 So, first question, can you introduce yourself? Can I introduce myself? I'm Audrey Thaum, talent's digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government and youth engagement. So, most of the people, when we are talking to the people about you, they say, ah, the digital woman, what do you think of this expression? Well, it means that I've got my message across the digital ministry. And the digital ministry, because before me, there was no such a title. So, being the first digital ministry is just to get people's idea about digital, as different from, say, ICT, which is information communication technologies. ICT enables the digital, but it's not the digital. The digital is the application of ICT technologies toward a new social configuration. So, Taiwan is one of the first country, maybe the first country to create a digital minister. What does it say and what does it mean? So, the digital minister says that we have the need of engaging people in a different way in a political context. Whereas before, people mostly acted through the representatives, through real-world meetings and assemblies, which has this physical constraint, just the room size, and the fact that only one person can speak at the same time. But now, using digital methodology, such as Slido, actually, everybody participating in the Brian Show, thousands of them can vote on the most wanted question to be answered by me, which is about my hair for some reason. But in any case, that is the idea of what we call crowdsourcing, meaning that people can listen to one another's ideas and improve on each other's idea. And this says that the democracy itself is a technology and that it could be improved by promoting it from being the analog world only into a digital plus analog world version. That is what you made the connection of the word digital to the way the ministry remains. What do you mean democracy is a technology? Democracy is a set of technologies, of course. Going into the voting booth is a technology. You use the technological component that is developed, the voting box, the screen and things like that. And so, this technology together enables collective decision-making in a, you know, every four years, every two years or whatever basis. But the way to make such processes and arrangements is by self-designed, whether we have referendum in the same year as the election or not, whether we have the threshold of referendum set to some level of the population, whether we enable day-to-day participation instead of just every once, every year, every two years, we have the continuous participatory budgeting and petition and things like that. All these are mechanisms designed to better reflect the actualality of the policy, what people perceive the world is and also what their common problems are and what common solutions are and to increase the bandwidth, that is to say the available input into the collective decision-making by everybody. How can this technology can help Taiwanese people who are, in fact, the prisoners of two camps, the blue one and the green one? How this democracy and this technology can help them to quit this dichotropic world? One hand the blue, the second hand the green. How can we go outside this model? So as of how to get out of the binary blue or green camps in the Taiwan citizenry, when I entered the cabinet and followed my HR form, people generally know that there's two fields, one is party affiliation and one is gender and I filled in none to each of them, symbolizing that one need not to choose in a kind of binary years or no, man or woman, blue or green version. I can rather empathize the idea of transculturality, the trans and transgender, means transition, meaning that you can grow up in a camp but move to another camp to learn their culture, their languages, their languages and view where you grow up from using the lens of a new culture. You can keep doing so. In fact, Taiwan has more than 20 national languages, so each one is a different cultural lineage. So the more that you learn about those national languages and cultures, the more you become transcultural, meaning that you form your own self-identity out of constellation of different languages. And when more and more people do so, we have a much more diverse and transcultural citizens' republic. That's why you accept to work with this government, not for this government, but as you said for with this government because you're the first transgender minister all over the world. So the question was whether I'm a first transgender minister in the world, the first openly transgender minister anywhere. What is the difference? Meaning that I'm open about it. But there could be transgender people that pass very well and do not want to go open about it. And they may be ministers, we don't know about it. So let's start from the beginning. Your first step in politics was with the Internet Engineering Task Force. Can you explain to me the origin of your steps in politics? So the question was whether my experience was the standards making semi-organizations like the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the W3C, the World Web Consortium and so on informed my political understanding. So I participated in the free software movement, in particular the pro-language, which was what we call people's language of choice to glue the World Web together. Because at the beginning of World Web, every website that offers dynamic context to what people are visiting in a kind of personalized fashion, most of which do it through the pro-language. And so there's a vibrant ecosystem of people contributing to make, for example, the various automated translations between languages on the World Web to write web search engines and web crawlers and things like that. And all this were done in a very open innovation ecosystem. Now there need to be certain rules for those browsers and for those fighters, right? If I have a website that I don't want a certain part of it to be scripted by those robots, but I want humans to be still able to view it, there need to be a well-agreed way like robots.txt that teaches all the web robots to first read that and understand that there are certain parts meant for humans but not for central engines or robots. And that is a protocol. That has no legal binding power backed by an army or something like that. But it is just by mutual understanding that if we all respect this norm and codify it as a request for comment, meaning a document that requests everybody's comment through this collaborative working group participation, it makes the web much higher value for everybody involved because people can feel much more secure. And that is the kind of common value out of those different positions be it browser developers or other kinds of developers. And so because of this, the IETF and the W3C are set up to be what we call multi-stakeholder, meaning that anybody who can show that they have a stake in this discussion with the email accounts, they can participate in the rulemaking. And that is the kind of political tradition that I joined since I was 14 years old. It was the beginning of the concept of Go Zero. You create the concept of fork the government. What does it mean? Can you explain to me? So the question about forking the government, which is one of the main Go Zero slogans, is to look at how software is being developed nowadays. Very few people write a complete system from scratch. They usually look at an existing system. For example, in Microsoft Windows, the main browser now called Edge is a browser that is a fork of the Google browser Chrome. They share the same open source projects, Chromium, which has its development mostly by the Chrome browser. But Microsoft took that browser and rebranded it and developed a few different functions to share mostly the common, what we call a code base. And so Microsoft Edge is a fork of the Chrome Chromium project. And so this implies two things. First, it is not purely competitive. Microsoft wouldn't want the Chrome project to wither because they share significant code bases. So it's not purely destructive competition. But then it is healthy competition because when Microsoft contribute into their fork and it is a very good idea, then the Chrome browser may also merge back those ideas into the Chrome browser so that the good ideas being prototyped in various diverse user populations may end up informing one another and to a better browsing experience for everybody. And so forking and merging kind of imply one another. Forking meaning taking an alternative route, exploring different possibilities, which might not work. And then merging means it gained mainstream acceptance and then the main line want to merge it back so that it becomes a commonality for every other new forks from this time forward. So forking the government website. So because of that, the GovZero website, G0V.tw, is an intentional fork of the public government website, Gov.tw. The idea is that for each government website and services, which is usually something that Gov.tw, there could be a forked version of that website at the same website address, but just changing an O to a zero. So without spending any budget on advertisement, people can just simply change an O to a zero from a government website and get into this kind of shadow government that is a forked version, offering very similar services. The first one being the more visualized way to communicate the budget, how the budget increases, decreases, and enable a conversation, but they relinquish the copyright in the national budget visualization so that by the time the national budget office think, oh, it's a really good idea, they can work with the National Development Council to incorporate that design of the citizen's budget visualization from a GovZero design into a real Gov.tw website. So now enjoying the Gov.tw, you can actually see the inaugural GovZero project of budget visualization now being made part of the government offering and so that is the merge of the fork of trying a different way to visualize budgets. So what is the aim of that? What is the aim for the Taiwanese people and what will be the consequences for the Taiwanese people, people like you girls, like every citizen? So the aim of civic technology is to build new ways of engagement so that people can understand where shared responsibility in this political context that if we face a global problem or a domestic problem that inflicts its structural issues on each of us, we can only make structural changes if everybody are on the same map, that everybody understand how national budget is made, how those items are distributed and if they are willing to engage a conversation, a real conversation with career public service about those budget items. Only then can they develop informed opinions and then inform suggestions on how to solve the problem in a way that is previously unimagined. Otherwise it could be a very innovative but it's not based on a shared common reality and therefore harder for people to adopt it as a public policy. Do you consider yourself as an activist, activist with the HAC, like hackers, but activist inside this organization, inside the government? So whether I consider myself as a