 So I'm super excited to introduce Audrey. Many of you probably know Audrey and her work as a digital minister. I got to know the work when she showed up on the 50, at A Political we run an Agile 50 list in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and showed up as one of the most agile people as did Sim in the world revolutionizing government. We have some others here, I'm sure who would be candidates for that. So really appreciate the perspective, the freshness, the transparency that you bring. So Audrey over to you. Thank you and good local time everyone. I'm really happy to be here talking about digital social innovation. I think the three pillars, fast, fair and fun to work with the people, not for the people provides the answer to really the first question, what was our best decision to do in digitalization? I would definitely say around 2016 when we classified digital public infrastructure as eligible for infrastructure money period. And that I think brought a renewed interest in pro-social social spaces on the digital realm, the digital equivalent of town halls and Hyde Park, right? Libraries, museums and so on. So our citizens are not forced to use the digital equivalent of nightclubs with smokefield rooms intoxicating drinks, private bouncers, Facebook for public conversations. And so, for example, in 2019 December when Dr. Lee Wenliang, young Dr. Fang Wu Han posted that there were seven SARS cases in the Chinese market on PTT, the Taiwanese social media, which is free of advertisers and shareholders. That's the only place around the world that actually triaged and escalated the issue. So we started health inspections on the very next day. So that provided the time model of countering the pandemic of no lockdown so far and also the infodamic with no takedowns. And another thing is to invest really in the infrastructure of listening with empathy and skill. So anyone can call this toll-free number 1922 to add to the collective and connective intelligence of counter-pandemic. Like last April when a young boy called 1922 saying, you're rationing out mask, which is great, but I got it with pink ones, which is not great. All the boys in my class have navy blue, medical grade mask. I don't want to wear pink to school, I'm a boy. But the very next day in the daily 2 p.m. press conference, all the medical officers wore pink. The administrator Chen even said pink panther was his childhood hero. So the boy became the most hip boy in the class for only, he has the color that heroes wear and the heroes hero wear. And this iconic picture is a creative commerce licensed, soon gets remixed into internet memes and so on. So pink masks became very fashionable for a while last February and so last April. So the mask rationing part, which I alluded to again, this is a co-creation with a decentralized community, coke of zero, but it's piggybacking on a centralized community, which is the government digital service, or services that ends in something that GOV.TW, they repurpose it to change the O to a zero basically, with the same domain name. So that just by changing one letter into a digit in the browser bar, get into the shadow government, that does the same thing, but that's, so for example, last February when we rationed out the mask, the real time inventories in each pharmacy were displayed by more than 100 different visualization tools. So people don't have to convey and there were no panic buying and come this May, when our face are real first wave, the same bunch of people in GOV.0 forked our contact tracing checking method and introduced this brilliant app free design in your lock screen on your phone, you can just swipe point and then click send SMS. That's it. It sends a toll free SMS to one night two, to that finishes the check in. So no app download required and so on. It's graceful fallback to even the flip phones because you can manually text the 15 digits. And so this show that with real time open data or open API, each and every one person closest to the pain, be them a pharmacist or someone who work on public venues for contact tracing can actually increase the bandwidth of democracy by amplifying their social innovations using exactly some access as the policy context and open data. Of course, it's not just for programmers, the artists and designers. As I mentioned the pink mask thing, it was actually the idea from participation offices dedicated teams embedded within each ministry in charge of engaging the public. So the minister of health and welfare participation officer who suggests the pink panther thing actually lived with this companion dog and they basically just take new picture of the dog whenever there's a rumor and we use this idea of humor over rumor. So that's this internet memes like this dog saying, wear a mask to protect your own face against your own and wash time or explaining physical distance in terms of the sheba in this way from one another soon became much more popular than the conspiracy theories and so on ensuring that people specializing in art in design and so on just as they could use the modeling of our presidential office or our dictionary our national dictionary of more than 20 different national languages or my own portraits or whatever. People can actually know just the why of policymaking the how of policymaking the real time context of policymaking and so on instead of just the what of the policy. So the idea I think is very simple. If people have assistive intelligence power pro social infrastructure does worth investing in then people actually do resonate with one another's feelings and to answer the next question when we develop this process of v Taiwan I think the main shortcoming in hindsight is that we run this conversation as a entirely social sector movement without involving professional public service but when I became the digital minister in 2016 I discovered that actually the career public servants are the one that are most innovative and they see this as really a safe answer with way to listen as scale. So if I time travel back to 2015 when we realized that most people agree with most of each other on most of each