 Rhaid fawr iawn, a fawr iawn o'r FCCJ. Rhaid fawr iawn o'r club a rhaid fawr iawn o'r online. Rhaid fawr iawn, Andy Sharpe. Rhaid fawr iawn o'r review asian. Rhaid fawr iawn o'r fawr iawn, Audrey Tang. Rhaid fawr iawn o'r Minister Digital Taiwan, a 39-year-old former hacker with a reported very high IQ, who at the age of 14 co-founded a computer book publisher and developed a search engine. She went on to become a Silicon Valley consultant for the likes of Apple. Audrey Tang was invited into President Tsaiing Wen's cabinet in 2016 to help boost Taiwan's digital prowess. She's gone on to help lead the country's much-applauded fight against the coronavirus by helping develop apps to spread the distribution of masks and economic stimulus coupons. There's much to discuss. Clearly, China tech is a big issue here. In a recent interview with my colleagues at the Nikkei in Taipei, she said that allowing Chinese equipment into a country's core telecom infrastructure is like inviting a Trojan horse into the network. But anyway, without further ado, I believe Ms Tang is going to make a short speech and we have a bunch of questions already received online and we'll also take questions from the room. So, I'm just to introduce myself, by the way, I'm the moderator. Teddy Jimbo, he's the FCCJ PAC co-chair. OK, over to you. Hello, so my extremely short speech about 30 seconds long is just to introduce the Slido system that we're going to use for this live Q&A. I see there's already seven questions being asked. So, very quickly, I think they will project the Slido link on the screen, but if the tech is still being worked on, you can also manually go to slido.com. That's S-L-I-D-O.com and enter this code. The code is 00727. So, 00727. And so, whether it's by scanning the QR code, hopefully to be projected soon, or by going to slido.com and enter 00727, you can like each other's questions. And the question with the most number of likes will flow to the top and I will answer that first. And if we get all the questions, that's great. And at any given time, of course, you can ask me questions which will appear on the bottom right of the projection screen. And if I cannot get to all the questions by the end of the hour, sorry about that, but if people have anything to ask from the podium, actually I don't see the camera of the person on site. So, the moderator will have to interrupt me during my answer to the online questions so that we can get a good online offline mix. That's my opening presentation. Thank you very much. Okay. So, I guess you want to start by answering some of the questions that's been sent so far on Slido. That's right. So, the top one currently from, sorry if my pronunciation is not perfect, from Ilgin Euromutz from BBC World Turkish. The question was, well, would I advise other governments in how to deal with social media companies when it comes to balancing, set as privacy while maintaining free speech? We believe in Taiwan that free speech is a core value. It's not an instrumental value. Indeed, according to the Civicus Monitor, we're the only jurisdiction in Asia which allows the completely open freedom of speech assembly, the press, and so on. And if you count New Zealand, that's one of the only two in Asia Pacific. And so, in our norm, it's not about takedown. We don't believe in takedown. We believe that a journalist where it should always work the same as a minister's work actually more. And so, the point is not allowing the administration to kind of collaborate with social media companies to take down anything, but to rather work out a way for people who see this information as defined as intentional untruths to do public harm the entities of journalism. People can flag it very easily. And so, for example, I'll use a metaphor. Maybe you've noticed that in your email inbox, if you receive an email saying that, I don't know, they're a royalty. They have like 10,000 big coins and they want to wire you if you just pay this small deposit and so on is a scam, by the way. And so, you would probably flag it as fun. And that is the norm in the internet governance. Basically, email is supposed to be private. But if you flag something as fun, you donate the signature, the signature print of that email so that people who receive similar email in the future, they still receive the email but it goes to the spam mail, the junk mail folder, rather than the inbox that is to say it doesn't pay to send spam after a sufficient number flagged it because it stops wasting people's time. And so, similarly, when people flag things on the, for example, line, which is an end-to-end encryption channel as a scam or a spam, it gets sent to the international fact-checking network members in Taiwan Dears 2, the MicroPen and the Taiwan Fact-checking Centre. And they make sure that they flag things as a scam or as disinformation as soon as possible. And the role of the government is just to make sure that we, once we detect that there is such a trending disinformation, not only do we with journalists so that they can do a public attribution so that people understand it is actually not true when they see it online or on the Facebook media and so on, but we also roll out counter-missages that are true up to what we understand and then packaged in a very funny way. And this is what we call humor over rumour because a lot of conspiracy theory travel on outrage and if we publish something that is very funny, literally a person cannot simultaneously feel joy and outrage about the same thing. And so because of that, people who have seen, for example, our Premier wiggling his butt saying that there's no need to panic by teaching papers because we only have one pair of butt each and by the way, teacher papers are of different material than medical masks so ramping on medical masks doesn't hurt teacher paper production. That's very funny and has a higher R value than the original conspiracy theory and so that is the idea of humor over rumour and partnering with journalists and fact-checking organisations and social media companies basically conform to this norm by doing notice and