 This session I am supremely excited about when I talked to Adam and Jess and the team at New Local about this conference I said, the first thing I said was you have to have Audrey, we have to get Audrey for this. The story of what the Taiwanese government has done, how the Taiwanese government has shifted over the last decade and particularly what they did during the pandemic is really a transformational one, a deeply inspiring one and one that shows what this community power thing could look like in reality. It's one I happened to tell in the book but when I came across it in the research I was just like this blows my mind. Audrey who is going to join us on screen in a moment I think to give you a quick idea of the journey Audrey had to doing this work, it started outside government as part actually of a hacker network, a hacker group called GovZero and they were called GovZero because what they did was they built parallel websites, the government websites with the URLs G0V.TW that enabled people to participate in essentially shadow government processes and see what a relationship between citizen and state that could be very different might look like. And then after an Occupy style protest the power changed and shifted in Taiwan which GovZero is a major part of and Audrey became first a mentor to a government minister and then after a presidential election a minister herself, she's now Taiwan's digital minister and minister for social innovation. So please give a warm welcome to Audrey Tang. So I'm hoping we can see your face. Hello and good luck, good time everyone seems I have to choose between the slides or my face so currently you're seeing my face. It's lovely to see that face Audrey it's been a while. I wanted to start really just by acknowledging the moment in time we're living in and obviously with Russia's invasion of Ukraine that there has been a lot in the headlines about China's relationship with Taiwan and just to acknowledge that and really ask you to just say a little bit about that from your perspective like how are you over there, how are things and give us a bit of a land in your way of seeing this moment in time. Sure you're seeing Taipei 101 our highest building displaying that we stand with Ukraine and with that said we're doing well I think yesterday just concludes the first extended two week like mobilization education exercise at the core of the reservists and people are in very high spirits and contribute a lot through a slide like a slide of like a questionnaire on how to actually improve the program so people are all very eager to put into use what the world are learning at the moment with the all out strategies that the Ukrainians have demonstrated. Very good and I think often when we think about these sorts of moments that there is a perception that this is a moment for the state, the big state to kind of act and protect its people but I get the sense from what I know of how you work and how Taiwan operates that probably there's a bit more of a role for people in communities in this moment in time than we might perceive there to be. Might you just say a bit about how you see the role of citizens in national defense in Taiwan? Well as we have learned in the past two years and counting of countering the pandemic without a day of lockdowns that people do not suffer from fatigue because there's no kind of top-down just do it way of ordering pretty much all the important counter-pandemic measures are invented by communities and just popularized by the state and I think this people first approach or as I like to call it social sector first approach proved that it's not just good for countering pandemic but also for the infodemic countering that this information crisis which is going to be very important in a all out mobilization for defense as well. Could you just give us a bit more make that a bit more real for us so you say the real countering the infodemic can you tell us a bit more about how you actually are doing that? Yes certainly so in Taiwan for example if you're using one of those end-to-end encrypted systems like Line which is like WhatsApp or Signal the leading antivirus companies as well as the G0, Vikav0 community all have this chat bot that you can invite to your end-to-end encrypted group conversations that provides a real-time clarification if anyone paste a link that's likely a virus of the computer sort or of the mind sort that's to say a disinformation and the idea very simply put is that we are doing the same as countering SPAM where you can flag any incoming email as SPAM and it protects not just you but also submits the kind of fingerprint of the SPAM into the for the SPAM cases SPAM house for the Taiwan case is the international fact-checking network and a group of volunteers which you can also join anytime at Covax.org can just edit it like we key editors do and so that we can see which variants of the infodemic are now gaining popularity are having a very high basic transmission value AR value of maybe 10 right within one cycle each person spreads to 10 persons and so when and when it's still early in its transmission or in this mutation and then we dedicate the fact-checking power including the media competence classes in basic education to those variants that are gaining the highest our value we don't squander the fact-checkers capabilities by Raja focuses on getting the clarification out so that within a couple hours we package up the clarifications the science and so on into what we call humor over rumor packages so it's very cute dogs or the ministers making fun of ourselves and so on it gains a even higher basic transmission