 the video on YouTube or alternatively as a transcript according to your preference. So both are fine. Okay, perfect. I'm fine with either. So whatever your preference is. Okay, excellent. Okay, great. So my first question is that as a young person, you know, you're already pretty famous for just being really great at computer programming. And I'm curious as to how your conception of technology has changed since your earliest days of coding and in this period of time also how your views on politics have changed? Like since I was eight years old? Pretty much, yeah. Okay, well it's changed a lot, right? When I was eight years old there wasn't such a thing as the way I web. There was just 1989 or something. It would be still some time until the first web browser get invented. So at a time to me, computer is very much like personal computing. The personal computer revolution was just starting. And a lot of that resides on the idea that anything that I can do in the day to day, for example, doing math or learning new languages and so on, computer can help me to do better. So I guess my earliest notion of computing is that of assistive intelligence in the sense of an assistive technology that assists me but ultimately I decide the direction where I want the computing to go. Now fast forward to today we have seen that computing was not necessarily just helping out individuals anymore. I would argue that most of our online life isn't actually so though, isn't bringing what we have encountered in the previous personal computing era online. It's more social, our video conferencing for example, where our attention is on each other rather than in any particular computation infrastructure. And the same goes for pretty much everything we used to be that's done in a solo way is now more and more social. It's as simple as starting a live stream I guess for the world to participate in the euro creation process, not just the product. And so I think what used to be like clearly defined by the person doing the computing is now more and more also defined by the system that facilitates communication is as important as the computer itself. And if one is using I don't know Chromebooks or things like that maybe most of the computing isn't done in the computer anymore I think that's the biggest change. Got it. That's really interesting actually. My dad was like a computer scientist in the 70s when it was like a field that was very much burgeoning. And I wonder if he would, I'm sure he would agree with you because you know he was working on like the arm chip and all those devices that are very very ancient compared to what we work with now. Yeah that's really interesting though. So I'm also curious your Taiwan's youngest ever cabinet appointee and basically your career in technology launched when you were very young. So I'm curious as to if you felt that people have doubted you ever or your abilities to serve in such a high up place in government and if you've ever experienced any of your own self-doubt. Well I'm actually the second youngest appointee and I was a digital minister I was 35 but a few years back when Ms. Chen Li Jun was first a cabinet member in charge of youth development she was 34 I think a few months but she was by far the youngest. And I mentioned Chen Li Jun is very important because her work mostly bringing in youth engagement bringing in the youth council introducing deliberative democracy and citizens assembly and things like that to the Taiwanese cabinet play a very important role in paving the way. And when I entered the cabinet she was the minister of culture so we worked together to beautify what the term public infrastructure means because previously in the olden days the public money can either be spent on public infrastructure which is considered investment or operation and maintenance which is considered like ongoing spending. But when we're talking about we want to digitize the like the Taiwan digital model library the historic buildings and things like that into polygons using photogrammetry videogrammetry and so on there's no tangible thing in it and so the argument that it's digital public infrastructure is new to many people because they previously would consider this as like everyday operation spending because there's no concrete like literally concrete structure to as a deliverable to such project but we say that because it's creative commons everybody gets to use it it changes the discourse around these social objects people don't have to rely on second or third hands reports anymore everybody can feel it for themselves in those historic buildings and so on and so gradually we did convince the older generations that this digital public infrastructure is as important or even more important than analog public infrastructure. So I don't think I've had any doubts but that's because I've had really good colleagues that are similarly innovative and is willing to engage the digital world. Gotcha okay that makes sense. So kind of actually transitioning more to questions about Taiwan's civic tech sector. So I'm sure that you've been interviewed plenty about Taiwan's COVID-19 response and I'm sure you've asked this question many times but overall what lessons can other countries take away from Taiwan's response and are there any other countries that are looking to partner with Taiwan to kind of share technology resources and general practices? Yeah during the COVID we've had many exchanges even a multilateral 14 economies exchange that a few days before a warehouse assembly and I think the main idea of Taiwan model is a society model where the people instead of just repeating or obeying top-down instructions are empowered in the sense that both epidemiological ideas are plentiful and people do understand it and also people are free to innovate to remix to as people in civic tech say to fork whatever government policies that are in place be it mask distribution or it could be using traditional rice