public notice. Okay, thank you. Maybe we can go on to the next question on your list from Pio. Okay, Pio from Italy. Yes. And the question is, do I think the world can survive without Chinese technology and I think Pio doesn't mean paper but rather Huawei. And so I think in Taiwan as actually the moderator have already mentioned during the sunflower movement in 2014 there's half a million people on the screen online deliberating each and every aspect of the cross-strait service and trade agreement or CSSDA and one of the aspects was this very issue and it's not about any particular company though. The issue was about whether we want to allow PRC components in our then new 4G infrastructure and the consensus on the street later ratified by the National Communication Commission and National Security Council is now and the reason is not that they're inferior or that they necessarily come with malice or whatever but rather with the realization that there is no private sector organization in the PRC when the need comes the state can always make a de facto state owned by searching and replacing leadership and so basically that says each time we upgrade even though the previous version that we installed have passed cybersecurity scrutiny we will have to do that over again because there's no telling whether there are state owned or de facto state owned actors trying to be at this upgrade to install new backdoors into the system and so the total cost of ownership of maintenance is deemed too high compared to other vendors and so because of that starting from 4G that's 2014 we did not use any PRC components in the core infrastructure and what little there were I think were all replaced by 2016 and so obviously we survived not only the pandemic and infodemic but we have pretty good 5G connection I'm holding a 5G phone using this is LG technology I think as we speak and so obviously we're doing fine not only surviving but thriving Okay thank you I'm going to open this to the room as well for any questions so please raise your hands if you have anything but let me ask one question first it's a question sent by email from Peter Elstrom at Bloomberg News he asks do you think there is a justification for governments around the world to tighten controls or ban social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat and are there specific security risks that those apps pose to users? Yeah in Taiwan I think there is a big distinction between the social sanction which is a very strong power for example Facebook during our election in 2018 the mayoral election because our control branch as a separate branch of the government published for the first time the raw data of campaign donation and expense people independently discovered by people I mean investigative journalists independently discovered that there is a large swath campaign donation expense that's not filed to the control branch and these are social media advertisements precision targeted advertisements and of course Facebook at that time there was no disclosure of the kind of the control branch the radical transparency that we did and so there's a social backlash people were saying that the Facebook by not disclosing it to the control and standards and the democracy by allowing extra judicial donations to the campaign sponsorships to the campaigns and that has a detrimental effect on the democracy and because of that the control norms which is too right first only domestic citizens get to donate and second each and every raw expense item is published we basically had a public conversation around it, the transcript of which is online with all the social media companies and we agreed on a norm on a counter disinformation self-regulation principle and the implicit outside game is always of course that if Facebook doesn't publish its advertisements library, its ads library to the same degree or more as compared to the control union even though that we may not have the legal instruments to shut down Facebook or to dispel Facebook people would feel that Facebook is actively working against our democracy and so we boycott Facebook and that's what I call social sanction and so by the presidential election this year they basically implemented the same control union norms and published in the ads library in real time for people to fact check working with investigative journalists and so that is the kind of norm conversations that we've had and of course Google and Twitter simply refrain from running advertisements for questions like this instead of saying like we should outright ban it or that we should allow it getting a social norm a social outrage if you will about the kind of threat that we could have on democracy and negotiating a safe norm and so making sure that international companies conform to that norm in an auditable, countable fashion that is preferred and only if they refuse to negotiate only if they refuse to conform to a norm do we go to the social sanction route and eventually the state action route Okay thank you Questions from the room? Yes Nakano san? My name is Nakano, I'm freelance Thank you Minister, thank I have two questions just let me hear what's going on in Taiwan these days is there any digital gap between generations in Taiwan and my second question is do many people have difficulty accepting the digitisation of the society in Taiwan? Sorry, sorry I didn't get the second question Okay, do old people elderly people have difficulty accepting the digitisation of society in Taiwan? Okay, thank you Yeah, there's just a I think NPR in New York Times piece about how a Taiwanese couple in their 80s becomes Instagram's newest fashion influencers they own a laundry shop in Central Taiwan and became Instagram stars by kind of posing as models the laundry that their customers never picked up and so they run a very successful Instagram campaign and so the point I'm trying to make is that this is a lifelong learning process this is not necessarily that the elderly people are not digitally competent it's just that if we shape the conversations so that we encourage everybody to learn and the