value than the conspiracy theory and then people who spread those memes and so on automatically gets inoculated so it's like a viral vaccine for lack of better term so that's our basic strategy the humor over rumor couple with notice and public notice systems I love that as I've heard it called out memeing it's like people are coming up with these things and as you say that it's coming from people these there's more accurate bits of information with the using the cute dogs and so on and then and then the state's supporting to popularize supporting to people to do those things but not not doing for people not doing to people yeah and even the state produced memes are under creative commons license so people can remix however they they want so our our most remixed is the cute dog the Shiba Inu names don't shy so don't shy is here telling you that when you're outdoor keep to she buzz away from another or indoor keep three she buzz that's for physical distancing and the most remixed viral meme is on the right side the bottom the where the sunshine is telling you to wear a mask to protect your own face against your own and washed hands and so that's mean kind of really took off and so even people who doubt the usefulness of mask early on when protecting kind of from outside transmissions and so when actually can't deny that it protects your face from your own and wash hands which links hand washing and mask use which is the kind of really early ticket that led us to combat the original string of the virus I just love this love that example and we've started to talk a bit more about the pandemic and and you became I sort of guess sort of globally famous in a certain space is that as the minister who hacked the pandemic and and I and I know that you've got a set of principles that I think you've you've applied in that you guys applied in that approach might you share those principles and just say a little bit about them because I think they might surprise some of the folk in the room yeah certainly and so they're really easy to remember they're fast fair and fun the fast part our collective intelligence tells us that instead of relying on the more anti-social corners of social media for example Facebook we have our own social sector community powered spaces like the PTT which is often called a Taiwanese equivalent to Reddit but it's not an equivalent because it's run by the Taiwan academic network essentially student pet project has been running for 25 years and there's no shareholder or advertisers so people focus in very quickly as you can see it's 2019 here on the last day of 2019 people already triaged the Dr. Lee will announce message from Wuhan and then very quickly the very next day because it's the most upvoted contribution we started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan so that's early response but not just people who have a habit of frequency text-based bulletin boards anyone even very young child can just pick up a phone call this toll free number 192 and inputs their knowledge and wisdom for example 2020 April there was a young boy who called saying you're rationing our mask which is great but I got was pink mask which is not great because all the boys in my class have navy blue medical grade mask and the very next day in a daily 2 p.m. press conference all the medical offices were pink I think the Minister Chen Xuzhong of health and welfare the commander even said that pink panther is his childhood hero or something so the boy became the most simple in the classroom only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes hero wear I guess and then all the fashion brands and so on turned pink for a few weeks before they turn rainbow but anyway so the idea is that it can I just pause you there very briefly just to underline what that actually was the government set up a phone line where anyone could ring in with ideas for how the country's response could be better which a six-year-old boy was that right yeah no I think it's 10 years or something but the thing is that it's not an answering machine it's not some natural language processing voicemail there are all professional calls into operators including charities communities that specialize in disaster recovery who pick up the phone with a lot of empathy so it's directed there's a heat there's a human being on the end of the phone when that then that's wrong because I think that the perception sometimes of what you've done in Taiwan is that it's all tech it's all high tech it's all is something that most can but that's not a high tech that's not a high tech thing in many ways is it it's just it's human to human contact well social technologies are also tech right we shouldn't you know say that open space technology is not tech we shouldn't say democracy is not a set of technologies they're tech as well they're they're just not you know digital shiny IT stuff but they are real social technologies thank you very much sorry I interrupted your flow though so you were talking fast fast fair and fun yeah so the fair part is more widely known it's one of the signature of zero projects in 2020 where people were queuing up in the pharmacies we have more than six thousands of them rationing out the mask using universal healthcare numbers and go zero simply forked that's to say made a different representation of the availability so people queuing in line can see every 30 seconds the real-time inventory of each pharmacy and if it runs out of mask and then of course it shows in red so you don't bother go to that place and so and so it made things more equitable but even more important is that it's a open API so more