hacktivist, well, I'm certainly more of a hacktivist than a collectivist. A collectivist is somebody who only press like but did not translate that like into other actions. But that is still entry level, very important is to raise awareness. But what we are doing then is in the government creating a way for the citizens to not only press like every four years, which is called voting by the way, for their leading candidates, but press more likes in terms of raising petitions, in terms of raising more crowdsourced agenda for public discussion and creating the context to inform more people to build such a crowdsourced platform. And what we are doing here can be considered hacktivism if you think of hacktivist as a kind of civic hacking in that making sure that people understand that our current civic system, including the democratic process, is a system that you can offer your insight and make changes for the better. So it's definitely white hat and not black hat hacking of the democratic system. That's why it was important to make a kind of hacking of the democracy because the democracy was sick of what what was the sickness of this democracy. Well, first of all, hackers, civic hackers, I mean, the reason why civic hackers understand a system and make changes to it is not necessarily to fix anything. It is mostly out of a curiosity and a shared collective mission to make common values out of different positions. And that is the true drive of civic hacking. It is to understand the society more and through this understanding also understand ourselves more because we are also products of the society that produces us. And so in this kind of mutual common understanding between the various different cultural lineages comes the idea of civic hacking that is inclusive instead of just people writing computer code. It could be people writing legal code. It could be people studying the way of storytelling. It could be people making visual arts that shows alternate possibilities and so on. And so this kind of inclusive civic hacking is no longer restrained into this computer like we see a broken computer, we fix a broken computer, a kind of mechanistic thinking. This is more about a diverse population wishing to do what we call social production, picking social objects that allow us to understand our own culture and each other's culture better. The first time when we talked each other two years ago you told me that this democracy was suffering of apathic. The risk of this democracy was to become an apathic democracy. So last time we talked I was observing that all around the world the people are not engaging with the democratic process as much as they used to. Maybe their attention or their time is more captured by the more instant gratification kind of social media. And this is a global phenomenon. And in Taiwan this is less pronounced because we're a younger democracy and also people feel very strongly about the democratic process. So we don't yet see a dwindling kind of attention span or apathy toward politics and toward democracy as much as other more developed republics and democracies with longer traditions. But what we are doing in Taiwan, the civic hacking and the democratic innovations can certainly be applied by those older republics and democracies in a way to kind of cure this apathy to democracy. That's why it didn't... So in 2014 the Central Taiwan Movement arise but you didn't want to participate to this movement directly. You were not with this young generation of political activists but you helped them. Why didn't you participate directly to this movement and how you helped them? So back in the sunflower movement the GovZero channel was simply asking for people who are versed in live streaming to help reporting a live streaming context of the people who are against the sudden passing of the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement or the CSSDA. So at a time when I bring my equipment to the protest I didn't know that they're going to occupy. That was not a information shared with people in the street actually only a very few people understand that they are going to break and enter the parliament. And so when I offered my phone at a time as a kind of hotspot to connect the HSDPA signal for live streaming I thought that I could get my phone back the next morning. But actually the phone was just stationed there for the next 22 days. So because of that that is the context of the sunflower movement is that there's a lot of people who are very much intentional in getting the right message out in that when they are indeed breaking and entering there was no violence confrontation with the police. There was almost no police stationed there and that they were not kind of vandalizing as some of the media tried to portray or they're not mobs and so on they're actually very intentional in setting up a demonstration but the theory is that the MPs were on strike so we do their job for them because we kind of elect them to do this job. So anyway, so the idea here is that we're here to support but I wasn't aware that they're going to occupy. But the fact that you said that Taiwanese democracy is very young democracy People care a lot. And people care a lot about democracy. But it's a young democracy Do you think that there is a conflict between two generations of people here in one hand, the young people who did this Sankawa movement and the generation of their parents for example, of their grandparents who lived under the Marshall law is there a conflict and is it a danger for this democracy that those two kind of generations fight each other and it can stop the democracy to go ahead. So the question is that whether the democracy itself while being so young can create by participating in the democratic process a divide between generations and specifically three generations my generation is the last one that remembers the Marshall law people younger than me have no idea what Marshall law is and the people above my generation, like my father's generation they are the generation that protested much like people in Hong Kong now against the Marshall law and eventually democratized Taiwan. And the generation before my dad my grandma's generation well, that was under Japanese rule and my grandma's first language is Japanese and so that is a very different certainly not democratic as a kind of colonizing culture that she was raised in so I would say though for all the four generations that I talked about democracy is a shared value various generations under very different colonizing Marshall law just lifting out of Marshall law now deep inclusive democracy and globalization these four different contexts people all tried in various ways to get the freedom of speech of expression, of assembly and this is the kind of value that unites the different generations together the particular ways of getting the democratic process of course differ because as more tools become available people's imagination gets widened people thought of referenda as something that is monumental and constitutional in my father's generation but now referenda is being used in more like solving day to day issues that concerns the entire society such as say energy policy and so because of that the techniques and instruments have different generational interpretations and it's true that people who have different lived-in experiences around say same sex marriage disagree with the job of one marriage means in a referenda but both sides agree and promote the idea of referenda as a democratic innovation that's my point but in the same time in this society I feel that there is a big gap between two kind of people the people who want to be independent because Taiwan is a country de facto and on the other side people who are afraid of China and they want to have a good relationship with China because they are afraid of, I don't know what but this is a new division because you are talking about generation of people who have the same value and the same feeling for democracy but in the other hand we feel that the choice now today for the Taiwanese people is money or freedom what do you think of that? So as for the question about whether that's maintaining the sovereignty which is the base of the democratic innovations is somehow controversial if one wants to make more economic ties with the PRC, that was the question but in fact the economic communications and cultural exchange with PRC have not slowed down it is true that in the past few years the more and more Taiwanese people thought that our democratic process is not up for people in the PRC territories to decide however they are still open for economic and cultural exchanges with the PRC it's not a zero sum game it's what I'm trying to say and also there's people who think that people in Hong Kong is going through a very similar process in the Taiwan's early democratization in that more liberal democratic people after a large protest is now actually helping to run their community level and there's a lot of it in the early kind of community development era in Taiwan where we have lifted the martial law but have not yet voted for the president where the civil society the social sector grew in its legitimacy and this community building process reinforces the democratic culture that then informed the presidential elections and so on after 1996 and so there's more and more people who think that people in Hong Kong or people around our region everybody can learn from Taiwan's experiences and Taiwan can help in that and so this is the other way this is not afraid of an external culture somehow influencing Taiwan so that we regress to be more authoritarian this is rather we becoming more democratic and have innovations that are readily applicable and then spreading these innovations across the region so that everybody in this region have a hope that the democratic innovations is not counter to the Asian values what do you think of the fact that a woman like Anna Klu for example choose to quit the DPP because she wanted to be with the same idea of alliance for Mosa because she wanted to claim the independence of Taiwan and change the name of Taiwan because the identity of Taiwanese people today is to be Taiwanese because they have democratic values change the name of Taiwan to what to Taiwan to change the name of Republic of China ROC into Taiwan now our history with mainland China is over we choose democratic values so we are not Chinese anymore what do you think of this? well my name used to be Archigious Tom so I mean name change being there done that but in any case what I'm trying to say is that everybody have their freedom of expression here and all the political parties centering around this idea there's many many ideas of which that we see citizens when they're voting on the party ticket they chose right so the various different parties which represents maybe more than a dozen different imagination due to that question of the naming issue they have published it on their public forums and the policy forums and the way that people voted currently says that most people are happy with the idea that of a Taiwan ROC or ROC left parenthesis Taiwan right parenthesis but you don't pronounce the parenthesis so it's just ROC