other's positions we would definitely open source everything but let the career public service co-create this entire public infrastructure maybe then we will classify it as infrastructure investment a couple of years earlier. So that's my opening keynote. Fantastic, thank you. I love for the folks listening to just write a few if you have any questions we have time for a question for Audrey if you have any or if you have a takeaway something that really struck you about what Audrey said do we have any? Do you have claps coming Audrey? Obviously I was really struck by your use of fast fare and fun and humor over rumor. And I was also really struck by the fact that you said the public servants themselves were the most innovative. I know we often think when you hear the word bureaucrat people are like oh but if you actually talk to people and give them space the bureaucrats are quite innovative. Great, any questions coming from the chat if not Audrey's gonna stay on the panel and we're just gonna roll right into the panel. Thank you very much Audrey we'll come back to you as the audience emerges with some thoughts and comments. Super, so what a great way to start. We started off with listening to you. I was struck by Audrey talking about the infrastructure for listening with more empathy at scale and that's what we wanted to do with you all at the beginning. What is your position on centralization or not? Where is your government when it comes to digitalization which is different than digitization which is about thinking differently about how things work which you can see Audrey has helped lead with others in Taiwan. Now we wanna go to a broader conversation where we're gonna bring in our other panelists. But first what I wanna do is introduce Gerhard Hammersmith. So Gerhard, can you give a wave to everyone? He's the director for the center of digital governance here in my hometown now of Berlin at Herty, Germany. I know Gerhard you're gonna give a quick overview of some of the findings that have come out of Tropico. So Gerhard over to you. Thanks a lot Lisa and very welcome. It's really a great, great pleasure for me to also join this great event today. Which somehow perfectly rounds off our tropical research over the last three, four years. One part of our tropical research which I had the pleasure to coordinate to focus on exactly the question we wanna discuss today with you. How governments in Europe organize and achieve successful collaboration across government organizations in order to achieve digital transformation. I think Audrey very much emphasized these emphasis. I mean, a lot of innovation, a lot of capacity comes from government from civil servants themselves. And we just need to organize or find ways to enable them and to allow them to collaborate together. And this was exactly the focus of our research but it also showed that this collaboration is not easy to achieve. I mean, we've looked at central government projects aiming to build up digital platforms for online services as well as projects to implement smart city strategies. And what we always saw was that coordination bodies spend a lot of energy to mobilize, continuously engage with a large number of partners. They have to cope with different interests, power imbalances, project risks. They need to develop a shared understanding, build trust among the different actors involved. So there's a lot of efforts needed to make intergovernmental collaboration working well and run effectively. We also found clear variations in the progress of digital transformation but also how collaboration is organized. In all instances, however, and we had 10 case studies from five countries which saw efforts to build up a more centralized or to build up more centralized strategies and capacities to drive government digitalization. This somehow is what we would like to discuss with you today. This, of course, is easier in smaller, traditionally more centralized countries such as Estonia and Denmark and great that we have representatives here with us which tend to be ranked top with regard to digital public services but also in Germany, my home country with a much more decentralized governance structure. This question of centralizations of high relevance, the question if you need a digital ministry to allow a more effective centralized steering of government digitalization has become really a hotly fiercely discussed topic here in Germany throughout the last year and that somehow the extreme of centralization that you build up a centralized ministry. I do not want to touch too much more about our research. I mean, we have many interesting insights about these factors to offer. We have developed policy recommendations on how to achieve effective collaboration but I, however, do not want to bore you too much now with the detailed description of our research. You can find all this on our Tropica webpage and you really should make best use of our three fantastic panelists. We have here today with us and they're rich impressive experiences on leading digital transformation in Denmark, in Estonia and Germany. And Lisa, I think you also shortly will introduce our panelists. Am I right? Fantastic and very happy to have Audrey joining the panel too from a Taiwanese from outside of your perspective. So thanks Audrey for that. So what I wanted to do first is introduce you all but not in the way that I think you're always introduced. One of the things I love to do is humanize the bureaucrats by talking about who you really are. So I've asked you all to prepare something that's not in your professional bio that has shaped how or why you do this work, whether it's a digitalization work or whether it's why you're a public servant just to sort of bring the human touch to all of this. So I'm gonna start off with Marcus Richter. Marcus give us a wave. As I said before he's the state secretary at the federal ministry of interior buildings and community and the CTO of Germany. So Marcus what's something in your background that isn't so obvious reading your bio that shapes how you think about this? Well, I've been once in Nairobi, Kenya and there I had the