technologies in Taiwan basically says that we need to adapt to the societal needs it's not asking a certain population to come to technology rather it is us the technology is conforming to what a societal expectation the societal norms of technologies are so I just mentioned 5G when we're deploying 5G there's an option on the spectrum there's a lot of extra money that we can allocate and we allocate it to the places where the 4G connections are least utilized specifically around in more rural areas in the places with a higher average age of population and to focus on education that's lifelong learning and health and these are the two things that all age groups feel passionate about and so yes of course there is some digital gap but it is actually not as severe as most other places because we have broadband as a human right we have digital opportunity centers and most importantly we emphasize lifelong learning around especially education and health areas and so that's the main idea and the other thing I want to bring upon is that like my own grandma 87 years old I consult her all the time when we're designing new digital services like the mask rationing you can pre-order masks using your national health insurance card on any local chaos by any local convenience store of which there's more than 20,000 in Taiwan and so my grandma suggested that I consult her younger friend who is 77 years old and grandma Yang her friend told me a lot of things for example that we should pay over the counter rather than to the ATM because a lot of the elderly people associate ATM with scan and so that we really need to allow cash based payment when you're pre-ordering the mask on the convenience stores and many other small things like that and so I think the wisdom of the elders are also very important when we're designing digital services OK, thank you Take another question here online It's from Anthony Rowley at the SCMP As I mentioned in my opening remarks you said in the NICA interview that allowing Chinese equipment into a country's infrastructure is like inviting a Trojan horse in Why do you think this and how exactly does this work? Yeah and I was simply relaying the rough consensus of the 2014 occupiers so it's not my view it's what the occupiers feel at the time and then ratified by the National Security Council and National Communication Commission and how does that work? Well if you install certain components no matter whether it's software or hardware of course you do a security audit but then necessarily in an emergency situation for example when it's out of service or whether there's just a security vulnerability that's discovered and disclosed you will probably have to update that piece of software and firmware and even hardware from the vendor and the main idea around the occupying 2014 was that we never know at which point would the CCP through its party branches installed in all the large local privately owned enterprises did do a swap of the leadership and take de facto control of the private enterprise so that they become de facto state owned so every time you upgrade you have to do another systemic risk assessment which could be done but the feeling at a time is that the risk is too high and the total cost of ownership too high we would be better to work with other vendors from liberal democratic countries ok, thank you now I'm just going to put up this take a picture of this for the audience please it's for questions to Ms Tang on Slido HTTPS nifon slash slash sli dot do slash 00727 and I'm using it here now and it's very clear and easy to use so people at home if you want to send a question please use this this link ok, thank you ok, another question to come in by on Slido it's from Patrick Velter at FAZ at German Media with the economic quarrel between the US and the People's Republic of China do you expect that companies will leave China and move to Taiwan or elsewhere ok the first time I've seen PRC spelled PR space China interesting spelling so I think there's two things the first is that we're already seeing companies that thrive only on free speech for example, media companies the journalism workers they are already setting up their headquarters in Taiwan and either moving from Hong Kong or moving from PRC to Taiwan and the people who hold for example the Oslo Freedom Forum choose Taiwan as their base indeed the reporter without borders reporter Sanfotir choose Taiwan as their original headquarter and all of this of course is recognizing the fact that in Taiwan a journalist's word is worth at least the same or if not more compared to a minister's word and you will not get quote harmonize unquote or quote disappear unquote if you say something that hurts the image of a minister that's just good journalism and so I think anything that thrives on free speech anything that thrives on what we call a permissionless innovation including many more interesting FinTech including DEFI distributed finance companies and so on I think that Taiwan is a better place even though that their innovations may not be restrained to Taiwan only Taiwan offers a really good sandbox for people to experiment there and that includes also what we call digital nomad who can hold Taiwan Goat Card you can check it out at TaiwanGoatCard.com and there's I think by this time almost a thousand now people holding these three year resident and work permits and they don't have to find an employer they can work for themselves or an international company and so on but just enjoy Taiwan as a safe and free space and so many people visit just by visitors this tourism and so on and they decide they like it and they're a foreign talent and they just apply for the Goat Card and just convert their six months trip into a three year state and we're seeing a lot of that going from the direction of PRC as well Okay, thank you Another question from Slido here, it's from Cantaro Suzuki, a freelance reporter He's asking, were there any cyber attacks from China during the recent Taiwanese presidential election and if so can you tell us how you blocked these attacks? What is cyber attacks literally