 Hello, is this sound getting through? Can you hear me? Excellent. So good local time, everyone. This is Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister. It is my great pleasure and honor to be here virtually at the 2021 US-Taiwan consultations on democratic governance in the Indo-Pacific region and share some thoughts with you about Taiwan's digital democracy. Well, as digital minister of Taiwan, I suppose it makes perfect sense for me to travel now digitally across time zones and boundaries to be part of this very meaningful event. However, I believe many of you would also agree when I say it is a pity that the pandemic made it difficult for me to join you in person. I remember the last time I traveled to Washington, DC, it was right before the pandemic hits and I had the opportunity to have face-to-face discussions with so many top notch experts and scholars and shook hands, which is a pre-pandemic thing now, with friends from all over the world. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic threw the world off balance and brought drastic changes. And in many parts of the world, we've seen symptoms of democracy in backslide and also some authoritarian regimes have tried to justify measures of state control and surveillance and restrictions in the name of public health. Of course, there is never an easy way to tackle emerging challenges, but I see opportunities arise among just the biggest global crisis of our time. When we are faced with the shared challenge that confronts the global population in Taiwan, I'm happy to report that I see digital social innovations continue to accelerate democracy and deepen collaboration across sectors. Because in Taiwan, democracy is seen as an applied social technology that improves when more people work together to achieve a common goal, just like any other technologies like semiconductor design. It works as a vehicle to turn the energy spread across different agencies and sectors into a driving force for policy innovation. And the idea is to enable the concept of working with the people, not just for the people, to permeate public policy decision-making. In other words, it is important to crowdsource democracy. So how do we start to bring ourself to work with the people? Well, for me, the answer is simple. It's to trust our citizens because to give no trust is to get no trust. And the first step towards such mutual trust is always more transparency. A few days ago, I met with a delegation from the European Parliament. And one of the delegation members heard about how facial recognition was used by some nearby authoritarian regimes and he was so curious to learn about how AI and digital technologies are used in Taiwan. And my answer was that in pluralistic democracies, AI should mean assistive intelligence rather than authoritarian intelligence. While in the more authoritarian regimes, transparency means making citizens transparent to their state. In Taiwan, we're using digital technologies to make the state and the decision-making process transparent to the citizens. And that is why in Taiwan, we have dedicated ourself to bring technology into the space where peoples are rather than expecting anyone to adapt to the spaces where the technologists are. So much like how the tip of Taiwan, the Yushan Jade Mountain, raises two or three centimeters each year because of earthquakes from clashing tectonic plates. We have built resilient democratic public digital infrastructures to invite completely different ends of the spectrum of different ideas, thoughts, feelings to come to the virtual table to discuss and also to co-create. A great example is the one-stop online civic participation platform, or join the GOV, the TW, where anyone can file a petition and participate in policy-making. Face-to-face cross-ministerial collaboration meetings are held twice monthly to explore ways to incorporate ideas from those petitions with more than 5,000 signatures into policy-making. So literally anyone, not just citizens, but also residents, global citizens, people too young to vote, can and they do play a role in the decision-making process. So far we've held more than 100 collaborative meetings as of October 2021. There have been close to 30 million visits and we're just a country with population of 23 million. So we're also using digital technologies to cross-source solutions to address globally shared challenges from a presidential or country-wide scale. We have a dedicated annual event called the Presidential Hackathon that we actually co-organized with AIT, so thank you very much AIT, which invites citizens from around the world to propose open data solutions to global issues such as climate change, anti-corruption, and so on. Every year, five winning teams receive trophies from our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, that carries the promise of realizing their ideas on a national scale in the following fiscal year with all the budget, personnel, and regulation support. So mutual trust and dialogue between the social sector, public sector, and private sectors are reliably discovered and amplified each year. Digital democracy also play an important role in our fight against the pandemic with no lockdowns. And I believe our efforts to counter the virus are based on the three pillars of fast, fear, and fun. Well, fast is for fast response, fear for fear access for all, and fun is for humor over rumor, turning outrage into creativity so we can laugh and overcome the conspiracy theories together. And with these key values, we can find opportunities to cultivate what I call people-public-private partnerships, and even a small idea can be augmented and amplified into a strong force for good. A good example is from last February's Face Mask Mops, initiated by social entrepreneurs working with the decentralized community of G0V or GovZero. To prevent a panic buying of medical grade masks, we instituted this national rationing scheme, but we also released Application Programming Interface, or API, to provide the public with real-time updated every 30 seconds location-specific data on mask availability. And within just a few days, more than 100 different mops, chatbots voice assistants were created so that people can look at the details of where the masks are in stock and their numbers. Within, I think, a couple of weeks, it was also adopted in South Korea. And similarly, in May this year, when we faced the real, early wave so far of COVID, the early measures to record the contact information for those entering or leaving public venue led to the quick development, again by G0V, of the SMS-based contact tracing system in, again, just three days. So it's not a government technology, it's intuitive, free of apps, no downloads required, and an easy way to check in at public places without any compromise on privacy based on well-understood principle of SMS. And anyone can look up who has accessed those records from the local contact tracing office in the past four weeks that shortened the contact tracing from 24 hours to less than 24 minutes now. And we're also using the power of crowdsourcing and people-public-private partnerships to fight against the infodemic, to relieve the anxiety that has stoked the flames of this information crisis during the pandemic. Instead of using centralized initiative, we focus more on a decentralized human-centered approach, this human-over-rumored tactic, for example, which gives public room to laugh at non-factual information which spreads faster, actually, than rumors. We also put an emphasis on media competence instead of just literacy so that people can see themselves as contributor to real-time fact-checking and journalism. Compared to censorship, takedown, top-down, lockdowns, I believe this is a longer-lasting solution or vaccination of the mind to the ongoing disinformation crisis. The word democracy comes from ancient Greek that combines demos, people, and kratos, power. It means power according to the will of the people and on behalf of the people. In Taiwan, we're making efforts to demonstrate how the use of digital platforms can strengthen democracy by giving everyone a voice and enabling a government that works with the people, not just for the people, supported by a meaningful, affordable broadband as a human rights and the administration that has worked to make our system and policy rational as transparent as possible because we believe that human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy, these are not to be traded in any shape or form. There's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in. That's a Lenecoe, unquote. When faced with this shared challenge that confronts the global population, I think an opportunity emerged to form shared goals, bringing all hands on deck to crowdsource for idea that unlocks our collective and connective intelligence to march toward a free, open, democratic and resilient Indo-Pacific. So to conclude, I would like to quickly share with you my own job description that I wrote in 2016 when I joined the cabinet as digital minister. 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 whenever we hear that a singularity is near, well, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening. Live long and prosper.