opportunity to work also at a slump project. And this was really touching for me. It was called shoot back. So kids from the slum received a camera and they had to take pictures of their surroundings. And then they had the opportunity to participate in football games. So that's why it's called shoot back. And yeah, it was so touching and moving that I thought it would be great to contribute in a way to make life a little bit better. And I think that's what we are talking about here. You know, digitization is about creating or gaining data and to really implement data-driven processes and to make decisions best better. And this is something which still moves me. Oh, it's great. Thanks Marcus. It adds to the international approach. How can we learn from everyone? And where do we get empathy and how do we bring that into government? So Marcus, thank you for that shoot back from the slums of Nairobi to the CTO of Germany bringing those perspectives in. Sim, I'm gonna go to you. As I mentioned, he is the CIO for the Estonian government in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. Sim, what's in your background? Well, I guess the thing I would point out is actually in my bio too, I'm Estonian. So, by that I mean that look, we are 1.3 million people and that's what really has driven me to do stuff in government and to work on technology. We only have a few shots in this big bad world. And so if we really have to make the most of it, then we have to be good at our game. And that's what drives me. So the size of your country, right? The number of people that are spread and you have rural areas and city areas and you were doing E early in Estonia, correct? Because of geography, is that right? Exactly, and I mean, so I'm really from that generation who were the kids who were the first ones to be brought online back in the 90s, right? So we are the kids who now are unicorn farmers and some of us in government. So, and we really grew up with the sort of mission saying, hey, technology could be the way that Estonia really can do something in the world. Yeah, great. So from public servants to unicorns, the kids that were brought online. Thanks, Sim, for joining. We're going to go over to Denmark, actually up to Denmark, up and over from where I'm at in Berlin, to Nina Hosfeld Klassen. She's the head of division for Danish digitization. So what about your background, Nina? Well, Sim started out by saying he was Estonian and I should perhaps start off by saying that, yes, I'm Danish, but I'm actually a quarter Norwegian as well. And that has a great impact on me and has had from an early childhood because I have been going back and forth between Norway and Denmark and has increasingly seen digital solutions that are enabling our ownership of a small cottage in Norway and enabling the cross country, cross barrier cooperation also between governments in Denmark and Norway. And that has, I guess, opened my eyes for the great possibilities that comes from not only collaborating within national states, but also across national states. Something that the commission is also increasingly working on using digital solutions and digitalization as an enabler for the collaboration across national states. So I guess that's very important for us going forward. Also enabling work, for instance, between and travel and doing business and studying across national states within the European community. Fantastic, Nina. You made a lot of our colleagues from the University of Bergen I think very happy knowing that you're a quarter Norwegian but again, hitting on that topic of geography and identity and collaboration and how that all comes together. Audrey, how about you? What's not in your file that really drives how you think about this work? Well, I don't think I mentioned that I'm a middle school dropout that I dropped out of high school and was 15 years old. That was 1996 and I talked to the head of my school not expecting she to agree to my position that the textbooks were 10 years out of date and I'm able to correspond directly to the researches but much to my surprise head of my school, Principal Du said, okay, it makes sense from tomorrow on you don't have to go to my school anymore. So I may drop out blessed I guess by the head of the school. And at the time there's no homeschooling act in Taiwan. So it really is an act of civil disobedience by a civil servant because she had to fake the records of me attending the school. So that's really imbued in me the sense that there may be career public servants are actually the most innovative people. Wow, 15 dropout. My son's been saying the same things about his textbooks. I'm wondering what's coming next, right, Audrey? I'll tell you, you know, Gerhard and last but not least you. My personal part was not expecting this question. I thought I'm the chair after moderator. For me, I mean, it's really this engagement with the students over the last years. I mean, I always had the fee. I mean, my topic was really public making government better but I increasingly realized, I mean, with digitalization suddenly this topic of making government better and becoming much more attractive for the young students. So five, 10 years ago, nobody of our students wanted to work for government but now with this topic of government digitalization suddenly government has become really attractive anymore again and many students want to work for government again. And I think that's this change over the last five years was so impressive for me. And that was also the reason why we decided to have these Center for Digital Governments established. Fantastic, great. Newly launched too. So let's get into the meat, Gerhard. I'm going to give you the first question to ask our panelists about their poll. Yeah, thanks a lot, Lisa. I mean, you're so perfect moderating the whole thing but I want to continue with a question to our panelists referring to the findings of our first poll we had on the state of digitalization, your government today and how did you answer this first poll question for yourself? So is your country a world leader? Good, but need to go better or a long way to go? And