Taiwan and to me ROC by the way means the Republic of Citizens let's go back to the central movement the fact that this movement was the first streaming revolution the fact that the central movement was the first streaming revolution what does it say about Taiwanese democracy there's a lot other like you know the Arab Spring that was live stream so yes but it was the first one in Taiwan sure so about the role of live streaming played in the sunflower movement I think live streaming drastically lowered the participation cost because people even if they are in like very far other countries many time zones far removed friends I want if they care about the occupy they can participate in the occupy for live streaming is a bi-directional device when people dial in to live streaming and there were many live stream stations each talking about one particular aspect of the CSSTA so maybe some people care about telecom components from the PRC to offer telecom services in the new at that time 4G network there's many people care about this but they don't have to physically travel to Taipei they could be anywhere in the world and yet participate in the discussion and contribute meaningfully to the rough consensus of people which by the way is that we disallow PRC components in the core 4G infrastructure at that time because of that the participation rate is gross exponentially because the more people participate the more that they see their ideas become the agenda that is discussed by the occupiers the more they will want to kind of water that garden to spend more time more attention in the occupy process and you see very similar dynamics at play in Hong Kong too Can you explain to us how this central movement began because how could people imagine that they could vote a law like that with no protestation some people we met said that for the whole generation of Taiwanese people who used to live under the martial law Taiwan became the little dragon you know everything was made in Taiwan in France for example when I was a kid my clothes and my toys was made in Taiwan and when the democracy arise they say oh we lost everything because the workers are paid more yeah so there is this new division between people who think that under the martial law it was good because the economic was good and democracy is a synonym of the bad economy so I'm not sure whether it's a question or just a statement that I'm asked to comment yes okay so I can't rephrase that question so quoting the statement that somehow the days and economy during the martial laws are better and days in the democracy although a lot of innovation did not result in better economy unquote for that statement I have two answers first, during the martial law there was no freedom of the press so anything that reflects a bad economy or a natural disaster or whatever is systemically dialed down and indeed censored so people don't see the bad news literally because nobody writes bad news during the martial law and so obviously if all you read is good news from the state propaganda unit you will think that there's a lot of social harmony going on however after democracy it's true that many people feel that suddenly it becomes very chaotic and people have a lot of different voices and some strange and some outright wrong from their perspective but that is how Taiwan can innovate you cannot innovate from a streamlined from a kind of cookie cutter mindset for Taiwan to have our contributions in the film world in the design world in making innovative software and hardware products in all sort of these innovations it's essential to have people think different and so this idea of a linear GDP growth sees to be the only number that we're looking at when we're doing policy now we more say the world economy forum ranks Taiwan as one of the four super innovators in the world that were the most innovative people even though that the GDP linear growth is of course because we're now a developed country in the WTO not as fast as people who start from the lower baselines that's true and so I would say that the statement is based on fact but it is indeed a value choice and that one chose diversity and innovation when we did our democratization you think that China is not is not an innovative country so the question was why did WEF not choose PRC as one of the super innovators why did they choose Switzerland or Germany or some other countries well I think that WEF mostly look at like new ideas being produced not a efficient implementation of existing ideas so there really is no kind of bad or good or that some innovation is good and implementation is bad or that creativity is good or efficacy is bad these are of course all good things what I'm trying to say is that every jurisdiction have its own prioritized values in Taiwan because we're a liberal democracy come to prioritize innovation over linear growth and we also prioritize inclusiveness like people have to take care of each others education and broadband access and things like that instead of just linear growth in the large cities and things like that so let's talk about the fact that you define yourself as an anarchist conservative anarchist so a conservative is someone who respects and conserves cultural traditions as I said in Taiwan there's more than 20 different national languages each representing one or more cultural lineages so while a progressive trained in one culture may drive process of improving the progress according to that culture that may sometimes have a effect that makes the other culture less commonly known or less visible so that it may look like progressive but to the other cultures involved that is not a progress that is actually just absorption or augmentation or adaptation but it all ends in absorption so that is the kind of way that we're not going instead of like monoculturalism or silo multiculturalism where each culture is safely in its own enclave what we're going for is transculturalism where people can easily travel across cultures and their own identities too and what this means in a conservative sense is not just to keep the culture as is but to make sure that people get exposed as much as they want so we can make new cultures in a transcultural way and that ties to the innovation culture that I just talked to you about now the anarchist part means that we're not having one culture dominate the other cultures through the use of coercion the use of commands the use of physical or other kinds of violence rather we want those different cultures to go about their ways in a way that respects their diversity and do so in a way that is more like a cooperative or at least collaborative relationship instead of a dominating or colonizing perspective it can be seen as a contradiction to be an anarchist and to work inside a government because usually we say that anarchists have no god and no master I don't have a master either but do you see the people who said to you it's a contradiction, you can't be an anarchist I was having a sense of texan of the root because Brian asked that question better than Brian I pulled the t-shirt I'm going to bring it into oh awesome Brian I think speaks excellent French as well oh actually that was the customization she was speaking very she's a friend of Ines yeah because I was just my eyes were closed and moved in various ways but I just keep hearing this very eloquent French speaking voice she said don't ask question because it's disturbing the and she said yes you're right so let's talk about this possible contradiction to be an anarchist and working inside a government the idea of a state of anarchy which means simply that nobody is at large and possibly chaos and the philosophical idea of anarchism which is rejecting authorities and rejecting hierarchies is actually two different things and I think it's important to distinguish between the two and not for like randomly destroying things to have a state of anarchy I'm trying to say that we can get about governing through multi-stakeholderism so that there is governance but we don't rely on the direct command and order structure hierarchies to do this governance so collaborative governance or Kogov is in fact compatible with anarchistic principles so let's talk about what are you doing as inside your digital minister what is your task here is it to create a free dialogue between the civil society and the civil servant and why it was important to create that and what is the problem between the civil society and the civil servants in Taiwan so my work as a digital minister is first to show that a government is not a black box that it is in fact a fact that we have a lot of mechanisms many of which describe in law but a lot of which is just norm within the public sector but people who don't work in the administration they don't have visibility in the machinery that is the public administration apparatus and so they often attribute individual ministers ideas as the cause to whatever structural deficiencies that they're perceiving in the administration to do and so what I'm trying to show here is that if we can have the career public service have more direct conversation with people in a more effective way they can also sympathize with the people more so the government can trust the citizens more and once the government trusts the citizens more by being more transparent and accountable some citizens will want to participate because whatever they offer they will see how it's translated into real policy and the problem of the previous generations of democracy was that it doesn't scale if you invite say 20 experts to form a focus group or a panel maybe they can produce something useful but if you invite 20,000 people into your city hall then they is very difficult for them to produce something useful unless of course you design process around deliberation and so the design of deliberation process which predates the social media is getting a boon by the social media by getting more people participation in a deliberative process previously people thought that they have to spend entire days just sitting in citizens assembly and reading materials and things like that very few people in percentage wise would want to do that to do sortation and maybe you statistically make your volunteers representative and things like that but now if people can participate in part time just spending 5 minutes or 10 minutes but add on this idea of social media getting people's attention toward the same problem then the actual hours added together actually exceeds that of the face-to-face consultation and so it can then inform what happened with a much more clear picture of what people discover into this problem space and the possible solution space then also grows for the face-to-face deliberation so this is not to remove or replace face-to-face consultative meetings this is rather to make it much more informed by crowdsourcing the agenda of such consultations how can you explain that in the 90s the institution changed a lot in Taiwan with the democratic process but not the institutional culture why institutional culture and institution didn't change together so the question was why did institutional like the process the rule of law and so on and election of the