 Awesome. So before I introduce our very special guest today, I want to acknowledge all of you who have decided to spend your time right now to gather here in this virtual convening. We have people representing every region of the US, just about every generation represented. We have a lot of diversity here, a lot of beautiful faces in one giant video chat, and I want to thank you all for your presence and for your being fully present during this special hour. I also want to acknowledge that this is obviously a really strange time. Can you please mute? Thank you. It's a challenging time. It's a testing time. It's a time where I know a lot of us are feeling a lot during this time of social distancing. Sorry. Is that Jeffrey? I'm trying not to do it by this. I'll mute you, Jeffrey. I know a lot of us are hurting, right? And we have to acknowledge that and do a lot more than just that. And on the other hand, I also want to acknowledge that this is a unique time that presents many new opportunities, opportunities for us to think about the state of our leadership today, to think about the relationship we have to those leaders, to think about the relationship we have to each other as citizens of the US and of the world, and to think about what democracy means to us, and to think about what technology can, how technology can better us and help us solve problems, not just feed us misinformation and tear us apart. I promise that you'll learn a lot today and that you'll meet at least a few cool people today as we'll do breakout groups in about 25 minutes. Also, we'll have a Q&A near the end, so hold your questions until then. I'll post a link later for you to submit your questions. And just one more thing, please stay muted. And if anything resonates with you, please feel free to do something I stole from another Zoom call last week, a little spirit finger shake. So if anything that Audrey says or anyone else says really speaks to you, this is how you're going to show it. You can also feel free to use the chat as well. So with that, I could not be more excited for this timely conversation with Audrey Tang. She is the digital minister of Taiwan, a democracy that has managed to keep its citizens protected from the outbreak with only a little over 100 cases. She is a champion of open source software, a civic hacker, a humanist and advisor to so many world leaders, including U.S. Congress people. She is a revolutionary in many ways. And she's a philosopher, writer, a poet, a speaker, and someone I could not be happier to have joined the civics unplug community today. And I hope that she stays in our community for a while. So please welcome Audrey Tang for this unplug conversation. Hello world. This is indeed a little bit early for me. This is 5 a.m. So good morning. Good local time. Good morning. And I may not be entirely coherent, but it's fine. So let's get started. Yeah, for sure. So I have a couple slides to show, mostly because people are asking where I'm calling from. Like people are reporting from all the different cities and that's great. And I want to also share with you where I'm calling from. So I'm from Taipei. And this is my office. And so you can maybe, can you see my screen share? Yep. Okay, right. So this is my office for the past four years as the digital minister. As the digital minister in charge of social innovation, my office is literally co-created with hundreds of social innovators around Taiwan. And people, this is an open office. We tore down the walls. It used to be Air Force HQ. Everybody can just walk in and have 40 minutes of my time. I'm here, for example, every Wednesday from 10 to the evening. And anybody who want to talk about, I don't know, self-driving tricycles, how we can modify them to fit the local population's needs of shopping hands-free in the flower market or whatever is free to have 40 minutes of my time. And the core thesis of this open conversation is that what our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, said four years ago when she was inaugurated for her first term, she's in her second term now, she said before, we think of democracy as a showdown between opposing values. For example, you can easily imagine, for example, the values around economic development on one side and environmental sustainability on the other, or scientific technological innovation on one side and social justice on the other. And in traditional public administration theory, the career public service will be the rope here that keeps everybody still tied together, trying not to break down under all the tensions and try to arbitrate between opposing values. However, as she pointed out, conversation between diverse values is now then on with the advent of the great social invention hashtag. We don't really need representatives to organize ourselves with the right hashtag. For example, when we occupy the parliament in 2014, or climate strike, or Me Too, or whatever, people can organize very easily without a intermediary or Hong Kong, anti-elab, everything without the need of these intermediary representatives. And that creates a problem for the governments because we cannot set up one agency for each trending hashtag. And so instead, we simply ask the different side of the question. We ask, instead of who are the representatives, how to arbitrate, we ask, given the different positions, are there common values? And given common values, are there, after all, some common innovations that can deliver on those values? And this is called effective partnership. And so I will just show you this one simple website. This is my conversation very early on after I became the Minister with David, speaking for Uber at the time. And my condition of speaking to any lobbyist, indeed any visitor, is that we have to publish the entire transcript after 10 days of co-editing. And in case of David, it's also on YouTube, on 360 record, so you can very easily put on VR glass and relive the conversation. But the point here is that I have this very interesting note here, right? So David concluded the conversation saying, okay, I can ask the local team to prove her material and send them over to you. I'm like, sure, just note everything you send my way will be made public because my condition entering the cabinet is that all the meetings that I hold is public. And you can very easily see that since I