than 100 different tools came up and one of the community tools analyzed the real-time supply and demand and the open street map community if I remember correctly pointed out correctly that even though we distribute to the pharmacies and they align almost exactly the same to the population center so in theory on average each citizen in Taiwan is of the same distance to the available mask but that was not actually where the supply and demand should because not everyone in the helicopter so the same distance on the map doesn't translate to the same opportunity cause when you count travel metro bus and things like that so they ask through a legislator through the parliamentary interpolation to minister Chen saying clearly your data is biased there's a real data bias but because we publish upon collection right we publish every 30 seconds minister was able to say legislator teach us right and it's not rhetorical because the legislator and going question was VP of data analytics at Foxconn so she knows something about data right so at her suggestion the very next day in 24 hours after that we change the distribution method to base on the real opportunity cause and then introduce pre-registration and collecting on convenience stores so this shows that real-time open data can ensure equity and families through co-creation right so people are not just protesting they're actually contributing a better algorithm but that would not be possible if we publish every quarter or something the statistics and I would love to just hear you say a word more about the word fun in this because I think the word fun might not necessarily be one we associate with pandemic response I know we've talked a little bit about humor over rumor already but just just underline that idea of making things fun for us a bit more sure so there's another project again initiated by gov zero I think it was featured on international media saying how to use simple tech to be the current virus and it's actually a little bit fun as well this is how we do check-ins so this is a phone number you point point at your phone I think there's a building camera to I think use a 711 and then a sense SMS so all you need to do is to point at a character and it's send so that's literally just a couple of seconds and with this is that is sense the 15 digits of random number to your local telecom carrier and it's not sent to the government it's only stored in your local telecom which is deleted after 28 days and it's fun because it's very easy to use and even for feature phone users who don't want to scan they can manually text those 15 digits and they can rest assured that only contact chasers get access to the records because we publish a reverse auditable platform so that anyone can see which municipalities which contact chaser access that in past four weeks which were deleted of course after four weeks and for the telecom carriers the 15 digits is just random number it doesn't mean a thing but the venue owner learns nothing about you not your phone number and the QR code printer doesn't know where you are right so this is called a multiparty oblivious distributed storage but behind this jargon right is the just honestly very fun process of scanning the QR code and went absolutely viral it was designed only for public transportations in May 2021 but a week after the starting of this SMS based contact tracing more than two million venues including my market stands and so and voluntarily set up those characters because it's very easy to do. It's lovely to hear I've heard this the approach described as participatory self surveillance and I think you dropped in very early in the conversation that this that your pandemic response has been characterised by actually not having a lockdown at any point could you just say a bit more about that because I think I think people might find that quite surprising to hear as well. Yeah definitely I think with the for example the contact tracing method around May 2021 when we faced the only real large wave the alpha variant we shortened the contact tracing time for from an infection case to exposure notification from more than 24 hours to less than 24 minutes and that allowed us to combat the alpha variant the delta variant currently we're on the Omicron variants and we still don't do lockdowns and so far in the past two years and counting there's less than 1000 casualties of all this variants in a country of 23 million. Less than 1000 deaths in a country of 23 million. Just let that sink in for a moment. Thanks and I wanted to people do start if you've got questions I'm sure you have I mean when I first started talking to Audrey I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing and I suspect you're in that place. But if you have questions do start posting them and updating I'll come to some questions in a moment. But before we go there I just wanted to ask you maybe to say a word about the philosophy that underpins this and the way you see I remember if I may just sort of prompt you quite directly with this. I remember when when when I interviewed you as I was writing the book I I said wow the people people of Taiwan must really trust the government for this for this stuff to be possible and your answer kind of blew my mind so I without pressing too too obvious to kind of play button on Audrey Tang can I set you up again. Yes certainly but it's not my answer it actually came straight from Dao Deqing the Taoist scripture so the credit goes to Lao Zi who may or may not be a single person and I think it's chapter 17 called acting simply and which is said when the work is done right with no fuss no boasting