president and so on changes but culture for example that was built during martial law that is still very authoritarian didn't change immediately with it well because culture change takes time culture is in essence a set of norms and habits and it's hard to change habits and so while you can appoint a prime minister that want to be democratic and engage in people in a way that listens truly to their voices and so on the people did not really have a first hand experience of such constructive deliberation and therefore they would still act habitually and correctly under martial law in a more authoritarian fashion of like power struggle and things like that and so that is important to understand that whatever habits evolved during the martial law many of which still here with us in each of us like I'm one of the generation that remember the martial law so I still remember the kind of self-censorship one can feel if you write something that may not you know be appealing to the central government censors and if you have this kind of self-censorship long after freedom of speech long after the press freedom is granted long after that the minister of culture no longer controls any press people can still act as if they're being watched by the censors and that habits change very slowly do you think that today because the democratic process started with the end of the martial law in 1987 more than 20 years more than 40 years after do you think that the civil servant today in the 40 years 48 years more than 30 years so not 30 years later do you think that the civil servant have always this habit of self-censorship so the question was for 30 some years since the lifting of the martial law have not the public service changed in this culture almost by definition people who are working in the public service if their age is under 35 then they don't remember the martial law period and of course they're much more liberal more inventive and innovative but it's also true that people in the public service are not universally under 35 years old and so there are still a lot of people some in senior positions some in junior positions that are still constrained by the martial law indoctrination when they were very young and that is just the fact that we're living with do you think that there is a danger to create a total democracy of transparency don't you think that it can be a danger for the democracy itself it will be totalitarian yes yes okay so I'm not for the idea of say total transparency if you take it to the logical extreme that I livestream everything that I see every day that people literally watch the world through my eyes for some reason there will remain no privacy for anyone who I encounter with and that will be indeed like some bad episode from Black Mirror but I'm not advocating for that I'm advocating for radical transparency where radical means at the root so whatever decision is being made with me as the chair we make a transcript so that people understand that whatever they say that has binding power will be published in context however everybody gets ten working days to work through their messages and removing say privacy concerns or removing say that anecdotal quotes that they quoted from other people that they don't want or they didn't ever get consent to spread to the public and so on but the thing is that is public by default so it takes some effort not a lot but some effort to censor parts of the issues that concerns say trade secret or privacy that don't necessarily go out and so this process means that open is the default and that is what I mean by radical but it's certainly not total transparency how can you explain that Tsai Ing-wen administration wanted you to create this digital minister because those people belongs to those generation who lived who knew the martial law what was the who how this idea arise in their mind to create this digital minister to ask you to lead this minister so the question was how did this idea of radical transparency get into the Taiwanese political culture so that first the KMT during 2015 and then the DPP in 2016 had to work with such a collaborative governance project that I helped create it was because of similar movement the movement the occupy is a demonstration but it's not just a protest it's a demo a demonstration of radical transparency at work and so people understand that even with half a million people on the street and many more on line we can listen and scale and arrive at concrete suggestions and demands and rough consensus that is then legitimized by the head of the parliament so because of that people cannot unsee and unlearn that there is actually room for participatory democracy through collaborative governance and so at the end of 2014 the mayors that advocated for it won the mayor who advocated against it lost and that is a clear political signal for everybody so since you are leading this minister did you see some change some radical change in a way of making politics in Taiwan? yes so since I become the digital minister for example the control room the branch of the government that takes care of auditing the campaign, donation and expense started publishing in raw data form each individual contributions and expense they didn't used to do that they used to do all the auditing by themselves and ask the public to trust them and publish only the statistics and recommendations but because of the occupiers one of the core demand is to do away with the black boxes and many people in the Gov Zero movement worked with each other to go into the control room asking for the photocopies of the individual records bring their mouse scan them into computer graphics use algorithm to divide them into small tofu chunks and gamified created a game to render those different images into numbers like a spreadsheet so they reverse engineered the control room's campaign donation and expense reports and the control room said well you can't guarantee that this is 100% correct even though maybe each tofu, each cell has three people looking at it you can't be 100% sure and as the civil society says well then you should publish the raw report so we can work with as investigative journalists and as data scientists and that's exactly what control room has done during the time that I was digital minister and so this rising social norm of anything that has binding power need to be available not only in its conclusion but in its process it's very quickly becoming a social norm not just for the administration but for the control branch for the legislative branch and for the judicial branch and in the same time when we talk to some independent journalists that said the big danger now today is that China control the information there is a lot of fact checking organization but in the same way to disinform people every day there is more than they told us 5 millions of cyber attacks each day so in one hand democracy is more and more transparent but in the other hand this democracy became more and more dark because of this cyber attack and disinformation and so on how do you deal with this contradiction it's not a contradiction both are true I don't see the contradiction is I honest I mean everything became more and more transparent but at the same time for the population of Taiwan everything become more and more confused yes that's true both are true but if you're asking me to comment on the relationship between those two there's no contradiction both are true so about the observation that while this entire policy making process is being a lot more transparent than before and making people more informed there's also actors that try to sow discord in the democratic process make people less informed by spreading disinformation and both this informed deliberations and those disinformation campaigns are a fact in our everyday life what we know is that for each policy that you helped creating that you participated and your idea became policy you become immune or vaccinated against disinformation about that particular policy because you have the whole context and you cannot be provoked into taking kind of a black-white view on things because you understand that there's various different colors various different sides in this policy making arena and so this oversimplification device of provoking outreach that disinformation relies on no longer affect you on that particular issue so the more people participate either in fact checking journalism or in creating policies together the less they would be suspectable to the disinformation interference do you think that because you said that everything you tried to make more transparency do you think that it can solve two problems the difference between opinion and emotion and the problem of identity also what do you mean by identity there is a law in Taiwan that was we the refugees low which is not very clear because we still don't know who is Chinese and who is not Chinese for example there is a lot of Hong Kong people I don't think there is a refugee law though there was a draft but it's important that people doesn't take care of it sadly but you wouldn't cover for Hong Kong people anyway because for people in Hong Kong and Macau that's a different law yes but there was a refugee clause a political refugee clause in the Hong Kong and Macau act that's already law what we didn't have is a refugee act for non-Hong Kong and Macau people okay and that's because I don't know our natural boundary is at sea anyway so the Hong Kong and Macau clause was indeed applied by a case by case basis and people are asking for more clarity but that is a different thing than this idea of a refugee act that would apply again just to non-Hong Kong and Macau people and non-PRC people so these are like two different things so let's talk about the first part just the first part the confusion between opinion and emotion okay so the idea of listening at scale means that when people feel strongly about something it is not the only the option of acting to destroy people status destroy people's reputations destroy the enemy of your counter camp that used to be kind of the early recourse if you think about things in a black-white binary way but deliberation means also listening to people who feel differently as you and really there is no right or wrong about feelings around the same shared fact one can feel happy the other person can feel sad about the same fact yet they don't dispute that it is an objective and so more transparency that builds this objective facts enable people having the realization that about the same shared fact there is bound to be different feelings and so people who feel differently may nevertheless agree on the facts and also on the solutions it's just they feel differently and so this kind of polity building is much more inclusive than the kind of binary thinking that says for any topic people who don't feel the same as me is automatically the enemy if you have to define the Taiwanese democracy it's a young democracy but do you think that it is one of the most mature democracy in the world because of all those transparency for example, Chen Shui-bian who have been elected in 2000 he went to jail for a long time because he received black money in France we have