cookers to to kill the virus but it didn't kill the mask or there's many interesting social innovations that just spread around and even very simple things like wear a mask not to respect the elderly or to protect the health workers but wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand and this meme which appears to address yourself interest is also very important because people do spread it more if they believe and correctly especially at the beginning of the pandemic where the asymptomatic or airborne transfers are not that well understood at least it protects oneself against your unwashed hand so there's less controversy or conspiracy theories so that's I think number one about empowering the social sector and I think the second one also very important is for the government to give a account in a very predictable fashion and that welcomes citizen input in the past year there's more than 2 million phone calls to the toll free number 1922 each one asking either for a personalized individualized explanation or actually contributing to the current covid like the young boy who calls saying um your rationale mask and getting only pink ones the boys on the class all have maybe blue whites I don't want to wear pink to class and everybody um on the next 2 p.m press conference everyone wore pink and pink became the most hip color and the boy became the most hip boy in class so that the point here is a rapid iteration cycle and it could be done using not very cutting edge using essentially just two free numbers and tv or radio and and that's it but a predictable way for people to understand that their ideas get amplified within 24 hours and if anything we didn't do well we just apologize and correct that within 24 hours that's also very important mm okay I see something that you touched upon just now was using technology for social action and something that I've read about in various articles is your Taoist approach to political and social action so I'm curious as to whether the role that spirituality for you whether that role plays the same um or whether it's the same in your professional life and your private life or if those are kind of distinct roles for spirituality well I'm currently doing this for fun right I'm optimized for fun so there's no real difference between the daytime and actually I do most of my work in my sleep anyway so most of the daytime is just for listening and for communication and the idea of a Taoist approach is very simple it's not to do any you know top down shutdown take down lockdown and that that will increase the what what they call the idea is is way way to to do without doing so instead of do specific things make spaces so that each and every one of citizens are able to then innovate without me or really any official being the bottleneck of innovation being spread and so on so like fostering eco-creative space I think that's the main thing I learned from the Taoist approach yeah it's I guess spiritual but it's also very practical and secular I see I see that makes sense um I want to ask you now about vTaiwan so I'm curious as to kind of throughout the process of building this open source software um what was kind of the most illuminating aspect for you of building the program or the platform and what important like governmental issues do you see it being instructive for in the future well vTaiwan is now well it's always run by the social sector so soon as I became digital minister in 2016 october I handed the route passwords and things like that so it's been quite a while I can't really speak for the project anymore but I think still to this day I like vTaiwan is being used to deliberate open parliament national action plan by the legislature and also I think many new ideas like social entrepreneurship whether one should legalize that and so on the vTaiwan team is still tackling that using a mixture of online agenda setting and face-to-face but also live streamed deliberation so I think one thing state constant since I was more in charge of vTaiwan in 2015 to now is that the online and face-to-face components they are not cancelling each other out is not a substitutive or replacement relationship rather the online part is best to explore the agenda because online especially asynchronously people get more time to reflect on each other's feelings but online is very hard to get to the actual deliberation so we always arrange a face-to-face deliberation and hold only to the online determined co-created rough consensus as the agenda and only explores such aspects that are already identified as like livable as that the people could live with it and which is surprisingly many and without over focusing on the ideological or the divisive part that's identified by say the polis mechanism so yeah I think the rule of thumb simply is to discover to explore in online but to converge to define together face-to-face okay something you you just mentioned was the idea of rough consensus and I've read about your thoughts on that before but I'm curious can you just kind of sum up your thoughts surrounding rough consensus and why that's important for a country sure so rough consensus is the idea from internet governance where people like home alone and get a feeling of each other's resistance to any particular idea but I think the main idea of rough consensus as to as contrast to the traditional way that the word consensus is used consensus usually used to mean something that's a fine consensus mean that we can all sign our name on it the problem is that when people get online especially when they don't share many of the first time experiences actually very difficult to get to that fine consensus usually the people with most time on their hands win the argument I guess but if one is just aiming for rough consensus meaning that we can live with it then we're really not talking about a concrete solution that's accepted by everyone but rather a shared value out of those different positions