every hour and so the question is yes, no matter which day you ask and fortunately most of those attacks were sorted automatically by the defense in depth system that we deployed and so it did not really interfere the presidential election although there's a lot of disinformation campaigns which are not strictly speaking cyber attacks in the traditional cybersecurity sense but there were specifically around anti-elab protests in Hong Kong we have seen concerted disinformation campaigns in the Taiwanese social media for example there was one last November that tries to portray the young people who go to the street in Hong Kong as quote, sucks that gets paid to $100,000 to murder police unquote and they even use a Reuters photo but the Reuters photo said the caption initially said nothing of that sort so they just swapped a different caption saying that this 13 years old bought new iPhones because they went down the street getting paid like mercenaries and things like that of course it's completely untrue and it's really making the round on the Taiwanese social media and again we did a public attribution notice and public attribution notice thanks to the help by the international fact checking network in particular Taiwan fact check center and who traced the original post to the weibo of the Zhongyang Zhengfa way of the central political and law unit of the CCP and that's very interesting because it's not covert, it's not like traditional cyber security attack it's right there on their weibo maybe they did not pay for the license from the Reuters photographer and simply just use a new caption to sow discord and spread this information so there's a lot of that and you can check Taiwan fact check center and my go pen and so on for a list of things there's one about invisible ink provided by the CIA and quote if you vote for Han your ink will disappear and replace by the invisible ink that appears for Dr Tsaiing when I quote and of course the way to bunk those is very simply encourage youtubers to record and livestream even the counting process because we are using paper ballot we use the counting process inviting journalists to film from all the different slides and so if there is invisible ink I'm sure that it will get discovered and so on and so forth so there's a lot of overt work on this information but I think it's proved to be much less impactful in the presidential election compared to the mayor election partly because the social media agreed on the counter disinformation norms okay thank you my next question is from Martin Cawling he's a correspondent for Handel's Blatt a German financial paper he's saying that in Germany and Japan the voluntary apps for tracking have been a failure so far and the approaches by Taiwan and South Korea have been rejected because of privacy concerns what is your answer to that there's a saying anything that's in place when I'm born is human nature and anything that's introduced after I'm born is called technology and so in Taiwan democracy is the technology and paraphrasing that we could say that any measures that's already taken by the state before the pandemic is considered norm and any measure that's introduced only after the pandemic would be considered novel and so in Taiwan for example the digital fans relied on a system that's already in place and that's advanced earthquake and flood warnings so that people in certain regions will receive an automated cell broadcast or a SMS like seconds before a major earthquake happening or that if they're in a vulnerable place a flood when there's typhoon or a heavy rain indeed last night I just received one because of the earthquake giving me plenty of time by plenty I mean maybe a few seconds to find some place solid and so because that's already in place this geofence SMS delivery is already in place so when we repurpose that so that people who return to Taiwan can choose either to go to a quarantine hotel or if you decide to stay home if they have a bathroom of their own and they don't live with people in the vulnerable groups they can choose to place their phone instead under quarantine that is the digital fans and whenever the phone escapes the roughly 50 meter radius it's not GPS it's the cell phone tower broadcasting triangulation just like receiving a SMS of earthquake warning their phone and nearby household managers as well police receive such a SMS and they will check their whereabouts and so because of that the system is already quite well understood before the pandemic when we repurpose that people feel that it is a narrow, deep intrusion to privacy but it's clearly time limited and it goes away after 14 days and we do not collect new data and so that is filled as okay so I think every jurisdiction need to look at 12 kits that's already in place before the pandemic and see if you can use a different configuration in an appropriate technology manner so that people understand already how it works the greenfield code that is to say code that's produced after the pandemic of course will always face a stronger scrutiny because there was no previous audits okay thank you another question here and it's also partly something that I want to ask myself where do you see the East Asian countries such as Taiwan, Japan China, South Korea on the digitisation ladder I mean how do these countries compare to each other and how do they compare to places such as the EU and the EUS because there's a lot of concern here in Japan about how Japan has been in some ways slow to digitise especially and this has come up with the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan we see the digitalisation project not as one ladder but as four ladders and it's very easy to remember the four ladders are called digitisation, innovation governance and inclusion and the acronym is of course DG easy to remember and they talk about different aspects digitisation talks about often as human right talks about the 5G infrastructure talks about the fact that most services provided by the government has a digital equivalent the innovation calls about presidential hackathon about sandboxes