 Hello, people in Poitiers, I'm very happy to be here virtually to share with you some thoughts around our work in Taiwan. How do you use technology to improve citizens' lives? Tell us about your role or organization. My role in the cabinet is the digital minister. I am in charge of the public digital innovation space at digital service at a national level. We're automating away a lot of those chores that the public servants are doing in order to make large-scale participation possible. I'm erratically transparent digital minister. By that, I mean that journalists, lobbyists, and everybody gets to ask me questions, but only publicly. If I get questions from a private email, I will ask if it's okay to give my answers publicly. If not, I just give them links to what my previous statements are. And this applies not just to the lobbyists and journalists, but also internal meetings. For all of the hundreds of internal meetings that I have had since I became digital minister, everything was transcribed. There are written records for everything everybody said during those meetings which are published online. The effect of this is very surprising. The bureaucrats actually become very innovative and risk-taking and propose some very good ideas under this condition. That's because previously, before I introduced this kind of radical transparency, they would get a blame if things go wrong and the minister would get a credit if things go right. Now with this completely accountable record, if things go right, they get a credit because their name is on the transcript. What has been the most exciting thing that you worked on in 2017? Every Wednesday, I work outside of the administration in a local social innovation lab here in Taipei. My office hours are 10 am to 10 pm. Anyone can come to me and say, hey, we're solving a local sustainable development issue. We're running into this regulation problem and so on. In a week, because everything is transcribed, they will receive a written response from any ministry that is related to their cause to try to solve the problem. It is easier for the minister to work with the social enterprises and NGOs because their missions are aligned with the government in order to solve social issues. It's much harder for any purely for-profit company to get treatments like this. I also tour every other Tuesday to all the four different regional offices in Taiwan to have a high bandwidth connection to the Taipei social innovation lab. We're also setting up 360 and virtual reality live streaming. All the eight ministries related to social enterprise as well as many others are sitting in a Taipei office while it's connected to the four different regional centers. The different regional center social enterprises, the innovators, they gather around me, but it's just me who travel. Everybody else can remain Taipei, but we still have a very good video conference and transcription that makes it very easy to see the local problems being surfaced and being resolved in a very quick fashion because all the related eight or nine ministries are there. Once the people solve it, the other unrelated ministries also understand, okay, so this problem is to be resolved in this kind of way. What tool or technique particularly interests you for 2018? We are now actively experimenting using AI as co-facilitators in collaborative meetings. It is our priority to support all people in participating fully and freely. In 2017, we have utilized AI to provide full remote participation for large groups of participants and we're now taking the platform to a next level by bringing participants into a shared reality environment complete with real-time captioning in an immersive environment. In 2018, we look forward to welcoming people with different learning inclinations to participate and contribute freely in the ways that they are most comfortable. We believe that by using technology creatively, humanity can facilitate deep and fair conversations, form collective consensus, and deliver solutions that we can all live with. If you were to share one piece of advice that you learned in 2017, what would it be? I'm building and rebuilding trust among people. There is every reason for citizens to mistrust the government. I think it's mostly not because the government has done anything wrong, but because the social media and a new generation of digital technologies that makes the civil society much closer to each other. Because trust is bi-directional, if the public service is willing to trust people first, then eventually they will trust back, because just how human nature works. It doesn't work the other way around though. We cannot say we should do nothing and have the citizens trust us. That would be fascism. I think what we really need is to trust the public conditionlessly. And to do so, civil servants can also use the same kind of social technologies to build solidarity across ministries in the administration itself and basically cultivate a digital solidarity. To demand the national government to offer working conditions that doesn't treat them as machines, as paper pushers, but actually improve the workforce. And once civil servants adopt this attitude, they will be seen as authentic allies in this project to make everybody trust each other more. Not as faceless people serving in a civil service. What was the greatest challenge that you overcame in 2017? We had an e-petition platform as a way for people to participate. It was like the We the People platform in the U.S. It did not receive much attention because for cross-ministering issues, people would get those very blind, very bureaucratic answers that doesn't really solve their problems but just explains why they can't do much about it. After I became the digital minister, we asked each ministry to send a team, at least one person, to serve as participation officers. We assembled this virtual team of 50 people online using rocket chat and other tools for online engagement. And so now in Taiwan, when people start a petition, they know that instead of receiving just a beautiful response they will actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries. In Taipei, or we will travel to those rural areas and islands if they're petitioning for local development. We solve a lot of very interesting problems like this, such as redesigning our text filing experience together with petitioners without exposing any public servant to risk. So we relieved their fear, their uncertainty and doubt around civic participation. What book did you read in 2017 that most interested or inspired you? The philosopher Martha Nussbaum's new book, Anger and Forgiveness, was instrumental in shaping my understanding of the ongoing transitional justice process that people in Taiwan are going through. Who inspired you in 2017 and why? I'm inspired by the participants at a personal democracy forum in New York City as they converge on this inspirational consensus statement on the AI-facilitated online conversation polis in real time during my talk. We need to listen to people with opposing views to find the values we share.