become Minister, I talk to 5,000 people in over 200,000 sections of speeches in more than 1,000 meetings. And that applies even for internal meetings. And the behavior of lobbyists really change under radical transparency. Whereas before they would make arguments that appeal to the private interests of politicians and themselves under radical transparency, they only make arguments based on common interests and global goals. So for example, David Bluth would talk about climate change mitigation, about empowering the more vulnerable people in the margins of the cities and things like that. And instead of making anything that doesn't resonate with other stakeholders. And so we systemically promote such radical transparent ideas into what we call data collaboratives. And data collaboratives is really the key to build trust between the various sectors. And I will just show one simple example and then maybe we can move on to the next section. And this is called a presidential hackathon. So every year we run this hackathon. Now you may think of hackathon as some two-day event, three-day event. But because this is presidential, it's three months of collaborative hacking, civic hacking. And every case proposed during the hackathon may correspond to one or more of the sustainable development goals, the global goals. So for example, two years ago when we first started the presidential hackathon, there was a water pipe repair person who listened to the water pipe leaks in the genome region where they hail from. It used to take two months from a water pipe leak to be discovered. So because they have limited people patrolling the water pipes. And their work is kind of boring. And so they said, what if we can train a machine apprentice using machine learning so that we can wake up and look at what's up in Taiwan. It's called line. And it would tell us what are the three most likely leaking points nearest. So we can spend our time figuring out the solution instead of just doing trivial redundant work. And the private sector and the academics are really interested in this idea. So they co-created such a solution that reduce it to two days. And they get the trophy. So every year we give out five such trophies. There is no prize money associated with the presidential hackathon. Rather this is a very simple trophy that is a micro projector underneath. So if you turn the micro projector on, it shows the image of the president handing the trophy to you, promising that whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. So it's basically self-describing a very meta trophy. And whatever people proposed in their data collaborative, it could be empowering people in remote islands, the local nurses, instead of sending all the sick people to the main Taiwan Island through helicopters. It may be a platform for them to video conference with the main island specialist doctors and so on. But the point is that the government only supports but never controls the data collaborative. Another example may be people using their balconies and their schools, primary school teachers reporting on the air quality like PM 2.5 using those less than 100 US dollars air boxes so that you can very easily see in more than 2,000 points. Now it's growing to more than 10,000 now. What a real time pollution is in Taiwan, the air quality. And because they frankly speaking have more than 10 times the measuring devices compared to the environment minister, they are more legitimate than the environment minister. Now Taiwan because we're the Asia's most free society, maybe New Zealand, equivalent to New Zealand, we cannot beat the citizen scientists, we must join them. And so through this kind of data collaboratives, they really did a negotiation with the environmental minister saying, okay, we can allow you to use our data, inspect our data on the distributed ledger, calibrate our devices and algorithms. But in return, we're asking you to fill in the gaps. And what are the gaps? These are the industrial parks, the industrial areas that are private property. And these high school teachers cannot really break and enter and install their air box there but people may suspect these industrial parks from polluting the air. And so it turns out that the government owns the lamp in the industrial parks. And so we commit then to install their design, the micro sensors on the lamps and join instead of controlling the data collaboratives. And that by itself is open source and open hardware. And everybody around the world can just download it and run it on their local hardware, Arduino, Raspberry Pi and so on. And this is by itself a education material for sustainable development. Now I would just introduce one last concept and how we can make sure that, for example, when we did this helicopter replacement of videoconferencing for treatment of people on the remote islands, how come that we can promise because it requires a law change. It was not legal for a nurse to make diagnostics and treatment based on doctors' advice from remote. So in every of these cases when we say, okay, we promise to deliver it in the next 12 months based on either personnel requirements, budget requirements or even regulatory adjustment, legal adjustments and requirements, it really need to build a level of legitimacy that is equivalent to a presidential mandate. So we did it through this national participation platform called JOIN, the GOV.TW, is a one-stop platform for people to vote on e-petitions. When they get 5,000 petitions signatures, we will meet them and respond one by one to their concerns. It's also regulatory pre-announcement, participatory budgeting and everything like that. So it has more than 10 million visitors out of 23 million people inside one, lots of people. So whenever we get the hundreds or so of cases, each corresponding to a SDG, so 169 of those, we hand 99 tokens, 99 points to each of those visitors on the JOIN platform and say, okay, you may now freely distribute those points as kind of voting tokens on any of the ideas that you think is good. So maybe you look at, or maybe you get mobilized into voting for using drones and computer vision to stop marine debris at the sea instead of waiting for it to hit the bay. It sounds a good idea. And so you may vote it for one vote, which will cost you one point. But if you like it so much, you want to vote