we could see, I mean, the majority of our participants do see their governments not as world leader but still progress or a long way to go. I would like to start, I mean, Marcus. I mean, Germany does not have the reputation for leading the world and government digital transformation but I know how much is going on would be great to have your insights on this question. Yeah, thank you. Well, actually it's clear that we have a long way to go and actually it will always be a long way because we will never be done doing digitization and modernization of governance but we are now in a situation where we have to create more pressure to really make it happening. There are so many decisions which are coming up and we have to face it. All these decisions can't be made by just one profession like lawyers. We have so complex systems, processes. It's very important that we do it in a more agile way to bring all these different professions together. Every decision on a business side has in the end an IT project, it brings an IT project with it and therefore it's important to bring all these different sides together from the very first and I think we have to improve it in Germany and we've seen that is this in different crisis now how the pressure increases when we are not doing this in this agile way. So from my point of view, it's clear we are having multiple stakeholders from my point of view, digitization is not so much a point of IT, it's more a point of the business side. They have to really have this in mind and I found it really interesting what Audrey mentioned, the mindset is so important by doing all this and we have to create this mindset on the business side because they have to reflect their own processes, they have to make decisions and therefore it's clear we have this multiple stakeholder approach, especially in Germany where we have the federalism with the states, the lender and everyone is responsible for something but in the end it all has to fit together and therefore when I talk about a ministry of digitization for instance, what we are thinking about could be an idea. For me it's not so important how it comes out or what if there is an own ministry or is it in the chancellery or wherever but we have to have a centralized steering. This is the important word, steering. It's not taking away the competences of the different ministries and shift it just to one organization. This would be a real mistake because they have to know it's their own purpose and it's their own responsibility to make digitization happening but it's great to have one centralized steering committee and to have a concrete action plan so that everyone knows who's responsible for what and when is time to deliver. Wonderful, thanks a lot. I mean, this is really exactly the heart of what we have been doing in our tropical research. I'm sitting, may I pass over to you? I mean, we all know about Estonia but maybe you have some new insights, what's going on and what the progress is in your country. Yeah, thank you. Well, I was about to say I'm not with a question but I didn't but I rather went for the same thing that Marcus did actually saying that look, we still have a long way to go in Estonia and the point is that, well, so we have been on a digitization journey and I say digitization journey like transforming really public service and administration with technology for the last 20 years. Okay, we've done fair bit. So basically from user point of view, almost anything, any bureaucracy you need to do you can do online yourself as a digital service option for that but that doesn't mean it really means the user needs the best way and I think we only scratched the surface there. So because what we fundamentally have done and even though we've been transforming things along the way as well, we still said even from username we could do more because even if you just somehow make bureaucracy better and more smoother, the fundamental core public service in many ways is still not changed. Think about how we teach children in schools even if we do it from remotely now but fundamentally we still basically had a classroom mode in many ways or think about how doctors treat the patients in the hospital even if they have all this sort of digital data and devices and tools and stuff available, fundamentally it still very much happens in the most ways. So my point being that that's why I'm very humble in a sense of what we have achieved with stuff on the surface and it's been powerful change but there's still so much more to do especially as technology moves ahead your new front just come from that all the time. I mean, we all, there's so much talk about artificial intelligence for example, again, we have only scratched the surface even though we happen to be in Estonia front runner in this. So that's why I would like to be very practical and say that there's so much more to do and I especially wanna say that I think as one last note, like I think in the space, I wouldn't talk about world leadership at all by the way. I would rather, I mean, that was one of the options in the question in the survey. We are not in competition necessarily although in some ways you can say the government's compete for talent and stuff but fundamentally what I always say to my team at least to say our benchmark is not country next door. Our benchmark is our potential and that's further wide ahead compared to what we have reached. Perfect, so impressive. I mean, recently touched very often this topic about humbleness. I mean, you should not be somehow kind of self confident but always try to become better, learn more and I think that's really very nice to show in your answer. Amida, very much interested to hear about Denmark on that. Yes, thank you very much. Well, unlike Sim, I put my check mark in the world leader box that doesn't mean to say that I don't think we have a long way to go yet. We still have lots of potential and in that way I can quote Sim and the clam that I'm totally in agreement with what you said Sim about the benchmark not being other countries but the possibilities ahead. That being said, I put the mark in the world leader