generation of politicians we have a long historical background of democratic background in France but we have a lot of politicians who have never seen the face of a judge even though they receive black money every day and every day in the newspaper in France you can find some politicians who are corrupted politicians so would you say that Taiwan democracy is one of the most mature or one of the most real democracy in the world I would say that our public administration have a very strong code of conduct against corruption that our contribution to anti-corruption is indeed very strong and that there is a general culture in the public sector that we take pride in being not corrupt and so that I think is one of the most valuable thing in the Taiwanese democracy because that also means that people trust the statistics more that people trust the numbers the data that is produced by the public service because people understand that it is very difficult it's almost not possible to lobby or to pay dark money, black money to a public servant to get them to change the statistics or the numbers that their data system is observing and that gives confidence in this shared data that is the bedrock of people building a democratic society based on different feelings about the same fact if people dispute the fact itself then it makes it much more impossible I would say actually to build this kind of deliberative democracy how can you explain that there is in Taiwan a lot of people coming from the civic tech sector working to improve the democracy at the same time in the French example a lot of people coming from the civic tech works for the government to try to twist the kind of reality here we have the feeling that all these hackers are working to improve the democracy yeah so why are there so many pro-social civic hackers in Taiwan two reasons first as I said the first generation that can really do democracy before us some sort of martial law still lingers and there is a kind of ceiling of how much your democratic design can go but not because of our speech freedom our freedom of imagination it's very very strong so that people find it very rewarding because then your policy design your mechanism design has a real effect not just a constraint but a fact that could be taken out at the will of a dictator benevolent or not it offers real gratification the second is simply that we have less legacy while people who want to make changes to the public administration in established European republics must first understand why it came the way it is through the various republics and norms and habits and historical nuances that built this public administration system there is simply less of that in Taiwan so even people who are somewhat naive about politics can go in and only take a year or two and they understand or there is to understand to the democratic process because it's so mean there is less to learn about and then they can start making innovations not to think that because nowadays we are talking a lot about artificial intelligence do you think that the fact that artificial intelligence do you think that to say that artificial intelligence can bring everything and to solve everything is not a little bit naive to believe that certainly artificial intelligence as it's defined simply means automation that seems like something that people can do and now machine can also do it is certainly not a God of the machine that can automatically solve any plot issues we are not living in a Greek drama and so that is not what my perception of artificial intelligence is so what is your perception well it's just a general term to describe a certain kind of computers that can somehow automate away what used to be people's work for example it used to be that only people can compute numbers like calculations so computers were describing people but then general purpose calculators with programmable software and now when we say computer it means machine not people or for example printers used to be people who work with the movable type to make the tablets for printing and that's very valuable work in fact powered to the entire enlightenment however now when we say printer we don't think about people anymore we think about a machine so these are also intelligences of printers and computers of the previous generations that are being put into artifacts and now we use those printers and computers or calculators without thinking twice that there were people performing these types but it doesn't mean that these people are out of the job there are still data scientists that makes use of computers to compute and direct the creative direction there are still journalists that makes use of the printers to print whatever they want to print there and disseminate ideas in a timely fashion so it is not that the work of journalism or the work of data science is going away or statistics is going away it is simply that the boring and trivial part of their tasks is being automated by artificial components so you you create V-Taiwan for virtual Taiwan well co-created but yes can you explain what is virtual Taiwan so back in late 2014 minister Jacqueline Tsai at the time attended a Gavzero hackathon and bringing with her two policy questions first is that how do we regulate telewacking there is no union for teleworkers how do we regulate telewacking and the second is that there is a lot of startups that are founded on human islands but not registering in Taiwan even though they are all Taiwanese people operating in Taiwan why do they do that and can we change the company act so that less people register human islands and more people register in Taiwan so these two questions are not easily answered by traditional ways of policymaking simply because there is no representative of either teleworkers or people who register their startup in human islands there is no form of assemblies or collectives or associations that you can simply ask them to send a representative to negotiate so because of that when she proposed this question a lot of Gavzero volunteers including me just start drawing on this whiteboard a possible way to reach out to those stakeholders via digital means so that they can express their voices that can map out the problem space so that we can meet through face to face consultations to find out what may be the common issue that they are all facing and that became the V-Taiwan process are you afraid of the fact that if everything becomes virtual and if you create new digital tools to improve the democracy don't you think that the risk is to be too far away from the daily life of the people in the street so the question is if everything becomes too virtual and if everything becomes digital don't you think that it can create a gap between what you are trying to do in this minister and the reality of the daily life people? people on the street they use mobile phones when they are on the street they are still connected to the internet I'm not sure what the question is trying to portray like are there places in Taiwan where a phone doesn't have a reception and what about people who don't have a phone reception and they would be excluded from democracy is that the question? so the question about if we make our documents online and we make our participation in online spaces what about people who don't have a connection to the internet or if people only have very limited bandwidth and we put so much data online they cannot really watch a live stream so whatever we are live streaming doesn't quite reach these people so are we excluding them from democracy that was the question and the answer simply is that broadband is human right in Taiwan if there is any place in Taiwan that doesn't have a broadband let's do this again so the question was about what about people who don't have internet access or broadband so that whatever we put online is unavailable to these people are we not excluding them from democracy to this I have two answers first we bring those consultations to people we're not asking people to come only for online discussions we're using online discussions to inform the agenda for face to face conversations in people's vicinity so we're not replacing town halls we're augmenting town halls and the second is for people who live in places where there is no mobile phone reception or landlines or any kind of broadband access that's our fault broadband is a human right in Taiwan so now even at the most indigenous and rural and mountainous places there is broadband connection the remaining 2% or so many of them above 3,000 meters high the minister of interior is currently also using helicopters to ensure complete coverage and so to us we take broadband very seriously because it's not just a right to access it's also a right to participate yes but even though they even though they have access to internet when you see the statistics there is not a lot of people who are going to see what is free access on internet so how can you educate all those people to go to see to participate because now the statistics show that there is not a lot of it's not the majority of the Taiwanese people who use those new digital tools to participate to this transparent democratic way of living so the question is that even though our participation platform joined GOVTW has more than 10 million visitors that in fact is not a majority for Taiwan with 23 million people slightly under half the answer of course is we need to make it more popular but it's not just asking people to come to our platform it's also bringing the conversation to the people and that is why people like Brian people in the unstoppable happy party are important because they can take a trending controversial issue maybe one of the petitions that's going on in the joint platform and package it in a way that resembles an entertaining show and reaches more people so that people would be more willing to understand the political context between the people who are pro and people who are against that particular conversation and so when more and more people remix this transparent product into various other messages that appeals to different segments of people that makes us more inclusive for our publications cannot be accommodating to all the different neurodiversity cultural diversity linguistic diversity no matter how we try there's bound to be some gaps that we do not anticipate and if we allow everybody to remix our work through choosing open licenses and making sure that they are not hindered by copyright and things like that people can remix those messages to cater for their own community and that increase the reach so we don't have to be the only people that caters to the publication preferences of people rather there could be any number of intermediaries that remixes the message and make appealing shows or appealing artifacts out of it so let's talk about the Chinese shadow who seems to be always on Taiwan for example the young generation of people we went to an agency to a what? oh head home to an agency head into an agency and he told us that a lot of young people want to go to work in China because China offered them more and more opportunity and better opportunity than in Taiwan so there is also a self-censorship those