two votes, it will cost you four points in total. Three votes is nine, four is 16. So it's quadratic. The idea is that the marginal return is the same as the marginal cost of each additional vote. So with 99 points, you can only vote nine votes instead of 10 votes because that would cost 100. So after voting nine votes and costing 81, you still have 18 left and nobody wants to squander their points. So maybe they look around and see another SDG and learn something about it. For example, this is water box, which is the same thing as air box, but you put it in the waterways in the aggregate plants so that if it detects the pollution from upstream and you can pinpoint it to a specific plant that is polluting the organic plant, then the administrative economy can actually cut the water and electricity supply for those plants, the organic plants areas that are polluting the water. That sounds a good idea. So you have 18 points, you can vote for four votes, that's going to cost you 16 and you still have two points left and nobody wants to squander these. So you may look at around and maybe see another thing this is using publicly listed data for public companies to predict how likely it is to engage in shell company fraud in the next quarter. And this is actually quite precise. And maybe you you think this was certainly more than one vote. So maybe you take some back from this nine votes and you do a seven and seven and things like that. And so our average people vote for four or five different projects and really gets into the nuance and synergy between those global goals. And at the end of their voting, where we get the top 20 announced, instead of as previous voting systems, which usually leave half of the people feel that they have lost in quadratic voting, most people see at least one of their projects supported one in the top 20 who to receive the coaching and everybody feel they have won. And so just a very simple change in voting system, change the legitimacy theory changes how the different teams see themselves as synergy making instead of purely competing against each other. And then when the final results comes in and the five teams actually deliver something, it makes it much easier for the legislator to appoint at the voting results and say, hey, we got a legislated. And so that's how the tele-diagnetic law were legislated. So that's just a very simple beginning of describing some of the work we did. And most of the winning teams are what we call assistive intelligence plus collective intelligence. Because once you have voted for it in quadratic voting, if it asks you to do some crowdsourcing work, for example, help identifying marine debris and things like that, you will probably be enlisted in it. Everybody has two minutes of kindness. And so that is how it's like the two wings of a plane or a bird. One part is assistive intelligence to reduce the burden of people doing chores. But the other part is collective intelligence to make sure that the AI is not biased when it comes to taking the people's ideas and so on. And so I will finally say that even though I'm hailing from the capital of Taiwan, from the city, and meeting people there every Wednesday, sometimes through teleconference, I'm touring around Taiwan every other Tuesday as well. And I deliberately go to the most rural, the indigenous, the offshore islands and meet people where they're already having their town halls. And the key here is that it's a connected room. For them, they're just showing through a town hall. And because Taiwan has more than 20 national languages, half of which are indigenous, we also have indigenous translators that connect through wall-sized projectors back to the social innovation lab in Taipei. So it's only me who travels and the 12 ministries that have sent delegates to my office, they send their section chiefs or hire into the social innovation lab in Taipei and view through this kind of video conference where local people has to say. So for the past three years, people are getting into the habit of just showing to those digitally amplified town halls and instead of just getting a written response from the Ministry of Interior saying, oh, we have to consider this, but the Ministry of Health and Welfare also need input and things like that, and it can wait for one month or two, and everybody forgot what the original problem was. Here is all the 12 ministries in the same room. They can brainstorm very easily. They don't have to say, I'll have to copy the Ministry of Economy because the Ministry of Economy is sitting right there. And because these people are section chief level, they can very easily innovate. And they get credit because it's very transparent if they brainstorm something that's useful. And if they say something that upset the local people, they're not at risk. I'm the only one at risk because you cannot punch people over Zoom. That's how I, by absorbing the risk and spreading the credit, making sure that people can get to the same page, that they can innovate from across different sectors. And finally, this is kind of my job description of enhancing liable data, building effective partnerships, and build open innovation that doesn't leave anyone behind. And so, as a conclusion, I'll read you my job description because four years ago when I first become a digital minister, it's the first position in Taiwan. This is the first time that Taiwan has a digital minister. And HR people ask, what are you going to do? Where are you going? I'm like, it's very simple. It's just 1718, 1717, and 1776 of SDGs. And SDGs was just not even one year at the time. And there's no minister, nobody, remember those, memorize those numbers. So I'm like, okay, I'll just translate it into plain English. So this is somewhat rendered into plain English version of the SDGs. And it goes like this. We'll see the internet of things. Let's make it an internet of beings. We'll see virtual reality. Let's make it a shared reality. We'll see machine learning. Let's make it collaborative learning. We'll see user experience. Let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, it is always remember the plurality. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much. So I just want to say like, Taiwan is such a blueprint for democracy around the country and certainly in the United States. And it's clear that almost everything that you've mentioned applies to any population. And as you were mentioning, it's not like Taiwan just has only one language that is spoken or one cultural group. It's very diverse. So when you have a blueprint here and you have the architect, you can't help but feel a little bit blessed. So I'd love to move into some questions that we've crowdsourced from the group, if you don't mind. So cool. So you left your life as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley around 2014. We're turning back to your home country of Taiwan. Why did you return? Right. So I'm always based in Taiwan, though. I only visit Silicon Valley maybe two or three times a year. And this is because I really don't play very long meetings. And if you're in the same time zone, you cannot help to avoid the long meetings. So I'm always based in Taiwan, but I work with Apple, for example, on Siri on computational linguistics. But I've never been to Cupertino, actually. And so this is not literally me flying back to Taiwan. This is more like I transitioned from being working mostly in the private sector to mostly working in the social sector. And there's two reasons. One is that I've been a social entrepreneur all my life. And given the Taiwan's civic hacking space, we finally see that there is a sustainable model for people contributing almost full time to the good of the society and can nevertheless keep themselves fit. And this is because of great platforms such as Patreon that I'm sure that you're all familiar with. And the Taiwanese equivalent of Kickstarter is called Zek Zek and also Flying V and so on that enable people who, for example, occupy the parliament to crawl fund New York Times entire pages of advertisements that shows how the occupiers think and work and things like that. And so with these new ideas around collaborative and collective action, I feel that I can devote all my time into the social sector, into the civic sector without worrying about private sector things. And that's the kind of material reason. And social reason is simply that it's more fun. I joined the GovZero community very early on and GovZero or GZeroV is a very simple idea. The GZeroV community, which has been around for a very long time now, for I think since 2012 is a simple idea that if you take any website, any government services, anything really that you don't like and if you just change O to a zero and I'll demonstrate it to you right now. So for example, there's a GovZero project or maybe we can just go to GZeroV.it and it will show something that's and this is the inaugural GovZero project that shows the budget and daily expenses. And there's a overview graph that you can draw down and have a real time conversation around the budget and the same actually because there's no trademark or whatever around GovZero. So you can do exactly the same but changing the TW to IT and then you see the same thing for the Italian national budget. And so the GovZero is and you helped with the Italian one? Yeah, of course. Of course. So it's not right and they have prettier colors, but in any case. So the point is that GovZero is more like a meme. So it shows that anything that you don't like about the government like Gov.tw, if you don't like this website, you just change O to a zero and you get into a shadow government that's more inclusive and that's more fun. And there are certain things such as collaborative fact checking that maybe people feel it's not the best for the government to do. And then you see GovZero. Heard about this? Yeah, GovZero, any of us that builds a bot like the website bot, this one is on the line system where you can just forward all the disinformation and rumor to it and it would just do a crowdsource fact checking and get back to you or your family about the real thing about it. And so again, GovZero is really just a meme and there's no cofact.gov.tw because it's not something that we see the government should be doing. And so what I'm trying to say is that it's not just about forking existing government. And if you take the as away from cofacts.org and go cofact.org, you're getting to the Thai version because everything the GovZero movement does is open source. We really inquish the copyright. So you can see it's adoption very easily and very quickly by nearby and not so nearby jurisdictions. So that's the real reason why I just devoted my full time into civic hacking because it's just so so much more fun. Cool. So your answer. So you advise obviously a lot of world leaders on democracy in a time when the United States has embraced an isolationist nationalism. Why do you choose to participate in these international conversations and help other countries in really meaningful ways like you showed with Italy and Thailand? First of all, I think Taiwan is as I mentioned the really according to the civic monitor, the only fully open and when come to civic space in Asia. And only one of the only two when you count Asia Pacific that's next to New Zealand. So and I encourage you to check out civic monitor. So there is a strategic aspect to it because if we don't collaborate with the jurisdictions that are fully open, the ones that are shown in green here, then we risk our nearby jurisdictions way of more authoritarian and as you can see, authoritarianism is kind of popular in Asia. Well, that that we risk having these becoming the North. So for example, when it comes to this information, which has a legal definition in Taiwan, it's called intentional harmful untruth and harming the public, not the government's image, which is just script journalism, intentional harmful untruth that harms the public. All the jurisdiction around us has this instinct of, okay, maybe we can just encroach on the freedom of speech a little bit. Maybe we have the minister's words to be somehow above the journalist's words a little bit, and maybe that's for the greater cause. But in Taiwan, because we still remember the martial law and we really don't want to go back here, we must innovate on ways that does not put the minister's words higher than the journalist's words, but we cannot develop this alone. And so strategically, we must co-create with all the jurisdictions that are green here and say that we work on the playbook together. So for example, this is a Taiwanese model called humor over rumor, where every time we