because I think not doing so would be a case of somehow false modesty on my side because we have been in Denmark in several benchmarks. We have come out as world leaders both by the UN and by the European Commission and we have been both European and world champions so to speak in digitization but that being said, we have digitized our solutions in both central and local government solutions from what meets the business needs not necessarily what is best for the citizens. So in that respect, we have still a long way to go creating digital solutions that meet the citizens' needs and not just our needs from different agencies. In that respect, I think the Taiwanese example is very inspirational for all of us and the way to go for most of us. I also would like to say, no, perhaps I should save that point for later when we come into the central, de-central discussion but we still have a long way to go even though in some ways we can say, well, in Denmark, everyone is a digital citizen by definition unless you are exempted means everyone has a digital ID, everyone has digital postdocs in which you can receive mail from public authorities. So in that way, we are of course world leaders but we have a lot of potential yet. Thanks a lot. And Andre, very much interested to hear about Europe. I mean, how do you see yourself in Taiwan? I mean, you're less familiar with what's going on in Taiwan than Denmark, Estonia, so very much interested to hear from you. Well, on the same benchmarks, we're very close to why are not us, right? We also have broadband as a human rights, digital competence in lifelong and basic education since the one with all the check marks checks. But I think I checked world leader, especially because in Taiwan, we've really moved beyond this public servants versus the public thinking. We think public servants are part of the public. And for example, in 2017, when we redesigned one of our key infrastructure, the text filing experience, the breakout groups were facilitated by public servants from the ocean guard, right? From the ocean patrol. But when we redesigned the ocean portal when it comes to serving amateur fishing, well, the breakout groups were facilitated maybe by the preservation offices of Ministry of Taxation and Finance and so on. And the idea very simply is that the sea patrol is also someone who files their own tax and the financial office is also someone that serves in their spare time. So by making sure that they take the side of the demand side of the citizens, we don't have this dichotomy between the public servants in a silo but rather they work actively across the silos. Perfect, thank you. Lisa, I pass over to you for the next question. Thank you. I see we have a bit of shy participants on the chat. So I'm gonna ask if people can just up to now in this sort of great opening where we talked about how each of those folks saw their governments, put your one word takeaway. We had some great sort of insights on humility or benchmarking our potential or lots of things. We won't just take a minute to put in one word so we can get you engaged in this and it's a good feedback for us to get a sense of what you're thinking. So go ahead and get that started. So I'm gonna bridge you all to the second poll question that we had which is this centralization versus not centralization question which I know some of you are probably tired of hearing as well but it is a really live conversation and many governments who are trying to deal with this. So I'm gonna first go to you. I'll go back to you, Ni, I'll let you start because it seems like you've got something brewing in this question of centralization versus not centralization. Like what's the way to go? What have you learned on this journey? I don't know if I can say there's one way to go but from our experience, I think actually even though it struck me that Gerhard, you mentioned that Denmark was a centralized country in our own point of view, we are a very decentralized country. We do have one central government. We don't have states or lenders as you do in Germany, Markus but we have a very decentralized public sector meaning that we have 98 municipalities and five regions who all have their own responsibilities when it comes to public digitization. What we do have as a central responsibility is the coordination of the processes that lead us to agree upon national strategies for digitization. We have a long tradition for coordinating and collaborating on the digital strategies. We don't have central government strategies. We have joint government strategies crossing both or accomplishing both central government level, regional level and municipal level. And seeing that we have 98 municipalities who all need to somehow find a common strategy, it's very vital that the agreements that we reach upon how on the national strategies, the joint public sector strategies that we are all aboard on these agreements that somehow we have joined ownership to the strategies in order for us to have the most effective and most locally based implementation of the strategies because that is local government responsibility to implement the strategies. And the central government responsibility in that respect is to set up the processes that lead us to agree upon these strategies. Then of course, we have some matters of lawmaking also. For instance, on the digital post that was made mandatory by law, but it was made mandatory after that we had, after we had agreed upon between levels of government that this was the way to go forward. This was the next big step in order to enable effective digitalization and also user-friendly digitalization because what we have seen is that Danes actually love their national EID and they love the self-service solutions and they love and welcome the possibilities that it gives them. But it wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been as effective in our own point of view very decentralized country if we had not had the joint ownership of the strategy. Super, Audrey, I'm going to go to you. I'm struck, Nina, about this sort of the federal and local implementation and bringing that together, which