ordinary people would say oh we did it because to give no trust is to get no trust so it's not about asking for trust it's just about us radically trust the citizens. It's not about asking for trust it's about us radically trusting citizens it's a really powerful thought I think and maybe if you could say just a word about how you you came to this work how you see your own journey in this and and where that might be going next what you're excited to be doing next as the next steps of developing this in Taiwan. Certainly so nobody really invited me right we invited ourselves in when we occupied the parliament in 2014 March so that's the citizens assembly and just to distinguish us from some other occupiers this is thoroughly nonviolent throughout the three weeks there's no no single incident of violence in the occupied parliaments and all the 20 NGOs that were occupying the various corners of the street were demonstrating not to protest but demonstrating to demo to show how a very controversial cross-strait service and trade agreement with the Beijing regime which the parliamentarians refused to deliberate substantial it can be deliberated by half a million people on the street and many more online if you apply just the right social technologies like as I mentioned open space technology nonviolence communication dynamic facilitation so on and so forth and my role is just to help supply the you know Ethernet cables that enable that the cable power and radio people to show this deliberation over the internet to anyone who care about these and to support this deliberation there's a lot of visualization of the national budget have a trade service may affect each and every of us so each corner can talk about a single aspect like there were a corner we're talking about whether we want to allow into our 4g infrastructure the so-called private sector in the Beijing regime and just to be clear sorry Audrey just to pause it just to be clear this is a visualization from from before from gov zero when you are outside of government that's right and and there's another supporting website where you can input your company registration number or the kind of service you do and show exactly which line in the see cross-strait service and trade agreement would impact you are in the next few years and so on so it enable a fact-based deliberation and this in auguro give zero project when I became digital minister in 2016 were then merged into our national participation platform join the GOV that TW so it shows the same organization and budget visualization is on but the zero becomes oh right so it's a classic kind of fork to merge play box so at the end of the occupy end of 2014 I was invited along with many facilitators as reverse mentors people younger than 35 who serve as kind of advisor man mentor to the cabinet members of course now that I'm old and 40 now so I have my own use reverse mentors guiding me I was just actually at a reverse mentor meeting with local indigenous people are talking about indigenous rising reconciliation wonderful to hear I'm gonna I'm gonna start to bring in a few questions from from the audience here so so I'm gonna pick off to start with and so this so you understand a little more who you're talking to as well Audrey but this is a gathering primarily focused on what we call community power here this these are your people in the UK to a large extent right with the closest thing we have to gov zero I think is probably this this movement although we're probably a little less a little less digital focused I guess and a little more a little more and offline but but we're pretty we're pretty focused on the local as well and so one question I want to pick out from here was the Taiwan pandemic response driven more by central government and what was the role for local provinces and municipalities in this yeah I think it's mostly local municipalities and local townships and so one so for example when we introduced the QR code based scanning it was invented by by the local people it wasn't a government invention it's a social innovation the same goes to the masquerading map it was literally invented by two civic hackers in the Tainan city and they never need to travel to Taipei our capital city to meet with officials or something they just did something it called on and I look at that website I think it's really good and then we work together to scale that solution from a single municipality to the entire country and the reason why we could do that so rapidly is because we already have a working relationship every year we have this presidential hackathon where we give an award to five local teams implementing local social innovations and it was shape of Taiwan with a micro projector underneath when you turn it on it projects president Dr. Tsai when giving you the trophy so very meta describe yourself promising whatever local things you did will become national infrastructure within this fiscal year with all the budget personnel and regulatory support required wonderful and there's a question as well about what what is digital inclusion like among the general population so so and how crucial do you think that that is it's absolutely crucial we have brought an access as human rights so even on the tip of Taiwan almost four thousand meters high you are still enjoying at least two megabits per second symmetrical communication over 4g at just i think 15 euros per month unlimited data if you don't it's my fault like literally my fault i had people emailing me saying minister you promise as bravin as a human right and i'm in this quarantine hotel in the yangming mountain at this particular