people that don't want to talk freely about China do you think that it's a real danger of this how to avoid how to make this shadow go away from Taiwan the question of China because China Taiwanese people said our most important problem is China I still don't quite understand the question the question is how to make Taiwanese people understand that they have to they don't have to be afraid anymore about these Chinese issues so the question was how to make people understand that even though that PRC indeed has a lot of economic ties with not only Taiwan but everybody else that their way of living which currently is much more authoritarian than our preference will not in fact be the dominant one in Taiwan any time soon I think people really made that message very loud and clear during the Hong Kong protests when we see the Hong Kong anti-elab movement everybody in Taiwan including actually both leading presidential candidates at the time supported the Hong Kong people to fight for democracy and for general election as well which is exactly what Taiwan went through from the 80s to the 90s and so there is no controversy in Taiwan during the presidential election that the Hong Kong people deserve what Taiwan has earned in the 80s and 90s and so I think this serves as a constant reminder that authoritarianism is very close is in our proximity however the real progress about countering authoritarianism is in fact happening and in fact that Taiwan is a liberal democracy is strong enough to support people everywhere in the world who want to advance democracy so that builds the kind of self-confidence that can let people look at authoritarianism and clearly say that this is not our preferred lifestyle and I think during the course of this presidential election a lot more people, especially young people built a very strong resilience against this kind of authoritarianism propaganda the democracy doesn't work or whatever yes but we have the feeling that Taiwan won the last election in 2020 because of what happened in Hong Kong because when there was one of the factors because when you see the pools the statistics 6 months ago nobody could say that she will win the election it was a tie back in June is it because what happened in Hong Kong and is it because of what Xi Jinping said that he won the election so about the June protest I actually also tweeted about it in the June 16 movement and I think people really agreed with the general sentiment that this is the chance that the PRC can show that they if they say they also public say that they commit to revise their governance for better governance and the justice in institutions but their poor implementation of the right to justice is in fact the root of the anti-elite movement if they have a court system that is even more just and respected than the Hong Kong court system of course people would not be that angry about extradition so because of that it shows that they have a way to go when it comes to the public trust in the court system and so they of course need to work on improving that instead of telling the Hong Kong people that they shouldn't protest about the lack of judicial accountability and transparency in the PRC and so people making this kind of arguments are being supported by pretty much everybody in Taiwan and others high made such statements before her other opponents in the presidential race but eventually all the other presidential candidates made very similar supportive arguments but many of them made this only months after the anti-elite protest so I wouldn't say that the Hong Kong protest gave anyone an advantage I'm just saying that people who make such a standing clear the earlier the more advantage they get from popular support because everybody in Taiwan is supporting that Do you think that what happened in Hong Kong in June is the same provoke the same consciousness issues No, do you want to oppose this? Do you want to oppose this? What happened in Hong Kong and finally a kind of consciousness like the central movement provoked a kind of consciousness in the Taiwanese population Do you think that what happened in Taiwan in Hong Kong is the same as what happened in Taiwan for these young people is the same effect So the question is whether the anti-elite movement carries similarities in terms of engagement strategies with young people with the Sunflower movement In the Sunflower movement there is indeed this kind of polycentric organizations Let's do this again So for the question about the similarities of the anti-elite with the Sunflower movement when it comes to engagement strategies of organizers of the movement the Sunflower movement was initiated by around 20 NGOs each caring about a different aspect of the CSSPA So it was kind of a coalition So it is not leaderless per se There are exactly like 20-25 leaders each being a NGO Because of that this coalition think about some commonalities but each participant in this coalition also focus on something like very unique to that particular NGO when organizing the Occupy movement But in Hong Kong we can easily see that there are countless leaders like anyone can be a leader and start writing say make glory be to Hong Kong on LIHKG and a lot of people volunteering to sing in chorus and to remix those ideas in various different languages we see some of that during Sunflower but still we can count the number of leaders but in Hong Kong in anti-elab it's countless and so because of that it's not leaderless it's like everybody can become a leader very quickly by educating themselves by organizing the protest and so I think they have a much wider and deeper reach into the people who are young and also people who are old who really want to get into this protest and that they reached far more people around the world than the Sunflower movement but they have certain resemblances in a sense of using digital tools to coordinate as the Sunflower movement but I think they went much further Thank you very much I've got another question but with your virtual double Ok, so I think he's going to rest a little he's very tired You're going to go to Paris to do that to rest, right? Yes, but you're not going to talk about it Frankly, it's going to be fun it's going to be tough Why are you Why are you using VR mask? Because the first time when we met you said to me that it was when you want to rest when you want to go away and brief somewhere else you take your VR mask to go in the space Can you explain to me? Sure, the reason why I choose to use which is an educational tool to make the viewer step out of the Earth and look at the Earth from the vantage point of the space and the other planets in their accurate position now is that making virtual reality not about something fictional but rather about the real position of the celestial bodies within the solar system and so to me it makes the idea of a body of politics more clear if you're viewing from space because you don't see the jurisdictional boundaries you don't see most of the features of civilization other than the lights and that view the overview of Earth as a celestial body is instrumental when thinking about stakeholder issues if I want to talk about internet governance if I want to talk about this emerging machine intelligence if I want to talk about the effects of 5G network on the planet climate action certainly have a vantage point outside of the Earth can remove a lot of the cloud that clouds are thought patterns simply because we cannot easily imagine what is it like to be in the other part of the planet because the clouds shields our eyes light so that we can only look at our vicinity which is a small part of the Earth so Earth as a complete body if you view it from space it removes a lot of thought patterns and habits that clouds wants judgments and so that's why I choose that as one of my relaxing practices but you are going there alone sometimes you bring friends with you yeah it could be arranged in a virtual meeting for sure but mostly I go there alone and listen to some music and things like that what do you think what is your thinking when you are upstairs but I mean in the space so when I'm in the space and floating between different celestial bodies not only me but pretty much everyone who I invited into the space instinctively look back to Earth no matter where in the solar system you are for Earth is the cradle of civilization human civilization I mean and it shows that how fragile and how unique it is in the solar system at least people become more pro-social and care for each other more because there are artificial boundaries you don't see it from space but this unity and the strength and fragility of our shared planet is much more tangible when you are in space so that's the kind of thought I have in the space you need to be able to and there you go so ask questions we are not going to have a sequence once you use that don't miss my games I'm going to prepare and on Brian imagine you start without a bath just at the table of the union that there is you don't need when I think about all the sequences that we have if you want to introduce them without question journalist I think you already have things but you don't want to talk a little about this show I don't know a few more questions because we don't know how we are going to use definitely editing why it was important for you to go to night night show with Brian so my main idea is to make pedagogy I would like people to understand that the work that I'm doing which is radical transparency has certain similarities of the work that Brian is doing where I'm trying to in a digital minister's position make everything that I chaired publicly available what I'm trying to do is to get prominent politicians in a context of a conversation to make apparent their agenda and their ideas and their goals and things like that in a way that is accessible to everybody, not just people who are interested in politics so I would like to talk to Brian not only about the policies that I help making but also try to show why such a mimetic humorous take on politics is important to build a polity that can engage in diverse cultures instead of kind of a mono culture of just right or wrong yes and no and black and white and things like that so I would like to contribute to this kind of thing at the beginning almost at the beginning of the conversation you said that you are creating digital tools not only to put everything in streaming but at the same time each time when I come to see you you film our conversation and you are filming every conversation it's not live streaming though no yes but you are going to put it on your on our website on your website why is it important for you to show the public my face cameraman our conversation because that's what I see the reason why I want to contextualize this conversation instead of people who are watching this film right now probably only see my head talking and not understanding that you are nodding all the time to me it is important to show that where I am looking at the world is nothing unique anyone who are accessing the same information that I am accessing can potentially think of even more innovative ways so instead of just monopolizing the information offered to a minister