is so important. I mean, Marcus talked a bit about that being the challenge and perhaps the opportunity that's faced in Germany. But Audrey, over to you on centralized versus non-centralized, your thoughts, lessons. Definitely. I checked the wrong question. And that's because just exactly as Nina has shared, in Taiwan, we focus not immediately on the rules and regulations, which is the main crux of decentralization versus centralization, but we focus on what's the norm, what's considered normal, what should be the social expectation of our digital services. And so, for example, when we talk about the norms around right-sharing, right, UberX and so on, the KPIs are literally crowdsourced and I introduced the Polish conversation. So each and every one, regardless of their level in the government, whether they're a taxi driver or a passenger, can say what is the one thing that's important to them and through agree and disagree, we get into the measurement of progress. And then, I think it's about mutual accountability. It became then very apparent what is the kind of regulatory work that the local temple or church should do if they want to start a right-sharing campaign or what is the role of the central government and also of the private sector. So I call this the people-public-private partnership, the people, the social sector agree on norms and habits, the public sector amplify that into rules and regulations, and then the private sector works in a very decentralized market-driven layout. Thanks for that very concrete example. I'm thinking about that in the German context, Marcus, about a system like that. Will it take a centralized or decentralized approach to do some of that in German aim, what's your thinking? You talked a little bit about this before, about the guidance work, but other thoughts about this. It's a real issue here we're looking at. Yeah, absolutely. From my point of view, as I said, it's important to involve the business sides. This is something we have to do in a decentralized way, but it's still important to have a common ground, to have common platforms, for instance. And we need a centralized architecture board, where we have architectural guidelines and where we can also prove them if they are met by the states within Germany, for instance. And I think it's great that we have contracts between the federal level and the states, and we committed all to the goal to digitize all public services by the end of next year, which is pretty soon, and which leads to a lot of pressure now to everyone, also within the 11,400 communities and cities in Germany, because they are also committed to this goal. And it's important that they are not just running in some direction, and in the end, nothing fits together anymore. It's important that we have a common sense of how to do it, because we only will be successful if we have a guideline like, one is creating a solution and puts this solution also in production, and the others can join and use it. So that's why we have now all our different fields, like housing or hobbies, all these different services of public administrations are divided into these different fields, and each state within Germany is responsible for one field to digitize this one, and the others can use then the solution which are coming up, and I totally agree also with Nina. It's really a question on how to organize, how to make visible, and I found it really interesting when I was to Paris, also to see what they are doing. They put all their governmental goals on a roadmap and combined it also with KPIs and made visible in which department, département, how far are they? And in the first step, all these different stakeholders were pretty nervous and maybe not so convinced that this is the right way because no one wanted to have the red flag in the end. But now there's a constructive discussion. Why is this working in this département but not in the other one? And I think it's also great to see that the minister there goes every Friday to another department and asks, where are you standing? And I think this is more transparency to governmental work and I think it's important if we don't want to lose the acceptance by people. We have to be more transparent and to make visible where we are standing, where are good solutions and where are also things which don't work out and where we want participation of people and users to ask, what can we do to make it better? And this is something which is a bit new to governmental work in Germany because everyone is afraid of doing mistakes. And I think we have not only to change the public sector itself, but we have also to improve the public discussion about failure and learning and being fast. This is something we have to debate in a public level. Super, thank you Marcus for that, living in Germany. I can feel that that debate is beginning to happen. It's live, right? We're living in it. Tim, I'm going to go to you. And unless you have something round breaking you want to say and centralized versus not, there's a question here. I'd love to get to the audience directed at you that says you're moving fast forward with digitalizing or digitizing. They're different, but the public sector, how do you bridge the digital divide and avoid exclusion? A question above someone else asks the same sort of question. What is your experience about including everyone in digitization? I'll be happy to take that up, but let me just say just two things before that on the central or decentralized stuff, right? So we have to understand two things here. First of all, is that if we talk about so-called business side of things, right? Look, if the rest of government is not getting more decentralized or centralized, you basically have to tune what you do digitally to that. Digital stuff is a tool, right? So that's my point of being that at least that's what I see around the world is that so if the government fundamentally is decentralized, there's no way you can bring too much centralization in, right? Because it's just not gonna happen, right? So you have to find ways of effective mechanisms and tools that somehow stay on the same page. And