side of the mountain we don't have good connection and this took me an entire afternoon to send so we worked impromptu to set up a repeating tower and within two weeks we improved the connection but that person is already out of quarantine right so he actually drove measure the speed has posted on social media to help me to account so we're very fanatic in our universal health care and broadband service speak speaking of someone who's first foray into this world i i helped start a project called my farm where we tried to hand over decision making on a real working farm to the public by online vote and debate back in about 2010 i think and it almost killed me and several animals but i remember at one point having to actually dig a broadband trench for the bt engineer because rural broadband is not necessarily our strong point still i think i would say um but turning to another couple of questions so um interesting one this how have other colleagues in taiwanese government responded to this radical level of openness and particularly love to focus you in on was there is i mean obviously there was the transformation moment coming in from outside and so on but there must be still like it's not wholesale shift there must be those who are reticent who need convincing if you were like this is particularly tough for us how how do you how have you overcome some of the some of the weariness some of the understandable kind of concerns about this sort of approach right so the question was uh was there resistance of course that there was resistance we are the resistance remember so we are the outside game because the implicit um threat uh so to speak is that if the government doesn't open up uh the mayor or candidates in 2014 even if their favorites by posters candidates if they do not promise to this open government's agenda regardless of their politics they don't get elected period and uh uh mayors who supported the sunflower movement and urban government and so on got elected sometime without preparing a inauguration speech so the political signal is very very clear and all the four major parties currently in the parliament have signed on the open parliament agenda and they compete on being more radically open instead of you know the the not going back to the black box was the consensus because if they don't agree on that they simply don't get elected so so that's the the strong political will now for career public service by the way I want to say something uh because we implement these as incremental changes we never force anyone for example to scan QR code my grandma almost 90 years old now still prefer to use a kind of stamp to stamp her way in on piece of paper and when she frequents the venues that requires the contact tracing details simply because she doesn't carry a phone with her she's very proficient with ipads and video and so but not for small screens so she prefers a paper based contact tracing and that's entirely fine we aim for harmless coexistence and we always introduce such measures in a way that's incremental that ends up being a swift and safer than the current solution but we don't actually face out the current level of solutions and because of that the career public service see us as people who push for change in a way that also improves their lives instead of asking them to drastically change their habits I hadn't heard you talk about the the open parliament agenda before in that way then that all four major parties are signed up to that as a commitment it's fascinating and we heard yesterday here from from Danny Kruger the conservative MP saying that this needs to be the the space that the political parties are fighting over rather than fighting to be the the agenda hold for this seems to be another level on from that not just like who's got the authentic thing for it but what are we all signed up to as a baseline is a really interesting kind of concept and I'm gonna look look for another question I'm gonna come back to one or two of these a bit later do you how do the media in Taiwan yeah I think that's an important place to go how do the media respond to this so so what's the role of them of the of established media in this in this moment in time yeah I think the media because my parents both of them were journalists so I think the the media is very important indeed the radical openness the publication of all my lobbyist visits and interviews as creative commons videos or transcripts is primarily designed to empower investigative journalists because if we publish the entire context of why and how of policy making instead of just policies that investigative journalists can offer their very critical contribution of their perspectives and so on but if we only publish the result then they are at a disadvantage to the kind of real-time so-called reporting of whatever the wings of the current state is right so to empower investigative journalism to me is very very important and the other thing I want to highlight is that we also democratize media competence in our basic education we instead of say media literacy which is for viewers consumers with the media competence which is for makers produce us so for example during our presidential election all the three presidential candidates January 2020 get fact-checked by middle school students who type in whatever they're saying in the real-time public forum and debate and if they discover something that's actually off the market is verified by professional fact-checkers and public media and so on it actually gets inserted into the live streams that people can say that this presidential candidate is actually saying counterfactual