so for example in 2015's uber x case instead of debating endlessly whether that's sharing economy or platform economy or gig economy or whatever we we instead just focus on the specific case of someone driving to work and back and picking up a stranger even though that someone doesn't have a professional driver's license and turns out that everyone including professional drivers amateur drivers and so on all agree that the passenger insurance the registration not undercutting existing meters and so on these are the shared values despite the very different ideological definition on quote and quote sharing economy so this is a sense of shared values without going to all the way to like find consensus with prescribed solutions I see okay and I guess from the perspective of someone living in Taiwan someone who supports the idea of rough consensus what do you think are america's hopes for achieving rough consensus I know that's a very broad question but as you probably know there's a lot of polarization in this country um we're much larger than taiwan and um you know there's a huge spectrum of backgrounds religions um you know ethnicities there's a lot of polarization um so I'm curious do you think that countries can emulate rough consensus as well as taiwan already has well in 2014 the taiwanese cabinet only had a citizen approval rate of around nine percent I don't think the US have ever sunk this low a chance of trustworthiness of government and people were very very polarized and I think the the main thing though is is not to concentrate on the parts that are polarized like in taiwan we've had many elections since our democratization we had one where the winning presidents get like barely 40 percent of votes out of three candidates we've had one where it's like literally 51 49 percent so I think we were no stranger to polarization and and the point of doing the rough consensus platforms such as the polis that I mentioned the joint platform many other platform presidential hackers on sandbox and also parts major budgeting and so on is to focus on a different picture of the population there's many people who look at the polis report for the first time and saw that even though there's maybe five percent of statements that devise the country there's actually 95 percent of statements that everybody more or less identify with that's a very powerful image and it's been repeated in the u.s. as well involving green kandak if you look at it and like citizens assembly virtual citizens assembly report you see exactly the same structure where people no matter where like republican or democrat or libertarian or whatever and all agree that we need to put art into STEM education because it's also creative and also diversify our broadband access so it's more inclusive and so on so there are a lot like concrete points that's really unrelated to political ideologies that importance is that whether we have a digital public infrastructure to reflect this face effect to the citizenry or whether we misuse the private digital infrastructures like facebook and so on which are really like nightclubs with their private bouncers and addictive dreams and things like that and and like misuse it as a place for public deliberation which it's probably not the best tool for doing so interesting so so overall your your take on technology seems to be broadly positive and optimistic and i would say you know many people would probably say that technology has failed society we've spoken about disinformation and polarization some people also point to how the news industry has kind of been decimated by social media and just technology as a whole so do you believe that these critics are right and or are you more optimistic and kind of what fuels this optimism but also what do you think that governments and the private sector can do to address problems that technology does have well both of my parents are journalists so of course i support local journalism but i don't think internet was invented to boost internet journalism i mean it's a worthy goal and i'm happy to work on it but internet is far as i understand designed to remain communication in a civilization after a nuclear fallout that's its original design spec and in in that internet probably didn't fail the society i mean amid lockdowns and so on we still managed to get a lot of things done thanks to videoconferencing and other technologies which that's it i do think that the so-called social media which i sometimes refer to as anti-social media is having a very adverse effect on the quality of not just political discourse but also on the basic ability to generate facts because journalism science research a lot of things like public deliberation and so on are supposed to generate facts in a way that everyone can participate but nowadays through the more anti-social corners of social media at the same attention span that could be used for you know fact-checking and digital competency and contributing to your local news and so on are being repurposed to amplify the most polarized and the most toxic part of the discourse and it's not even public anymore because it's very questionable public interest it so i think the solution here is not to go back to like i don't know dial up i don't really think that that magically stuff things i i don't think it's a broadband issue i do think it is a asymmetry issue if we have broadband as a human right as we do here in taiwan we make sure that everyone enjoy like 10 megabits both uplink and downlink and use it in a more symmetric way that the point is that if one use the social media or the internet you know just downloading 10 megabits per second but uploading only one bit which is called like i guess it's two bits now or three and they're like five different emotions but i mean it's very asymmetric and it's essentially like amplifying the worst of radio and television without the kind of public spectrum accountability that people used to have over