that's essentially what we're talking about here. And that's why I love the sort of the wording you had for the question, which is about steering. Now, steering can only be centralized. It can only be one captain basically in a boat or in a plane, car, whatever. So, and that's my whole point. So that's the sort of balancing act we do. And so a lot of Australian experience has been how to find that sort of middle way and hybrid the way in a way. So we started from really top down and the issue was that then basically you were only delivering as much as there was a bandwidth of one team and it was nowhere near in touch with the users in all different areas. Then with decentralized whole other way, everybody was responsible for their stuff only and everybody was running in two different directions and very uneven experience or quality of services. So we've been clawing that back now. So, and that's also a point saying in terms of steering, I think fundamentally all of us in our different contexts are looking for effective ways for two things to steer how everybody stays on the same page in terms of where are we going? What's the next level? And that a certain amount or a certain minimum level of services is guaranteed all over the place. So how do you lift all the boats to that? That's what is the architectural guidance you know what Marcus mentioned. That's why we do platforms. That's why you do like, you know, skilling, I mean, all that sort of stuff. So I just wanted to bring that in that to fundamentally say that, look, it's, I think actually that the space for discussion is much more confined to the, what are the tools, not the models necessarily. In terms of digital divide, two cents there. But first of all, from Estonian experience, from very early days of our digital journey, I mean the skilling and connectivity haven't been part of the strategy because of that. Just to make sure that, you know, the more we do stuff digitally in government, for example, or in the whole of country, the more there's also ability for people to use the stuff as well. And so, but we didn't, you know, wait for the users to pop up, but we rather started exactly doing offering of services in parallel already. Secondly, digital divide thing I want to just really throw it out there is to say that even if there's some people not online yet, that does not mean that we should be doing more and better in terms of digital and government which is for public service delivery. So even if not everybody's able to use it yet, but if that's the 80% tar, there's no way we should be holding those 80% in fact. So, and this is what I think it's lost in the divide portion, quite a bit saying, hey, so what about 10 or 20 or whatever percent of people who are not online? Yeah, you still have to serve them too, but that doesn't mean we have to be crappy for the rest. That's the quote. That doesn't mean we have to be crappy for the rest as in the digital divide. So Gerhard, we have one last question and a speed round. Do you want to deliver to our, this is about exactly what you're talking about, Sim. You've bridged to the role of skills and mindset. So Gerhard, you want to do a speed round with our panelists and we'll close up. Wonderful, that's indeed a question, topic which already came up through some of the comments, Audrey, Marcus and then the others. You want to expand a little bit the discussion. I mean, effective implementation of digitalization is not only about structure, steering, like we talked today already, but also about skills of the leaders, the employees. And my question and I would ask for a very short answer, which in your opinion is the most important skill or competency needed for government digitalization and why? So that's what we would like to address to our speakers. I mean, not an easy question, you reduce it to one, Audrey, may I start with you? I certainly is to trust our citizens because to give no trust is to get no trust. Perfect answer. Thanks a lot. Nina. Sorry, yeah, that's difficult to follow, Tweet, but I would say that the most important, other than that, which I totally agree with, other than that, I would say that the most important quality actually is to be able to listen and collaborate and not just do what you think is right, but actually listen to both the users, but also other agencies, other authorities and also private vendors and suppliers. So listening and collaboration skills in my point of view are vital to successful digitalization. Thanks a lot. Markus. Well, from my point of view, the most important skill is that even in changing times in unsecure situations, you should be able to see it as a chance. And this is a skill which is not only needed in the field of digitization, it's needed in every single situation where decisions should be made. Thanks a lot. And Sim. Yeah, so I've been talking to colleagues and peers over the last few months, dozens of them around this topic, and they always bring up one thing, and I would say the same, is basically how to lead and organize for delivery, whatever that means. It's not a digital issue at all, it's pure just ABC of management. So how do you get the teams to deliver? We all have great ideas, we have the technology and stuff, but to really make the fruit come out of that, that's the nutshell here. So perhaps not answering you what you expected, but that's the heart of it. Yeah, thanks a lot. If I could jump in on that, Sim, apolitical, we are a collaborative learning platform for people and government. And when we first started off, we thought, oh, people are gonna need to know digitization and all these sort of policies and by far the most popular, and they say to us the most important is, how do I communicate effectively? How do I run a meeting? How do I write a memo? How do I manage to inspire people? These really human, I heard all of you talk about these very human skills, trusting and listening and managing and looking for opportunity even when things are really hard. So that definitely squares with our experience when you actually really listen to the public service and Audrey, I was really struck by just wanting to