divisive statements and trolling as many social media is prone to, we use this new kind of AI power space to focus people's energy on consistent statements that resonates with people and people refine it until we get a set of feelings that resonates with practically everybody. Now it becomes easier then for the government to meet with all the stakeholders and check with them one by one. Here is the consensus of the people. Do you agree? If you do agree, how do we translate that into a new law? Because in a live stream environment, they're bound to the words that they said during the consultation. The stakeholders eventually agreed. When we ratified their agreements in August 2016, everybody know that it's coming. Everybody anticipated it and now Uber operates entirely legally under the new framework, but so did the taxi companies who are now adopting the same motive that Uber is using for dispatching its costs. So this method really works. And the next question is, can we scale this process of listening? Can we scale it out to reach more people? Can we scale it up to accommodate more people at the same topic? Can we scale it deeply so that it becomes a new culture of public service? So right after the ratification in 2016, I joined the cabinet as the digital minister to explore this possibility through PDIS, the public digital innovation space. We're like the policy labs in the UK where a digital service at a national level with designers, programmers, policy experts, we're automating away a lot of this chores that the public service are doing in order to make participation possible and fun. So it is a culture that we're bringing into the government. For example, I'm a radically transparent digital minister or the lobbyists or the journalists, everybody can get to ask me questions by only answer publicly. So if I get a question from private correspondents, I will reply and say, if it's okay to give my answers publicly, if they're not okay with it, then I will just paste them the link to where my previous statements on. And it also covers internal meetings for all of the hundreds of internal meetings that I have chaired since I was the minister, everything was transcribed and published to the internet. There was this written record for everything everybody said during the meetings and after 10 working days of collaborative editing would publish everything. The effect of this is very surprising. The bureaucracy actually becomes very innovative and risk-taking. They propose some very good ideas under this new condition. That's because previously, before I introduced this kind of radical transparency, the public service would get the blame if things goes wrong and the minister gets all the credit if something goes right. But with this completely accountable record, if things go right, well, they share the credit because the journalists will find the names on it. But because it's an experimental method, if things go wrong, it's all my fault. And so it becomes very innovative and people became open to a lot of interesting ideas such as adopting a startup entrepreneur standard toolkit of remote collaboration, like Sastorm, like Etherpad, Trello, like Slack, and all these free communication tools, we find their open source counterparts and install it using it in the public service. And we were able to find our cybersecurity department and a lot of Whitehead hackers to ensure the safety of the underlying sandbox system so that we're free from cybersecurity attacks and issues. So we have a lot of interesting systems just developed by young public servants like an app to order lunch together, to plan traveling together, whatever, and it's really good to have this choice. Based on this remote collaboration network, we have this E-Petition platform as a way for people to participate. To the public, it's like the We The People platform in the US. However, we did an improvement on it by focusing on cross-ministry issues. Whereas before, people would just get those very blank, beautiful answers that doesn't really solve their problem, but just explain why one single ministry can't do much about it. We sent a virtual team of at least one person per ministry, so about 50 people online. We assembled this virtual team of participation officers or POs, and they specialize in online and offline engagement. So now in Taiwan, when people started petition, they know that instead of just a beautiful written response, they can actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries in Taipei, or we will also travel to the rural areas and islands if they're petitioning for local development. So we solve a lot of very interesting problems like this without exposing any public servant to risk. For example, we have a petitioner, Las Main, who petitioned that for Mac users and Linux users, the national income tax filing software is explosively unfriendly to use. And so instead of just explaining the problem, we invite all the people who complain the loudest and to co-create the new tax filing system this year. And through this kind of co-creation, people in the public learn that they can contribute their expertise, not just as complaints, but as co-creation efforts. And this is the way we're collaborating with the civic sector through participation officers. We're building a robust environment suitable for social innovations to grow, where the power of civil society could be brought into the national stage in full play. And the venue where we hold these collaboration meetings, the Social Innovation Lab is also itself a product of co-creation. More than 100 social entrepreneurs were invited at the inauguration of this space to communicate their conceptions and expectations. As such, we achieve a blended consensus and created a space that morphs to fulfill everyone's purposes. For example, it stays open until the midnight, until 11 p.m. and so do the cafe and kitchen. And the resident chef to connect everybody through food was also arranged by popular demand. Moreover, I personally provide a mentorship