those radio and television so as i think the solution is digital competence which is why in our curriculum and we don't see media literacy anymore we see media competence emphasizing that each school children each middle school student is free to contribute not only to environment size and local news but also fact checking the three presidential candidates or they can i don't take a film of the local tallying process and and so on of elections and so on so once everyone see ourselves as media and see thanks through the lens of media then people could use the uplink much more than many corners of the world currently do and that i think will depend the democracy by giving the democracy more bits of source checked information to work with that's interesting i haven't heard this distinction between social media and anti-social media i really like that yeah it could be pro-social too right it's a matter of choice yeah yeah yeah yeah um i want to talk a little bit more about disinformation um i have one last question about that so um can you speak to specific examples of disinformation that have been spread in taiwan by china um and can you speak to you how taiwanese citizens harness technology in these instances to you know find proof that china was the culprit and also just to combat the misinformation sure um so one example was uh in november 2019 uh and it's it's not even covert it's very overt and you can check it out in the taiwan fact check center i think it's uh the fact check number is um 204 204 and and i quote the disinformation is and i quote hong kong thug's compensation exposed killing a police earns those teenagers up to 20 million end of code and the interesting thing is that it's actually based on a real photo as a reuters photo uh with some young people participating in hong kong protest uh and which is shaping up to be around the end of 2019 the defining issue of the presidential election in taiwan and so uh the caption which was just saying there was teenagers in the protest was recaptured into a variety of mixes such as and i quote uh this 13 year old suck bought new iphones and game consoles and is recruiting his brothers i'm quote uh and and there's many variations such as this and so we we didn't take anything down just as we find a pandemic with no lockdown we find infodemic with no administrative takedowns instead uh what we did is that partnering with the international fact checking network uh so taiwan fact check center is one chapter uh in it um did a fact check really quickly and said that oh this actually is a wrong caption the reuters photo didn't say anything like that and uh bad caption uh originally came from the weibo account of the central political and law unit of the ccp of the chinese communist party um and and this is interesting because uh this approach of what i call notice and public notice as opposed to notice and takedown actually inoculates people for vaccine is just um that virus i guess so um because people still share that on the social media but the anti-social media is made more pro-social by a very clear marker that says this is state-sponsored this information campaign uh click here for the fact check but we didn't take anything down and people come to understand that there is a Beijing sponsored media campaign this information campaigns related to the hong kong protest so this is just one example there are there many but they're mostly on the time fact checking center website which is a social sector organization and not at all sponsored or directed by the government they check they fact check us all the time too very cool very cool i will be sure to to you know check check that out um and i do have a follow-up question to that um which is that how has kind of taiwan's general um open government policy made hard to find material more easy to ask access um and then kind of what is the information that is most demanded by the public like what information are people most interested in finding given that they have you know such a capability to do so well their own information of course the the top downloaded app last year in both ios and google play is the national health insurance app or the nhi express jianbao kuaidong in mandarin and that's where people could after logging in see all the dentist visits traditional medicine visits you know doctor visits x-ray i think city scans too so basically any medical record that's held by any clinic that's covered by the nhi which is pretty much everyone is in that app and people could very easily download the data as well as even dedicate the masquerading quota that they don't need to international humanitarian aid or things like that so this is much more than downloading public information this is a data coalition where each and every citizen is in charge of how to make use of the personal data that they have stored on the national health insurance and the point here is that with um i think one quarter of population now using this app and dedicating their um quotas to international humanitarian aid and also participating in studies such as diabetes and so on by authorizing through a sdk third party researchers data they trust will make use of their data well without you know targeted advertising or anything like that i think this shapes a a new way that is citizens control the production of the data not just the consumption of the public data of course we also do public data downloads very well like the real-time masquerability in the 6000 pharmacies that's of course very popular but i think in terms of the time people spend on data definitely the personal data that what we call my data is more than open data i see got it it's very cool to me um and i think i mentioned before but kind of how i got to know about your work is through listening to a podcast episode about civic hackers um so i'm curious why are there so many civic hackers in taiwan and what incentivizes these hackers to maybe forego high paying like