about the kind of freedom to innovate even in a more or less disruptive way and that's the innovation part and the governance part talks about regulatory technology the RECTAC the government's own way of getting a rough consensus from the people, from the stakeholders that's affected by the innovations so that we can come up with new norms that can then guide the technology so that it works with people or even after the people rather than just four people and finally the inclusion part talks about the digital opportunity centre talks about intergenerational solidarity talks about how we're working to right the wrongs of the social injustice and so on using technologies that empower people closest to the suffering rather than in a way that excludes them from conversation so that includes for example participation by people who are not of the voting age or even ways like the civil IoT infrastructure that makes air or water or mountains oceans previously represented in the democratic conversation to represent them in the democratic conversation and so these are four very different pillars and it's hard to make a linear projection, linear conversation because it's all about the societal priorities and I don't think there's right or wrong about these and in Taiwan we try to make sure that all those four pillars support each other rather than detract from each other and cause polarised heated debates between the different pillars that is to say the way to connect those pillars is what I'm focusing on not making one pillar particularly high to the detriment of the other cultures, this is called transculturalism. Just to follow up quickly there and then I'll come to you in one second please would you have any advice for lawmakers and policy makers in Japan on how to improve the digitalisation process here? Well I think that one, we're conscious of not making this about kind of paperless or CO less or things like that, it's not about removing the previous ways of doing things, there's always more than one way to do it so just the triple stimulus voucher have no less than four different variants depending on the payment method and more than three methods of collecting even just the paper part. And so the point here that I'm making is that if you work with the stakeholders across different generations you will find ways that doesn't take away from anyone like in the National Palace Museum Twgong in Taiwan, we work on to improve the ticketing process to reduce queuing. Previously they found that the elderly people insist on queuing with paper ticket rather than using QR code for the ticketing process like the high speed rails. It's not that elderly people doesn't like QR codes, it's that after interviews we discovered they really like this paper ticket because they can take it home to put in their diaries to share with their families on dinner tables that the token, this paper token really met us and after we did this interview we discovered they'll be perfectly happy if after using QR codes to very quickly into the museum, they can collect the receipt and nobody says the receipt has to be dull and uninteresting. It could be gold-plated, it could have their name on it, it could have any number of beautiful design including QR code that you can scan and bring to your grandchildren's island on a popular Nintendo Switch game and things like that and which by the way the National Palace Museum actually do. And so this kind of intergenerational co-creation workshop is the key in producing digitalisation project that doesn't make anyone feel that they have been left behind and that is the key here. Okay, thank you. Question overhead please. Hello, my name is Kondo from Gendai Business Japan. My question is that the Chinese government seems that the internet is a tool for controlling 1.4 billion Chinese people and what do you think of this policy and it will succeed? Thank you. Thank you. We have seen that previous attempts at totalitarian government is at most sub-totalitarian because there was no sufficient technologies to ensure a total tracking of people. Now in places like Xinjiang of course we are seeing that the prototypes of a truly total not just sub-total totalitarian surveillance regime is being worked on and so my main point here is that in Taiwan because we are a liberal democracy we see things through a human right and democracy lens and so these attempts for example in Xinjiang that I just alluded to is basically prompting all the sectors in Taiwan social sector people the hacktivists but also people in a private sector and so on to look at these applications and technologies and serves as a really strong reminder that we should not go there and this is also why we have such a strong societal norm for example against takedowns and lockdowns by the way and that is because we just look at the takedowns the surveillance censorship regime the great firewall and into a great canon and say that we should totally not go there so in a interesting sense it actually made consensus easier to reach in a Taiwan political discussion when it's about emerging technology because people can just bring out a argument saying what you're doing censorship of the internet are we going to the root of the PRC and that proposal became a non-sata okay thank you a couple of geopolitical questions have come in online here too so I'll probably ask you them both together now unfortunately we don't have this person's name for this one but this person asks about hearing about Huawei spying for the Chinese Communist Party especially Mr Trump sorry making these claims but we've not seen any proof presented what would you say about this first my first question there as I said in the very beginning I'm not making any comments about any specific companies indeed when we talk about the 4G and the sunflower rough consensus the conversation on the street is not about specifically Huawei or ZTE or any companies it's about a systemic risk assessment of the defect of control of the state from the PRC government to their so-called private sector companies and so that is our main argument and my