when we are chairing a meeting instead making clear the context so that people can re-enact this context and think what I would do if I am the digital minister currently being interviewed by Alain what would I say and things like that and because of that of the contextualization people can become much more prepared when they do perform political actions and so it takes away a lot of the mystification when it comes to the work of a career politician it's a way to demystify the reputation work and why is it important to demystify so that everybody can participate for example if you put on your website our conversation how the people can participate with us they can also think that the question you ask me if there is a more appropriate according to them version or whether the same idea maybe put in a more eloquent way or whether I omitted or missed certain part of people when I say everybody supports the right of Hong Kong people to enjoy the promised self-governing to them maybe I am missing some people leaving some people behind maybe some people don't think so and these people can certainly let me know that I am not representing them and so on so it enables a kind of peer to peer conversation around the same social object people stop being just the watchers of the film and their only engagement is to rate it one star or five star on Netflix or somewhere else but rather they can just write me and say when you are answering Elaine's question in this context I think you should have said this instead if it were me I would put it differently and so on but if they only look at the edited and cut version where it is mostly me speaking without this whole conversational context they can not be as informed as they are if they look at a whole context you can also use archives why did you decide to create a digital double of yourself so if you refer to the 3D scan avatar in the virtual reality digital double which incarnation because I have many incarnations one is the actual 3D scan model of myself that can walk and talk in virtual reality one is simply a kind of Skype projective through an iPad sometimes attached to a robotic body sometimes just snapped to one of the chairs I don't really know which one you are referring to or which scenario you are referring to why did you create so many double of yourself ok thank you so the reason why I create a lot of technologies that enable what we call telepresence meaning that being present at some place while physically being elsewhere is out of practicality I guess invited to speech and forums and summits over the world and if I keep doing air travel it will have an impact on climate change but also it will make the jet lag perennial for me and so it's not practical for me to fly to each occasion where I need to engage in conversations but if they can use inexpensive equipment such as a holographic 2 dimensional gore projection or some sort of telepresence robot or some sort of just an iPad but snapping on a chair and they can rotate the chair it can enable me to participate in meetings without having to fly over the world so at the beginning it is just a way for practical jet lag avoidance as well as reducing carbon emission you said that internationalism in the 21st century is the internet does it mean that the question of the recognition recognition the recognition of Taiwan is not anymore an issue so the question was on the internet does the fact that Taiwan website ends in .tw and anywhere in the world including in PRC territories if you type something that it goes to the to the Taiwan domain name service and it correctly responds within the governance of Taiwanese people is that a kind of international recognition I would say yes definitely that .tw is actually the domain name that I print on my name card and that is the only domain instead of the name of any country or whatever I just wrote my email address and also the website pdist.tw to me that is the main space of international negotiation but that's because I'm digital minister I'm not pretending that for other ministers they don't have international recognition challenges I'm just saying that on the internet governance issue we don't see any trend of kind of cancelling pdist.tw from the internet that's not happening so with your digital different doubles you can cross the border you can go everywhere you want to go you can discuss with everyone that has internet connection braband you said that you don't need any visa so anywhere that has braband connection I can send my digital double once so repeatedly in many say UN venues or various different multilateral organizations and high level meetings and so on because mostly the jurisdictional control occurs at passport control but a robot does not need a passport and because of that my robotic double can go anywhere that has a braband connection and as long as I have a secure communication link to that robot that robot cannot represent me it can re-present me from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world what do you think of those democratic country like France like European country or America or Australia who don't want to recognize Taiwan because they're afraid of losing their business with China the question was about countries such as the U.S. and other countries the question was about other liberal democratic countries such as the U.S. and other countries that does not recognize Taiwan but in fact U.S. does that's the Taiwan relation act or the TRA and its subsequent acts gives for example the AIC the de facto embassy very similar status and in fact it's a real embassy in all but name in its functions and in its dispatch and things like that of course we now also have the Taiwan travel act and various other acts that enable regular visits of high level officials and things like that with DC and to DC and from and things like that so it is obviously possible to build a relationship with Taiwan you just have to think creatively but the fact that they don't want to say that officially for example in Paris there is no Taiwan embassy there is only an office representative office but the people who are ruling in the office are not ambassadors they are ambassadors according to our legal system but not according to French diplomacy so how can you explain this hypocrite attitude it's not my role to comment upon other jurisdictions attitude what I'm trying to say is that for some years now all the tech row Taiwan economic control office representatives are ambassadors according to our foreign service and so we're not being hypocritical here we call them ambassadors they are our ambassadors whether our ambassadors is recognized as ambassadors depends of course by the people they interact with in many jurisdictions when our ambassadors deliver their communications and their missions especially for the civil society and the industrial sector they treat our ambassadors as ambassadors it is only perhaps the career public office working in foreign service in various other jurisdictions that have this concern that our ambassadors by the civil society and the cultural and industrial sectors have long since recognized our ambassadors as ambassadors so you are the one who tries to spread the open culture in Taiwan and all over the world one of the ones but yes what about OGP should recognize Taiwan but Taiwan has twice to belong to OGP how can you explain that? Well, OGP actually have already agreed to partner with Taiwan so we are in fact making the national action plan as we speak and we will likely produce one sometime around May which is the inauguration date of Taiwan's second term and so unlike other OGP member countries who make two-year national action plans Taiwan makes four-year national action plan that aligns exactly with the second term of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen so that we improve on the democratic process of OGP itself by making sure that we don't run a file of the usual problem of the two-year action plan the second of which sometime for between two presidents and the incoming president is then hold also to the promises of the previous president that creates a kind of political issue but for our NAP that's going to be exactly the same as the second term of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen so there is no disconnect between our NAP and her campaign promises about open government and we think is a better system and so we forked OGP offering a better process and partnering with the OGP and calling ourselves the open government Taiwan national action plan and other OGP member countries and maybe merge back this process so we are in close partnership and this kind of affiliate or partnership status instead of a member status actually offered us more liberty at innovating on the core processes of the OGP while adhering to the OGP process in a manner and one other precision when you say when you want to spread open culture what do you mean to open all the data from the government to the people or also the data of the people? When I'm saying that I would like to make an open government I mean to make the government proceedings transparent to the people sometimes through open government data sometimes through participatory processes sometimes through accountable institutions for example improvement and all this makes the state apparatus much more accessible and transparent to the people and certainly we're not saying that the people should be transparent to the state which will be surveillance Is there a red line that you come across? So the question about is there a limit to make the state apparatus transparent? Because you were talking about totalitarian totalitarian the question about the kind of boundary of making the government proceedings open of course it should be protecting the privacy of the people involved because we're in this for work it is not about making comments on ourselves and our private endeavors and our private time right so we only make public the meetings that are official meetings publishing the menu of every dinner that I had it has nothing to do with the work right so this is that and of course national secrets confidential documents and so on have their own rule some of them need to be declassified after 10 years some 20 some 30 years and of course open government needs to stop at those national secrets that were classified for various reasons so there need to be kind of embargo and of course there's also the concern of the public benefit for example there was a data set that people really wanted which is the release of the frozen cabbage or some kind of vegetables in readiness to a shortage of supply to make more accessible the agric products that people rely on and so it serves to balance supplies of the market now this amount of release every day to the market is actually confidential because if you can predict the release of the amount way before they gets released to the market that actually doesn't help to fight speculation the speculator would have perfect information to continue to speculate and so that is kind of like a trade secret of the government in the council of agriculture but when we ask them how soon after the release of that into the market can you publish the