keep bringing this back. I have a bias towards loving bureaucrats. I'm a former one myself, but also just really thinking about the role and the possibility and seeing the public servants as citizens as well, I think will go a long way in all of our countries to better delivery. So we have five minutes before we wanna wrap up. Does anyone have a burning question that you wanna come off mute to ask? If not, nope, Maximilian was thinking about it. I could see it. I'll ask a question and whichever one of these panelists wants to answer you can. So we're back here hard at a reunion in 10 years. We're all here, we're back. Maybe a little grayer, maybe a little wiser. Hopefully we've had fun and have been fair along the way, Audrey. What are we talking about in 10 years? What's gonna be the topic in digital era collaboration 10 years from now? What do you think we'll be talking about today? Marcus, yeah. Well, from my point of view, it's really about the question, how do we govern and worldwide in an international context? So if we, let's take an electronic ID, I think it's great that we create something like this in Europe, but it should be made worldwide. And it's important to have e-collaboration in a way that we can work together free from too much lock in effects and having open source more in it, to create really offers to the people which they can use also in an international context. Great. 10 years from now, we'll be talking about that. Sim. Yeah, so I think what I've seen from experience is it's hard to know what we will be talking about because stuff will change, but I thought about it this way. So I know what I don't want to be talking about. And that's what should inform us. I mean, if in 10 years, we are still talking about how to have a digital mindset, how to have the proper skills and be used centric at agile, then we have failed. And I think if we get these blocks right finally, because we're talking about them 10 years ago as well, so if we get those right finally, then we can actually have other stuff that we should be talking about. That's great. What we shouldn't be talking about in 10 years. Nina. I think it's very difficult to know what we're going to be talking about. Looking back to 10 years ago, we launched our fourth national strategy on digitization in Denmark. It was a four-year strategy. It didn't take into account the development towards using mobile screens and mobile platforms. So we had to adjust the strategy and just after just two years, I think. So technology happens fast, change happens fast. One thing I do think that we'll still be talking about because it's an ever going important subject is citizens trust in government, which is of course affected by our increasing use of technology and data sharing and artificial intelligence. So how to maintain trust in government I think will be an ongoing discussion many years to come. That's a great set up, Audrey. What were we going to be talking about in 10 years? Any thoughts from your perspective in a quick bite? Yeah, definitely. Because part of my job description says when we see Internet of Things, let's make it Internet of Beings and also whenever we hear singularities, Nina, let's make sure that the plurality stays here. So I guess we'll be talking about how to include non-human kind sapient ideas into our planetary governance and also future generations who by default doesn't have a vote, but maybe by that time we'll be able to include some proxy of their interests in our democratic governance. That's kind of a mic drop moment for the future, right? Thank you, Audrey. Dear Hart, any last words from you while until I wrap this up? I mean, on this question, I think, I mean, I'm now doing research 25 years on the topic of public sector reform and I see a lot of continuity. So I think the technologies, what we will talk in 10 years will be changing rapidly, but I think it will be some core topics we will still continue to discuss. As you have discussed before, how do we better collaborate? How do we better engage with citizens? How do we better deliver? So I think these questions, what kind of skills, competencies we need, we'll still will discuss in 10 years. So there will be some kind of stability also in what we will discuss in the future. Dear Hart, I fully agree with you. I wanted to say more or less the same thing. One thing more that I think that we will be discussing about is infrastructure to implement all these technologies because yes, on one hand, we have technology that is advancing and changing very rapidly and administrations have to to reconsider their approach based on the new conditions. But on the other hand, we have society and they will still have the same problems like how to improve their skills, how to get access and so on and so forth. And we will also have the discussion on infrastructure because smart city infrastructure is costly. We have many legacy infrastructures in place that needs to be replaced. And again, the entire issue of upgrading urban infrastructure in order to enable smart city services will still be an issue. Thanks, Margarita for that. Thank you. So great, Gerhard. I'm gonna ask everyone to turn on their cameras as I thank Audrey and Marcus and Gerhard and Nina and Sim and all of you. If you could, as you're turning your cameras, put your one word takeaway, what's the one feeling or thought? I'm always struck by the personal leadership that I need to work on myself. So much we're talking about is going and really showing up as people and continuing our human skills with one another. I want to, while you're getting ready to wave it, anyone just remind we have a second session for this final tropical report involving citizens in policy design today at two. And then tomorrow I'll be back for one and involving the private sector and the process of public service innovation. So with that, thank you everyone for joining. Let's give everyone a wave. If you wanna come off mute, you can say goodbye and you're on language. We have people from Italy and Israel and everywhere Taiwan. Thanks everyone. Have a good day and thanks for everything you do. Yeah, take care. Bye.