main message to people around the world I do not as a rule comment on specific companies okay thank you and following up there with a question from someone called Tom very simple question when do you think China will invade Taiwan well I think that is a question to PRC leadership that is certainly not a question from us I have no idea I cannot over answer that question okay understandable as well okay George got a question from the room now hello Mr Ong I'm working for Swiss Radio and Television can you talk a little bit about your own career and about your priorities today as Minister of Digitisation to promote the development of the software industry in Taiwan and to make it as competitive or even more competitive as in China or in the US thank you my own upbringing is as a moderator I have introduced an entrepreneur and later on work as an open source movement consultant to large companies including Apple so that they can work more in the open and the idea here is very simply that open innovation works better than closed room innovation when it comes to software because one of the key of software is that making new software is very easy maintaining software in the face of changing society is very costly and if we can empower all the citizens of software to become co-creators rather than just users who often connote a very I don't know addictive way of relationship to technology there are some other industry that also use the term users we need to rethink the relationship of software making and people who use the software and so because of that my job description I think very clearly explains the priorities that I have in mind and so I'll just simply read my job description which is very short and it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and when we hear that a singularity is near that is always remember the plurality is here okay thank you okay we've got a question here following up on the internet of things again from Anthony Roly at the SCMP has 5G made it easier to access the internet of things from outside granting others access to vital control systems not necessarily because the information flow can be configured in various different ways for example in Taiwan there's a lot of people voluntarily putting air boxes that is very cheap less than 100 US dollars PM 2.5 and other air quality detectors on the balconies on the primary schools to teach kids the digital competence so that they become data producers, data stewards rather than just consumers of data and so that is of course a great educational tool but it also enabled us to have a very complete structure of moving this to other for example water pollution sensing and mask availability level as a one it enables the entire community the entire society to collaboratively do sense making about things but it relies on the ideas of a distributed ledger that everybody can just write to append to without taking control of anybody else's numbers that is to say it is just a way for data to grow into a ledger structure without relinquishing any source code algorithmic and control or things like that is a commons in a data collaborative for all to use and if you configure it this way then there's no risk of people interfering with the control systems of the larger for example environmental sensors or the industrial processes and so on because people just write to this this should the ledger and the use of that ledger is governed by its own logic according to each and every collaborator in the data collaborative and so there are ways to design the data flow such that it is minimized by its very importance to look at into the 5G specification and see where do we want to place the computing is it at the edge is it at the data centers it is something between is the federated learning is it about protection of private data using differential privacy or for the homomorphic encryption or open algorithms or things like that and in Taiwan we're looking to establish just as Japan recently did a dedicated data protection authority that is independent from any ministries that can look at those mathematical cryptographic building materials and suggest the best way to configure those okay thank you another question here from Nishimoto from the Asahi Shimbun a Japanese newspaper you're communicating obviously now through the world online how would how to you does you know online communication compare with face-to-face communication what is the advantage of online and what is the advantage of face-to-face well the advantage of online is two fold right first that we can see each other more clearly without wearing a medical mask and nowadays and the second thing is that it reduces carbon footprint also very important and speaking personally because I adjust jet lag very slowly it also is much better than long distance flight because on average it takes me one day or more to adjust for one hour of jet lag difference but that's just selfish reason the other two are public benefit in any case the point I'm making is that mostly we can replace the knowledge sharing part of face-to-face gatherings using online conference as we're having now or even in virtual reality where we can share knowledge about three-dimensional spatial objects and buildings and simulations and things like that I even had a conversation with people in the primary and secondary schools by shrinking my own avatar in virtual reality to the same height as the kids and that really made them much more eager to interact with me because I don't look a meter and 80 centimeters high anymore and so these are the great thing about online is that you can transcend physical and acoustic rules but of course there's parts of face-to-face that are not replaceable for example the face-to-face conversations that is around understanding what people feels like is very important and in face-to-face conversations we often make for example food and drinks and music and things like that and making sure that we can feel that we are not only in the same place talking about same things but feeling the same and that is harder to replicate in an online way