things and this is a very empowering experience for the middle school as students as well wonderful to hear I want to just ask one of my own actually so going back I remember reading that that it was as early as March the third 2020 Taiwan published an article and in English in an English language journal with 120 something actions that the Taiwanese government had already taken on k-vid so so your fast principle also features some of that right and then and Jacinda Arden in New Zealand explicitly said she was following the Taiwan model but there is a sense often that Taiwan is just too different that you're culturally another place that you're that there's something different between east and west that means that some of this couldn't land that you knew about SARS and so there was something that means we can't learn that much from this how would you if you were me us going and responding to those attempts to sort of push away Taiwan as an example or or consciously or otherwise I'm not necessarily sort of making that a blame thing how would you how would you answer that well if you don't like the Taiwan model it's fine you can call it a New Zealand model I mean New Zealand didn't have SARS but by playing the SARS playbook from Taiwan they're actually doing better I think Taiwan is the second place when it comes to like average casualties per million people New Zealand is doing wonderful so what I want to say is that I don't think this is particularly to to a Confucian culture something like that right I don't think there's anything about that I think this is all about a way to surface the latest social innovations because people who are closest to the frontline who are closest to the pain that the pharmacists the community leaders the convenience store workers and so on they actually know what's going on and the virus mutates very quickly so the real time response is from the front line how soon you can surface it up and distribute it so that's the entire country you know we need to change course to adapt to this new variant and so what is the thing that defines success or failure when it comes to the counter pandemic thing so this is all about increasing the bandwidth between an average 10 year old boy and the commander for counter epidemic it's all about reducing the latency from quarterly reports to every 30 second reports through real-time urban data it's all about improving connection so improving the bandwidth and reducing latency of democracy I think that's the main lesson and you don't have to call it the Taiwan model you can call it the New Zealand model I call it whatever works I wanted to ask as well there's a question around it's a joy to hear about a community working so closely with so much trust has Taiwan experienced polarization where is that and maybe has there been a there are big sort of vaccine hesitancy movements there are these sorts of things all over the world there's the QAnon conspiracy there like where is that there in Taiwan and if not why not and if so how do you deal with it yeah we don't have much vaccine hesitancy there's strong preference in some groups Modena over AstraZeneca there's strong preference of Pfizer BNT over Medigin in some other group there's a strong preference of Medigin or homebrew to I don't know about Vax or something but the thing is that we designed a kind of collective intelligence platform it's almost like market of vaccines that showed in real time the incoming supplies of that vaccination and everyone can register your preference of personally I just register I don't care so whatever available available so regardless of people's preference of labels soon as a new batch of vaccines come in last year the the age bracket of that vaccine drops automatically so if fewer people on the elderly range prefer AstraZeneca but more younger people prefer it then the younger people get access to AstraZeneca very quickly and so again through this kind of mechanism design it's expressed the preferences of citizens citizens feel that their preference is being honored but then the upshot is that all the incoming vaccines even when they're still defrosing or something already know we already know which individual is going to receive that particular vaccine very interesting I guess there's a sort of where making the information available just and just saying well okay like we'll have an open conversation essentially yeah and it's also creates a reflective space right this is like the difference between Slido where people can see which questions are more popular and then the kind of competitive spirit is on improving the quality of questions these are these just collecting those preferences individually but then people might be shy and say oh I don't want to ask a stupid question but on Slido no question is stupid and you can't see the social preferences in real time so by displaying this Slido-like dynamic in the vaccine preference we don't foster the vaccine conspiracy theories in Zybulin because people can plainly see that even for Medigen or AstraZeneca there's millions of people wanting it they received it and it seems they're doing fine Very good Zooming out I guess where as you look at the broader challenges we're facing as a world right now and I guess particularly at these challenges of polarization the role of social media you know your way around these firms these organizations very well one of the questions is if you could wave a magic wand how would you change social media? What would you what should we be doing? We've already waved that magic wand that that's where the PTT the join platform and so on came about the idea is