detect a trending rumor online that said this information, then the responsible ministry just roll out a meme through memetic engineering within a couple hours at most, every stir doing 16 minutes now. And that is just generally very funny. So without censoring anyone, we just kind of hack the SEO. And so whenever you see, for example, this is a real rumor that says, perm your hair will be subject to $1 million and $10 fund starting next week. And within an hour, our prime minister just realized this picture saying it's not true. And a young version of himself saying, I may be bought now, but I will not punish people with hair. And the five things that says what we've done is a labeling requirements that takes care of the hair products starting 2021. And the prime minister, as he looks now, says, however, if you keep permming your hair many times a week, it will not damage your pocket, but it will damage your hair. We can just look at me as how you may become. And so this is pretty good humor because he makes fun of himself, not anybody else. And he's being sincere, right? It's scientifically correct. So it really went viral. And if you search for a perm in hair, fine, whatever, this shows up instead of any rumor. And once you laugh about it, there is really is a vaccination because people who left about it and share it will not share the original disinformation because originally disinformation is writing on the psychological pathway that turns this personal anger of helplessness into outrage, which is a positive emotion for the individual, but very negative for online discussion. If you laugh about it, and you see the humor in it, then this psychological energy is already spent and people will not actually be motivated into sharing things in outrage. So this is just one of many examples. But what I'm trying to say is that by working with jurisdictions that just prioritizes freedom of speech assembly and civic rights, we can co-create such solutions jointly without relying on authoritarianism, which tend to be more isolations. Great. Thank you for that. You're a vocal proponent for autodidacticism. Why are you an autodidact? And why do you believe that it might be better than learning through a conventional education system? Well, we kind of hacked the education system now because starting a year ago, Taiwan adopted a new curriculum that just prioritizes autonomous learning. It's just one of this core value. It's the most important value next to interaction and the common good. And so it's just like open source. It started being this niche saying, and now you're the norm. But 30 years ago, when I first engaged the research community, I was doing a science fair, actually, in 1995. I was 14 years old at the time. And I discovered this great website, which is still around, the pre-printed website, archive.org or Cornell University. And I remember because my science fair project is about doing kind of inference on logic and learning natural languages and just automated reasoning stuff, machine learning stuff. And so there really is no textbook around it in 1994 that can actually work on my personal computer. So I had to go to archive and just click artificial intelligence, computer science, and just start reading the papers. Of course, I don't understand half of it, but it's okay because all these kind people have left their email addresses. So I just start writing them in very poor English. And anyway, I just saw me as a fellow researcher. Nobody knows that you're just 14 years old, of course, an internet. And so I printed out those email exchanges. I eventually won the first place on the science fair. And then told the principal that you tell me that winning this science fair gets me a guaranteed place in prestigious senior high school. And that I can study with the professor of my choice, if I study hard and things like that in 10 years time. But I'm studying with that professor, like co-creating really right now, without having to go through this institutional education. And I'm seeing that all my textbooks were out of date, and people are just co-creating knowledge now on this new thing called a web. And it's really to the credit of my principal after reading the email pronoun and thinking for a couple of minutes and say, okay, you don't have to go to school anymore tomorrow. And then she just covered for me because at the time it was still compulsory education. So she just, you know, fake the attendance records. I'm sure that it's at the time for persecution now. So that's why I so much believe I'm so optimistic when it comes to private and social and public sector collaboration, because there is a principal that is seeing a bit of future, right? Just not very widely distributed and willing to be this just nectar that enable this kind of auto-diagneticism. So maybe I'm lucky, but I'm supported by the pre-print community and by people who honestly just don't care about my age, but just about my contribution. Well, that's something that we try to live the whole idea of not really caring about your age, but your kind of willingness to contribute and, you know, things like your time and imagination. And that's a good segue to my next question of how have communities helped you develop as a civic superhero? Well, I don't know about superheroes, but just ordinary civic heroes. So anyway, so I think there's quite a few things that I want to highlight here, but I'll just highlight two. First is about intergenerational solidarity. This is really important because in Taiwan, we have this idea of reverse mentorship. So what you're seeing here is the world skills champions, people who participate, I think it was in Russia last year. They won the third place overall. And these are people who specialize in, for example, car painting or clouds, deployment or whatever other skillful things that they are doing. And they're just parading on the national day next to the athletes. It used to be that Taiwan only invites like Olympic champions and things like that on the national day parade. But it's thanks to a very young like 27 year old reverse mentor of the Ministry of Labor that we now promote these people not only on the national day parade, but actually inviting them to co-create with the K-12 schools so that the people learn to rebuild their schools together when they were just, you know, 14 years