although I guess we can order the same pizza delivery beforehand and have the same beer or something it could of course be a range and approximated but it's not as natural as people are gathering in the same face-to-face place because we never had a locked down what we have seen is that people avoid large gatherings during the pandemic so we see educational facilities encourage some kind of satellite structure where people gather in preferably outdoor place keeping one meter distance so we don't have a wear a mask having food enjoying drink together and using large projectors or virtual reality to connect to many more such places so you can have the best of both worlds indeed I'm working in the park in the social innovation lab so if you look out of the door you can see people just holding such outdoor gatherings at any given time they can just go through this place and look into out there look into my office and see very transparently how I'm working why I'm working but at the same time we can amplify these face-to-face conversations to various different municipalities using 5G technology even to the most rural and highest mountains so that people can also feel that they are in this co-creation workshop no matter how remote they are so I think it's eminently possible to make the best of both worlds happen if you design the interaction space appropriately okay thank you another question here from Ilgin at BBC World Turkish she says where did your heart lie and do you miss your earlier life as a conservative anarchist okay my heart does not lie well I'm a slushie so I am at once digital minister that's my day job but I'm also moonlighting as a civic hacker not only for mass availability but also for example with a public buttering creator of the Ethereum blockchain and Glenn Weil Danielle Allen and so on and we have a start-up really MPO a such innovation organization called Radical Exchange in New York and I'm a board member I'm also a board member of Digital Future Society in Barcelona of Council of Democracy Foundation in Amsterdam and that's the original Madrid decision-making after the 15M so very much civic hacker organizations and as long as I don't take a salary from those organizations as long as they are not for profit and as long as the Premier, the Prime Minister, feels that it furthers our digital diplomacy they are okay with me moonlighting as a civic hacker while being a digital minister so I see myself as a channel as a bridge as a Lagrange point between civic movements on one side and governments on the other and as the Lagrange point between the earth and the moon there are three such points and two more behind the earth and behind the moon I'm in a place where I can more effortlessly balance between the movements and the governments and find a common purpose common value despite your initially very different positions okay thank you we have a question here about the your mask app it's from Riho Izawa at NTV Japan what was the most difficult thing regarding creating and using the application such as the mask app or the mask map sorry when you were trying to deal with Covid-19 initially in Taiwan what was the biggest challenge in creating such apps given that obviously Covid-19 came very quickly well as I said because the civic hackers already had experiences working with the air pollution map working with the water boxes and so on the code is already there we just need to repurpose it with a new real time news feed an API an application programming interface for the mask availability which the national health insurance agency provided very quickly and it's updated every time every 30 seconds so that's not a hard part the most challenging part actually is in the negative externalities that it caused the pharmacists because as soon as we rolled out the mask availability mask map we see that the pharmacists who swipe the NHI card and then hand out the mask praising that it's working very well but there are also pharmacists that choose a different strategy they say that you can get a numbered batch a numbered card from the pharmacy in exchange of your NHI card and they just hand out those numbered plates very quickly and then start to swipe the NHI card in bulk and so it will create a couple of hours in which they are just slowly doing this NHI card swiping and telling the people who have those numbers to collect in the afternoon for example so that the mask will show that they still have in store but actually they have already rationed out all the mask of the day using a number of plates and so those pharmacists are actually quite upset of the map because map is inaccurate and actually increased their work because people would just call them saying that why are their discrepancies are keeping the mask for yourself and even though they are volunteer they were not getting paid and so this conflict is solved quite quickly because that we have a weekly iteration cycle so when the pharmacist says okay we will announce the availability hours, the schedules and you need to make an additional field in an open API for that we just adjust very quickly and eventually we also develop a back end button so that each pharmacist can just click that button and disappear from the map which they will do if they handed out all the numbered plates and so on and so this is truly a co-creation process and there is a crack in everything that the light gets in Okay, good. Do you have any more questions from the room? Okay, I will go to the next online question It's from Rick Weisburd from ELSS How can democracies effectively deal with threats that unfold over long periods despite relatively short cycles of elections and of course corporate strategy? Well, I would argue that cycles of elections are too long for real-time feedback In Taiwan during the pandemic we have the central epidemic command center doing daily life broadcasted press conferences such as this one where the journalists ask anything they want and the minister always respond to each and every single one of them and if you do this daily iteration cycle plus a toll free number 1922 where everybody