really simple we need public digital infrastructure we need the digital equivalent to the public parks to the university campuses to the town halls and so on that you are all very familiar with in short we need community spaces in the digital realm so in 2016 we did wave the magical wand to the national budgeting office because we said even a infrastructure like the join platform the civil IoT platform where people can report air quality measurements by their own sensors in the school and so on all these data pipeline stuff even though it's not concrete it's not made in concrete it should still qualify for infrastructure budget per the special budget act now this is a real change because prior to that we've never classified bits as infrastructure money but a world of difference did it make because then people are not forced to use the digital equivalent of a nightclub in the nightlife district Facebook with private bouncer smoke filled rooms addictive drinks and very loud music you have to shout to get hurt I can go on all these you're not forced to use those places to hold your town halls or deliberative discussions or open space technologies now don't get me wrong I respect the entertainment sector and I think there's a place for their existence with the children probably educated on the mental health and health hazards frequently those places but they have their place in a city it's just we shouldn't rezone everything so that our town halls and public parks became part of the nightlife district I love the image of Facebook as a nightclub of the digital space people clapping that one Audrey I wanted to from there maybe ask you to say a word about one of and if there's a better story then please feel free to tell it but I was particularly struck by the the way you used digital tools social media of a sort to certainly social technologies in the policy development process and the famous use cases is the development the regulatory framework on uber the one I know most about I don't know if you could tell us that story or if there's a better certainly certainly but but I mean that's the inaugural story but nowadays the tool that we use for that which was called polis at polis.gov.tw is already commonplace so it's one of those public infrastructures in the digital realm so any public servant can start a polis conversation just like you can start a slido conversation very easily and quickly without getting any permission from your minister or something but back in 2015 yeah it was quite radical to ask all the stakeholders to go to this free as in freedom software platform to express what you feel about the uber x situation now to refresh everyone's memory a little bit at that time the debate was uber was saying our algorithm dispatch better than laws so we our driver don't have to obey the law and there's some people who are saying their gig economy not really sharing economy sharing economy is for the platform co-ops the local taxi co-ops and so on so it's a very abstract debate around the world everybody was having this in 2015 now on polis as you can see our friends and families are clustered automatically using assistive intelligence or AI powered conversations so we call this pro-social social media they're pro-social because people look at the same fox and they're asked to share their feelings not some decisions or some platform just their feeling how do you feel about a person driving to work and picking up strangers and charging them for it without having a professional driver license and in short how do you feel about that and after three weeks of such conversations we always get a coherent blended feelings from people so the experience unlike facebook there's no reply button but like slido there's no reply button so if you agree with me you click agree and then you move toward me if you disagree you move farther away from me in your own class and then you see another sentiment from another fellow citizen but after a while because there's no reply button there's no room for trolls to grow and then you can propose your own sentiment and then see what people feel so that way so after three weeks we always see this shape the five percent of ideological statements where people agree to disagree but actually most people agree with most of their neighbors on most of their points and most of the time everyone feel the importance of insurance that's not undercutting existing meters to protect their labor condition of empowering the local churches and temples to do search pricing and on demand dispatch via apps and so on so we just took this package just like the occupied parliaments and then held a real discussions where we want to develop the measurement progress as crowdsourced by this agenda right so this is crowdsourced agenda setting that pulls in all the stakeholders but they are not a decision-making device this is not a referendum or not a constitution-making citizen assembly or all it does is it creates a agenda on top of which everybody needs to have a real-time conversation and we held all the stakeholders to account when they say okay this sounds reasonable and then we want to implement in the next quarter or something the same fairness principle as determined by pretty much all the taxi and Uber drivers and their passengers so for quite a while now Uber is a legal company in Taiwan the Q taxi company with proper insurance and registration and professional drivers but all the local temples and churches are enjoying the co-ops are enjoying the same access that Uber has to the kind of app-based dispatching laws so it's a win-win-win situation for everyone and the principle there