old. And they can see that the technological high schools are not something that you go because you cannot place a good mark on the academic high schools. But if you have something that you really want to learn to contribute to the community. And the Ministry of Labor, of course, is in her 60s. And the reverse mentor is less than 30 years old, younger than 30 years old. But they form a partnership where the young reverse mentor, the youth counselor can just invite any minister to any meetings and just show them the direction, show them the way. But the feasibility, of course, is being ensured by this Minister of Labor. So I'm trying to say this is a norm in Taiwan where the young people point the new direction and the old people remind them how to make them work without offending too many existing stakeholders. And so the community needs to be intergenerational before it can actually achieve a co-sectoral understanding. And I, of course, benefited from the preprint researchers who are all like 40 years, my senior. So that's the first thing is learning from the, from your elders. The other thing other than presidential hackathon is this cross, well, I call it transcultural settings. I set up this office in town hall starting in indigenous places, because back when I was 14 years old, I dropped out of high junior high with the full blessing of the principal. The first thing I, the first place I went to is the Atayal indigenous nation. And I just learned from their ways of looking at nature, interacting with nature and things like that. They don't need foreign concepts such as sustainability because they've been around since the time of Moana. So that is the idea of seeing your own culture upbringing from the perspective of another culture, widely different culture, by sharing the same mountains. And that's how I learned, for example, about natural personhood, about how people treat the mountains as spirits. And nowadays we see this idea being adopted in New Zealand, which is kind of a, a, a, a, we share the lineage, right? With people sales from Taiwan to New Zealand, the Maori people, I mean, culturally. And so they also have this idea that rivers and mountains can get a seat of thought membership as a kind of legal personhood that represents the previously non-voting stakes of the night nature. And nowadays it's gaining currency in this idea. And so if we keep constraining ourselves in a very linear economy, culture will see this as nonsense. But by moving to various different indigenous cultures and foreign cultures in the very beginning, in the very early on, I consider the community not restricted to something that is only of a common kind of social production, but rather around a set of social values that I can then inspect my own upbringing with. So I think intergenerational and cross-transcultural that are the two communities that I benefit the most from. Amazing. Related to intergenerational movements, you've helped lead slash advise both the sunflower movement in Taiwan and the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, which were both struggles for democracy in resistance to China. What have, what has that taught you about what communities of courageous high schoolers and college students who are committed to democracy can pull off? Yeah, the sunflower movement is a really good example because it was mostly just university students who feel that the sudden enactment of the Cross Strait Service and Trade Act or CSSTA is not so much a good idea. And so they said, okay, the MPs refuse to deliberate it substantially. So we occupy where the MP works because we voted for the MPs anyway and start doing their job for them. And that's the legitimacy theory. And so it's very kind of thinking outside of the box. Nobody really thought about this legitimacy theory before they really broke in in 2013. But once they did so, all the very senior people in various NGOs, there's more than 20 NGOs, each deliberating on one specific aspect of the CSSTA just surrounded the parliament protecting the young people from the police and from the rioters. And then we start live streaming everything and letting people see that people are there really doing very civil deliberation and inching together toward a consensus every day. And at the end, they have four demands, no one less, that basically cause for reevaluation of the CSSTA and gets accepted by the head of the parliament. So it's one of the rare occupants that ends in a more trust instead of less trust. And so, but if it were not the original thinking of the young people who broke into it, none of the social support or solidarity would happen. And I really think that being not constrained by a legacy by this time honored way of doing things, this kind of unbounded thinking really helped them to find this new response to a new situation at heart. So more Americans than ever are working from home with all the experience you have connecting and collaborating with people remotely. What advice do you have for people who are just trying to get used to it? Oh, okay. Yeah, I've been working in telecommunication and through telecommunication for 20 years now. And there's only really two main challenges. One is social isolation. It's kind of a sense of loneliness. And the other one is what we call perma work, which you never stop working. And so, and these two have very simple solutions to address social isolation. You can work in a teleworking space, you can work with kind of social rituals. Back when I work remotely with Silicon Valley companies, there's people, there's a colleague who just ordered some Napa Valley red wines. It's not like super expensive wines, but he took the trouble to just ship them to Taiwan. I'll have this ritual of just every couple of weeks and just opening the same bottle of wine and just sharing a moment together so that we have something other than bits of pixels to talk about. So that's for social cohesion across space. And the perma work, again, is a very kind of insidious thing. And the simple solution really is just to make a space for work and make a space for personal. Sometimes if you have lived in a smaller space, people sometimes say, okay, if I'm using the iPad, it's for personal, but if I'm using the MacBook, it's for work. And so there's got to be a ritual when you just commute to work. And even so as simple as