data because they were withholding everything and then say even national secrets you declassified usually after a decade or two so suddenly there is a time a delta time that you can sell me after this amount of time this is no longer sensitive to the market fluctuation and you can decide it for people in raw data form and they held some meetings and go back and told me minister we can release it after 24 hours because after one trading cycle it has no amount of influence on the next day's price they determined so we set up an open data plan that release it after 24 hours thank you so just one minute without speaking and you can look at this security perimeter that of course takes a little bit more time and expensive in a kind of front loading the expense but on the other hand if you do accept PRC components in your core network you're going to have to run security audits anyway and so that is like a more time expense and whether the cost benefit scenario makes sense for each telecom companies as well as for the citizens that they serve again that is their own assessment while we're trying to provide is just some real facts in our experience we're certainly not saying that these calculations are the same universal first of all in certain areas for example in semiconductor manufacturing we still have a healthy lead of easily nearly a decade ahead of PRC and there's many what they call dual use technologies that PRC currently don't have easy access to which is why there's alleged efforts to exit this through non-market means but all these I think is no match to just setting up core innovation value in the society so that people would very much like to innovate on the cutting edge technologies that serves the common good that serves the good after not just the profit seeking shareholders but all the society stakeholders and Taiwan has no shortage of the leading machine learning researchers and communication researchers and so on that works towards that so I'm quite optimistic when it comes to making up a innovative landscape what I'm trying to say here is that sometimes it's not a linear competition between like who deploys the most number of 5G stations first equally important is where you are strategically placing those early adoptions of 5G sites are you only benefiting certain people in the core municipality of your capital or are you enabling previously unheard of solutions that is needed for example to enable telemedicine for the least privileged people in the rural place or to enable novel forms of social collaboration in the lands that where people who are of a indigenous culture want to revitalize their culture and could rely on 5G for co-presencing so that people can experience their culture together and so on so all these cultural and social values are what is needed to make the 5G innovations that involve the whole society instead of just a few researchers and that is why we have dedicated sandbox plans for dedicated spectrums for the issues that pertain to a local use case not just the large municipalities so you say to the world that they have to be confident and they don't have to be afraid of Chinese technology my main message wherever it's disinformation or whatever is don't panic because if you're in a panic especially moral panic it actually makes innovation harder to happen because innovation requires the kind of entertaining various different possible solutions but in a panic state people seek for the fastest solution which may or may not be the best one over even a medium term let's talk about your double hi you are the only one to do that or did you meet other double did you meet already other double or are you the only one who do that you mean other ministers or anybody other minister I was part of the virtual island submit which is I think started by a few Caribbean island countries they want to talk about climate change and sustainability for islands and because a lot of it came from the climate change and action world we don't want to have more CO2 emissions by running such a submit so everybody is a digital double in that submit but we still have the same schedule we have the same like ministerial participation the opening remark just like a real summit but everything is virtual so we can say with our conscience that running this submit with participant from me from Taiwan and also someone from the peska door from the island which is its own island contribute almost nothing to the carbon emission because we imagine that you did that for the first time because you couldn't go to the UN for example no no no that was just a time where the press discovered it because the UN IGF was live streamed but I did that routinely and even way before that Geneva meeting we did that even domestically I used the 360 robot to visit the south site of the national palace museum to tour a kind of Japanese exhibition of the national treasures and then I talked with the head of the head curator of national palace museum and a lot of people piggybacking because they watched the 360 live stream with my robot walking type in questions so I kind of moderated their questions and asked the chief curator and so we've used that very routinely I would say for quite some time before the press discovered it because of the IGF Geneva meeting. What was the reaction of the Chinese people for example who refused that the world listened to Taiwan well I mean there's nothing against the UN rules for you know playing a movie and this is just playing a movie even though it's recorded maybe you know 500 milliseconds ago it's still a movie and so because of that I've made a lot of impressions to the UN related places that we're just talking about the sustainable development goals we're just talking about policies not really politics and we always focus on topics and so the PRC of course according to their interpretation of a certain UN resolution they cannot coexist with a Taiwan representative in the same room in the same meeting but as you can see during the IGF Geneva live stream even though they try to protest the chair said no to the protester but they did not leave the room and that means that they don't classify this robot as a kind of human ambassador which would require leaving the room if they cannot remove me from the room and so they may not be that happy but they coexist in the same room with my robotic double yes because it's not just a movie the voice of Taiwan which is what you're making I guess it's a comment okay thank you very good can you introduce me this new avatar this is the oldest one we scanned this in France and we went to a 3D scanning studio where they used a lot of cameras in a kind of cylinder and captured me in two poses and that's one of the poses and that's the main one that when I was in Paris I talked with people like primary and secondary high school people in this avatar form and shrinking this avatar to the same height as the young people in virtual reality so they don't have to look up to me they can feel that I am the same height as them as to enable a kind of more equal conversation and that's one of the very early experiments in setting up a more deliberative in the virtual reality we also made another scan which is less used that is around the same time which is me but less high-five I guess and wearing a coast cup shirt I think makes something as you wish in Taiwan so how do you use this avatar so we use a virtual reality called high fidelity in the high fidelity world we can make those avatars move by using those controllers so if I move in the real world it's like a cheap motion capture device so they figure out where my head is turning and where my hands are and make the avatar in the virtual reality do the same movement and this is even better if you only have an image because they don't have to transmit my image only the place in the space of my ankles and that enables a faithful recreation of my movement in the virtual reality space which can then be projected as hologram or something in another physical space it's again a way to be anywhere in the world for example to make co-presence and there previously it required a lot of arrangement and at the same time you can be all about the world at the same time that's right can you move in the first one okay what is another position there's a static position and I can also show you the kind of base model where it's made of as you can see it was of and polygons don't look as good as a polished one so we did some cosmetics in virtual reality and put on some dolls and so on and did my hair but unlike the cosmetician the makeup artist we work with I don't have to do it every time I appear on the show, I only do it once and then the better model can be reused so it's also my environmental friend so that's the kind of polish model that I use do I put on this? I suppose you can see what I see so I remember visiting artists above my colleagues went to a museum to see Lucy which is a kind of ancient fossil record that helps establishing the East and North Africa as one of the origins of the modern humanity of homosadians this is the so called out of Africa hypothesis and as you can see a lot of the human structures are simply not visible when you're viewing this you will instead only have an idea of the population based on the kind of lights that they offer and that's just us we're talking about so maybe it's not just us there are also other places this is Hong Kong and we can also see many other cities around here in the world and for many people there's for many people if they look at the sun they cannot directly look at the sun they will have to wear sunglasses because the star chart is protected against radiation you can easily hope the sun and look at it without hurting your eyes and then you can actually travel outside of the solar system and look at the configuration as it currently is for the solar system and there's also many other around us and if you truly want you can also this is various other planets and you may also look at its basic properties and make a travel between the celestial bodies and that is Mars and it can also show the constellations as the people imagined them by painting the configurations of stars and overlaying it with a kind of mythical figure or object that they try to assign meaning to this formation of the stars and that is the Mars and two of its satellites as they look now and we can build the Mars so thanks to the spirit and curiosity we now have a pretty good view of Mars as is and there's various interesting features around here. Are you okay with this? Shall we look at something else? Can you just listen to music like you do sometimes when you take a rest with it? There's actually already music playing out so I don't know how you are going to make this maybe I have something without speaking just a second possible to put full screen for us probably that's all there is to see do you still need other scenarios? Can you go closer to Taiwan and Hong Kong? I'm not sure why it's showing Singapore but I guess it decides to show it anyway Is it possible to go closer than that is? Of course I'll have to stand up like physically go closer I think that's the limit Can you just go over there Sha Qing Okay, we're done