is really one as I understand it of saying let's hold the space for the conversation make sure everyone's present in that but trust that that process is going to lead to a place of consensus if we hold it in the right way is that right? yes and it's also about fully empowering citizens on the agenda setting stage we have some designs that shares the power of decision-making stage national referendums being won but this is actually at the opposite end of national referendums this is the government saying we really don't even have consensus within our ministries at the time the ministry of economy we're saying one thing and the labor we're saying another and we say okay we don't even have consensus within the ministry but that is fine we just let people crowdsource some better ideas that resonates with everyone's feeling so that's the innovation so holding the space before you even get and certainly a long way before you get to the stage of what's traditionally called consultation like feeding back on something oh yeah yeah way before yes just just to emphasize that's a what like you say that as if it's completely obvious but the consultation is still arguably the major channel for civic engagement in in relation to council and national government in this country and in our country too we do do statistically representative large consultations we do do truth and reconciliation consultations with the indigenous people and so on so we do all that too but what we're saying is that for some emerging topics it's not good enough if the ministries write those poll topics of consultation because the ministries doesn't know it as much as the people on the front lines driving for Uber or taxi companies or the co-ops so we should actually create the consultation agenda so this is some time compared to a weekly survey it's like a survey but the surveys are written by the people yeah I mean turn like just say to you that this is a group of people as I say that are trying to do this work that are doing this work in in in communities across the country do you have advice for us like what would you where do we start how do we like what would you what would you do first if you were if you were in if you were in a council or a local authority or something like that in this country well actually just use slider more and heard conversations like this one and I say that completely sincerely because in many dynamics within city councils and within the kind of legislature like bodies within a municipality with some delegated power people don't want to say anything that's they don't already know how they're going to be handled right so so those wildcard ideas and feelings and so on are often not given the room because simply because people would feel that they would defer to someone with more knowledge than they do actually everyone is an expert in their own life right in their own perspective so slider like systems and polis is one slider like system where your pseudonymous ish right we have of course today is all anonymous questions and you can't be re identified by other people but then you must design some counter troll mechanisms like in our join platform you have to authenticate using your local sms number but the sms number again is only known to the platform authenticate saw who doesn't know which questions or ideas you proposed right so it's again a kind of oblivious multi-party thing where the person doing the authentication can't censor your speech based on who you are but we know for real that there is no way for a troll to create 5000 fake accounts because if you try to get 5000 sim cards the anti-money laundering office will be after you very quickly right so it strikes a balance between pure anonymous say but also it strikes a balance between that and real freedom of speech so you can talk more freely under a pseudonym whistleblowing if you want and so on but get the uploads right from the other people and then using slide or policy or similar technologies you can then say okay we pre-commit for our monthly town hall meeting to answer the top 10 agenda as crowdsourced this way so that would be a really really good example and a kind of matrix dot picture I just show you is actually from one such local town hall and it's not in Taiwan it's in Bowling Green, Kentucky so if you search for Bowling Green reports polis you can see how they're using that for their town halls thank you so much if I one last thing if you were to sort of leave us with a message you there's so much you were to leave people with one sentence to remember one thing to sort of hold in our heads that might be an impossible challenge and I should have prepared you for it but if you would leave us with something what would you say yeah sure so be good enough don't be perfect if you are perfect there's no room for community to contribute and if you're just good enough as I mentioned we show the data buyers of mask availability and so on all the earlier prototype have a lot of wrinkles then it became an implicit invitation for the community to do better so to paraphrase I think I'll just quote Lena Cohen who said it best and I quote ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there is a crack a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in thank you thank you so much Audrey and John wasn't that brilliant absolutely fantastic really good thank you thank you live long and prospering I mean that comment governments to trust the people not expect the people to trust the government I mean that could just be absolutely the motto of community power and what we and all of you are trying to achieve absolutely fantastic