just passing through a different corridor and things like that, reminding yourself you're going to work and back can really help. And once you're in work, I use personally the Pomodoro method, where I focus for 25 minutes and take a five minute break. And that again reminds us that it's not just about work. It's also about taking a moment to reflect, to be with your body and things like that at least for five minutes every half an hour. Thank you. So you talk about how it's hard to run against open government transparency and participation. And if that's the case, why is American democracy so much further behind Taiwan's? And what can we do about that? Well, I think it's simply because we have a longer history of democracy. I mean, so there's a lot of artifacts in any democratic systems that used to run on paper, which is a very analog technology and any technology that has what we call a migration path from the previous eras. For example, broadcast radios and television, which is all about having millions of people listening to one person, likely the president, rather than one person listening to millions of people or have million people listening to one another. And that creates an ursia that it's really hard to fight against. The most that we can do is just to build viable compelling alternatives at the city level, the township level and county level and so on, and show people that really it is possible and actually much more fun to listen at scale instead of uploading five bits of information every couple of years, which is called voting. And just as Mr. Fula said, it's not about fighting the system, it's about building new systems so that the one are rendered obsolete. And this is easier in Taiwan because when we got presidential election, that's 1996, we already have the wire web. So there really is no, no legacy to overcome no inertia of the systems. But all our innovations are, of course, readily deployable to politics of similar scale. So not necessarily starting from the federal level. Yeah, in the case of us. Thank you. We have a question from Josh in New York. What is the biggest mistake you have made? And what did you learn from it? Well, today I made a mistake of not fully charging the MacBook that I'm connecting with. I have to switch a laptop. And I will be back in 30 seconds or so. Oh, so everyone, the Dory link that I put there, if you want to upvote because we're not going to be able to get over every question, even if you don't have a question, you can upvote other people's questions so that they go to the top. And Gary, I'm going to break protocol as a former government official. We need to make sure they answer that question. So. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. All right, now we're back. Can you see him? Okay, that's great. That's more seriously, aside from forgetting your charge. I think it's early on when I first became the digital minister, I was already a reverse mentor, a understudy for a previous minister in charge of separate space, regular adjustments. And at that time, all most of my work is about working with the administration of the career public civil service. And I remember training thousands of career public service. But that was kind of a mistake that I should have been working also with the members of the parliament because the early direct democracy that early occupy although it gained a lot of popular support. Many of the MPs saw it as a kind of threat at the work that they're doing. And this is unnecessarily so because what we've been doing through crowdsourcing and listening skill is in design thinking terms more about extending the discover and the define the first diamond when it comes to public issues so that we can find the how might we question the key questions for what UK people call wicked problems and where as the representatives in charge of the budget and legislation is more about delivering and the implementation of these ideas so about develop and deliver. But instead of showing this very clear picture in the very beginning with help from people from IDO and CID, the professional designers, we kind of duplicated work and just did some parliamentary work because maybe because we occupied a parliament. And so that was a mistake. And it took a couple of years for the MPs to realize that e-petition and things like that actually augments their work instead of replacing their work. So now with this fresh batch of MPs some very young cosplayers like 20 ish so we're now at a point where we can work very fruitfully with the parliament but we took four years to do so. And if we learn about this earlier we could have saved like two or four years. Great question from Rocco. How has Taiwan's democratic values helped in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic especially in a digital sense and I know this I know you've done a lot so it's a great question. Right well there's a I think recent article that talked about this actually many recent articles but there is one article that talked about specifically how civic technology can help stop a pandemic. I think that's just the title if you google for it you can see I think it's in foreign affairs or foreign policy I have trouble telling them apart. But anyway so the simple answer is that the civic technologists are empowered with open data and we trust citizens with open data so everybody can very easily see for example how many surgical masks are around their vicinity in any of the pharmacies and it's updated like every three minutes or something and so yeah that's the article. So the idea of the government publishing the real-time stock level of surgical mask of all the pharmacies leaves a lot of room for example people build voice assistants Siri extensions navigation maps this trend analysis and all things like that there's more than 100 applications and it's all done within the scope of a time scope of three days. Well and so just by publishing the open data committing to listen to the feedback from the civic technologists and updating the real-time data for example the pharmacies say we also wanted to to issue our own PSAs to the people in the vicinity and we updated the open data field for that and so on so it became a real data collaborative where nobody owns but everybody have a joint control ship into the ecosystem and that's just for mask distribution