office hour at the lab every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. As long as my visitors agree to have our conversation posted online, anyone interested in social innovation is welcome to have a discussion with me. And the different regional cities, social enterprises and the innovators are also able to leverage this facility by joining me in a bi-weekly regional talk. In this regional round table, as you can see here, people gather around me and I bring the live streaming equipment so that more than 12 different ministries in Taipei also join in this virtual connected room so that all the related ministries are there and can quickly resolve issues brought up by the regional social innovators. And once the people in Taipei solve it, the other ministries then also understand okay, so this problem is to be resolved in this kind of way thereby providing a virtual team that is cross ministry and can respond quickly to any issues. For example, the Gavzero Air Pollution Observation Network is such a grassroots movement that gained national spotlight. By combining the diversified talents in the civil society in the academia and private sector and the public sector, this project utilized this air quality sensor Airbox which is becoming very popular. It applied those IoT sensors in a sense of fusion fashion so that all the interested people can acquire with very little expense any real-time air quality information of their local schools, balconies or even in the office. So little by little and bit by bit more than 2,000 contributors accumulated a massive database which is closer to the air quality in actual places where people are active. An exceptional advantage of Taiwan is the full support is the rejection of the government. As soon as we learn about this effort, we allocated a forward-looking infrastructure plan that allocates more than $5 billion NT dollars with a four-year budget for the IoT for public good. So it starts with air pollution, but also meteorology, water resources, earthquake, disaster relief, all those massive amount of data are integrated into the high-speed computing environment so that we can collaboratively compare the models of the academics and discover the correlations between social activities and environmental phenomena in real time. We're also working with the private sector and the Industrial Technology Research Institute to assist with the manufacture of domestic, affordable, high-quality sensors so that communities can yield data of a higher accuracy. And why does Taiwan government encourage such social innovation? Because currently there's many misunderstanding between government and the people due to lack of transparency. Establishing an effective dialogue about public policy is difficult until the source of daily air pollution are disclosed to the whole society in a trustworthy fashion. So we also distribute to the ledger to store this information so that we are very proud that AirBond's related products and services has been introduced to all over the world by uniting the strengths of both the government and the public. Taiwan proved to be capable of not only solving our own social problems, but also providing such solutions to other countries in similar situations as a reference. Moreover, we have a sandbox law design so that if you experiment in FinTech, in AI, in autonomous driving or vehicles, you can apply for a systematic experimentation for six months to 12 months to up to four years and you can get to break the law during the experimentation period. But the law is meant to be broken in a way that achieves the common good for the society so that during the experiments we will assemble a multi-stakeholder panel that lets people to experiment with this new technology for six months and collectively decide using civic tech consensus gathering methods whether the society thinks this technology is good for society moving forward or is a really bad idea. If it's a good idea, then the regulators and the laws gets changed because of social innovators. And if it's not a good idea, well, at least the risk is cut and it paid the tuition for everybody else so that we can try a different model the next time. And through this way, Taiwan realizes our duty and our responsibility to the international community by developing and focusing not on only just one or two sustainable development goals but concurrently on all the sustainable development goals and focus on SDG 17s which is cross-sectoral, international and cross-discipline collaboration. The idea of developing this kind of collaboration technology is that voting like two bits per four years is a very low bandwidth communication. It's very easy, everybody can do it but there's just not much bits of information. On the other hand, hecticism like occupying the parliament is very expensive and we can't do this for every major public decision. So we need to build a ladder of expertise by sharing more real-time open data by having interactive public Q&A forums by setting up binding, petitioning and discussion processes and by bringing the technology to people instead of asking disadvantaged people to use new technology. We're building a deliberation system that takes care of proper access as human rights that scales to all the levels of the society. And through this, we're building a unified democracy not hijacked by ideologies and efficient democracy that responds to the demands of the society and the empathetic democracy that lets people take care of each other's feelings. And we do this by listening and building civic technologies that help us listen to one another. So let's all keep listening to each other and I welcome you to join us in Taiwan for the 2018 GEC Plus. We welcome friends from all over the world to participate and join us with the spirit of sharing a collaboration with an open attitude and a collaborative approach combined with the power of innovation we can meet the sustainable development goals together. So thank you for listening and let's now take some questions.