can call and not only get their question answered but also correct the parts that we did wrong, for example there's a young boy whose family called saying that my boy doesn't want to go to school because you only ration pink medical mask to our district and we don't have other color of mask and our boy said that he will be bullied and so the very next day in the daily press conference all the medical officers start wearing pink and the minister of health and welfare was his childhood hero in a way of gender mainstreaming I'm sure and suddenly the boy is the most hip person because only he has the color that the heroes are wearing and so the point of this daily rather than every four years iteration is that the social sector can bond together and instead of just criticizing they can offer constructive ways alternative visions forking the government and merge on a daily cycle just as in open source development and so if you have a short enough iteration then the threats that unfold over long periods will get the collective intelligence sensing it long before it actually become a large problem for example when Dr Lee Wenliang, the whistleblower from Wuhan posted that there are quote seven new SARS cases in a local seafood market within 24 hours it gets to the PTT the local equivalent of red here and it gets up voted so our medical officers take that into action imagine what would happen if it would take us a year or so to notice that post that would be have been impossible so the way Dr Lee Wenliang became literally a savior of Taiwanese population is having a collective intelligence mechanism and have a really short iteration cycle noticing it into sensemaking into triaging into starting health inspections for all flights coming from the very next day, the first day of January of this year so short iterations, quick merging of alternative visions from the civil society, a strong and robust social sector I think these are the ways that democracies can effectively deal with threats that are advanced and persistent okay thank you we have another question here from what is your message to Japan given that it seems now to be in the midst of a second wave of the COVID-19 virus with increasing numbers of infections every day well don't panic that's always the most important right and in Taiwan we have a really a very calm Minister Minister Chen Shi Zhong that appears every day so even though there were panic like panic buying of tissue papers which was solved with a meme panic buying of instant noodles which was solved with another brilliant meme that says there is endless instant noodles by as much as you want and add some vegetables to it so you have a balanced diet this whole point of making sure that people can remix those messages into a way that's calm collected and even humorous is very important to make sure that people don't panic and once they don't panic they have some mental capacity to understand some epidemiology and working with people who are closest to the suffering I will use one example in Taiwan there was a day when there was a confirmed case and the confirmed case said that she stayed at home with no contact to people a very simple family and so on there's no way that she would get infected by the COVID but the medical offices keep on interviewing and the next day with this government works in a kind of intimate bar as a professional service provider in that intimate bar and she initially provided a different account because she didn't want to review the people that she had intimate encounters with in that intimate bar as a professional and so at that point many people were saying that we should just shut down any like night clubs intimate bars and so on but minister Chen Shizong insist on saying no we're not putting them any criminal threats they're not criminals they're professionals and we're not threatening them even with the closure fines we're challenging them to discover ways that they can continue their business while observing physical distancing and real contact that is to say people have to file the way to contact them if there is really a virus outbreak and at the time it was met with some ridicule because people saw the entire point of intimate bars is to break the physical and there really is no way that people would consent of leaving their real contact details to the intimate bars but this is like the pygmalone effect if you expect a civil society to come up with innovations eventually they do so there are some intimate bars that then discover that if you wear a cap with a plastic shielding then you can still have a clear view of the people who drink with you and even have drinks while observing the physical distancing rules and if you keep only on paper your contact phone number but under a pseudonym and if you physically shred that paper after four weeks of no local outbreak then people actually trust them enough to actually leave their contact details and you can do SMS or line to check that it's actually their number before they enter so they eventually rose up to the challenge and become part of our conversation about counter coronavirus pandemic and so instead of casting any group as outside us, I think it's important to work with each and every group even though they're currently not capable of coming up with physical distancing rules and so on the belief is that they eventually would and once they do the municipalities eventually require them to say which rules they're implementing and then based on that accountability then they're allowed to reopen and that's just a one of the very a lot of bignets into the Taiwanese counter coronavirus but I hope this conveys the idea of co-creation OK, I think that brings us to the end of the hour so thank you very much for your time Audrey, much appreciated we're going to send you by email a one year honorary membership to the FCCJ so when you are allowed to come to Japan wherever that may be we do hope you come and have a drink with us in the bar and tell some more of your stories OK, arigata gozaim washa and live long and prosper OK, thank you very much indeed Thank you