there's many other civic tech projects and I encourage you to read the article. Great we'll do. What kind of inequities do you think pervade a digital democracy? Does lack of access to technology and tech literacy significantly impact a digital democracy or will most groups still be equally represented? Well certainly and that is why Intel and broadband is a human right the internet penetration rate is I think almost 90% now and even in the top of Taiwan literally the highest point like 4,000 meters almost in the Yushan or in the indigenous language this is like you still have 10 megabits per second at only 15 US dollars per month for unlimited 4G connection and if you don't it's my fault so we believe very strongly in providing broadband as a human right and through digital opportunities to send us devices and how to lessons and so on so we're I'm actually very proud that in our e-participation platform joined at GOV the most actively contributing age groups are around 15 years old and then around 65 years so there's no age gap and these two groups of people have I guess more time on their hands but also care more about sustainability about public values instead of just private benefits and it's really heartwarming to see them partner so well on important e-partitions for example on banning the use of take out plastic straws for the national identity drink property and things like that which are all proposed by people who are 15 years old who don't even have voting rights and supported by people who are 65 all right we'll do two more questions we have an anonymous one I admire how the Taiwanese government makes so many records transparent including chat conversations budget information you find that everyday people have enough time and desire to review that information well not the raw data certainly just as we really don't have time I don't have time to review all the real time stock level of search for masks in all the 6000 pharmacies and there's no need to right people only want to know which pharmacy near them have surgical masks available and that is a simple query to a vast data sets and the same for all the pretty much all the open data so the point is not about people reviewing all the information it's about enabling journalists and by journalists I mean people who add their own perspectives their own interpretations investigative journalists to empower them to have the same time to market as opposed to people who are just there for the scoop so if you don't have a transparency in communication investigative journalists are at a disadvantage because they have to spend a lot of calories just to get the sources but they don't have much time to add in their perspectives and once they do it's probably already swamped by other social media stuff but by for example in Taiwan the central epidemic command center do a live interview with all the press conference is all livestreamed people can just hide in this youtube chat room and all the journalists can ask all the questions they want there is no time limit the cec just responds to everything sometimes twice a day and in this way all the investigative journalists are empowered to make really good tools for people to to at a glance see what's it about there's one in the newslands if you search for I don't know international newslands Taiwan COVID use it as rotating globe of really good in English to journalistic outputs of what the cec has been doing catering to the expat audience and so on so every investigative journalist then cater to their story readers and the interpretive work but they always can include a source so that people can independently check the source for themselves so this is about a kind of ladder of expertise that's the more raw data and information that you have on the upper tier it all more empowers the people the storytellers in the different parts of the ladder but if you don't if you only have hearsay or random social media announcements then it's kind of like a zigzag where you don't know what's going on right all right so I want to end with a final question in this it's pretty crazy time what gives you hope well I think the coronavirus thing more so than climate change really brings us together across time and space in climate change which is already a global problem its emergency status is felt differently right if you are in a jurisdiction with a very large landmass and you are not living close to the coastal areas or the places with wildfire you simply don't feel it that much and that that's a fact and Taiwan have many friendly Pacific Islander friends and like Tuvalu who feel this like very strongly because their area is really small and they feel climate change literally every day then Taiwan is somewhat in between because we're after a large island so that the point here is that climate change while being truly global is few on a different time scale depending on where you are on earth but coronavirus is felt in the same place one it's literally within not even a year and people are tackling very similar problems across the world so I think we can learn also something from the virus by saying that just being open in our innovations and just making sure that ideas spread fast and wide that we let it mutate meaning that we don't hold it back through copyright and patents then the most active appropriate strains will be appropriated by the local people across the world to become appropriate technology so that technology really answer to the social problems instead of causing more social problems by asking the society to conform to technology so bring tech to people instead asking people to to conform to tech I think is more so important in the coronavirus situation than in others and we won't forget about how to collaborate across even after the coronavirus is over so I think it really is quite enlightening it may be a blessing in disguise well said well it was a tremendous gift for you to be here today and for you to be this up this early and you are more than coherent you are so inspiring and I couldn't think of a better time for you to join us today so thank you so much for your time and I think thanks everyone else yep absolutely so if you have to go you know please go I'm going to hang out here for a little bit for anyone that wants to chat but thanks so much Audrey thank you and stay safe and warm bye