tech sector jobs to instead work on you know promoting democracy and working towards social causes well these are definitely not competing interests there's many very high paying people yours truly included before i join the cabinet that dedicate their their weekends or even some weekdays into the public infrastructure work for for digital democracy and this is because not just because out of a sense of fun or a sense of passion but also it has very concrete rewards if during a hr interview someone said that hey you you probably have used the work that i've done because your child is you know learning mentoring and mentoring dictionary is collaborative done by people in cov zero chances are that their recruitment will go much more smooth because they're essentially contributed a very very high profile and um like left by many um thing uh that's the government wasn't doing very well in the beginning and the citizen the civic hackers forked and did very well uh the same goes for for climate science uh and for pretty much everything really like this information management if someone applied for a job to the trans micro that was leading antivirus company and said hey i've contributed to the bot that um did the disinformation real-time fact-checking in chat rooms they probably get hired uh in real time actually that happens already with the covax uh teams uh that there's a fork of that bot called many who which got acquired by by who's call which is again a really fast-growing startup so there's an ecosystem and if you solve a problem that has brought public appeal it's probably also solving worldwide problems and that gives you much better access to the worldwide um network as well so so i would say it's still entrepreneurship uh it's just social entrepreneurship uh things that you know doesn't destroy democracy but rather repair democracy um as part of the entrepreneurship so that's uh the gist of why people develop so so many times because they see a exit not necessarily to um the public listing of ipo but exit to a community which is uh very much thriving and worldwide i see so you know you've had extensive experience both in the business sector but also in government and kind of as a follow-up to your last answer um is it your belief that these two shouldn't work in silos that they should be very much interconnected well my my idea is called people public private partnership so the social sector such as scale zero uh or the time infection center and so what should set the norms and then the public sector the government need to amplify those norms so that it has democratic legitimacy legitimacy and is maintained for consistency by the career public service and then the private sector the business sector can work on scaling it out so instead of just scaling it up which is giving it democratic legitimacy and making sure that it works on for example national issues not just one particular district in the social sector the private sector can then package that as solutions and that can just i don't know help a worldwide community and also make useful like addendum to the data collection data production and things like that there's a business around that but the importance is that the norm is set by the social sector not the other way around where in many like private part public and no people partnerships is is the private sector setting the norms and the public sector kind of forced because they don't have any choice to use the rules already set by the private sector to conduct as i mentioned like town hall deliberation on a private sector infrastructure that's definitely not meant for that use and then the social sector will be weakened including the local news and journalism and things like that so like just flipping that around and having the social sector setting the rules of engagement i think would make for a much better cross sectoral collaboration very cool very interesting and so my last question actually is focused on e-governance and kind of what has taiwan done already to strengthen e-governance um and then you know looking towards the future how will kind of smart technologies be harnessed to help with challenges such as like you know the aging population simulating new immigrants fostering economic connections just curious as to how e-governance will grow in the future sure um yeah it's like nowadays we say our mail you're probably automatically prefixed that with a e-dash right we don't say e-dash mail anymore and so when the national participation platform joined the gov.tw has more than 10 million visitors a couple years back we dropped the e from e participation we just call it the participation platform because once you have more than half of adult population using a platform and and also for the non-adults listening we have more than one quarter of petitions started by people who's not even 18 years old so i think it's i think the point is that people could assume that brahman is a human right is very affordable just 16 us dollars per month for unlimited data and only then only when we have this inclusivity can we truly say that this is just governance this is not e-dash governance and so that's what we have already done now looking forward i think what we are now doing is to make democracy itself a type of civic technology which is really quite radical but it's easier i guess in taiwan because we're very young so we can afford to change our constitution i think we're on the seventh or eighth change now and probably going to be a referendum for constitutional change and the point is that if people think of democracy as a fossilized ritual then they will spend more time on other things and not on democracy and as a result public decision will suffer but if people who are the most creative ones apply whatever they have learned like from ethereum blockchain governance and translate that directly to democracy like with quadratic voting which we've done for the past two presidential hackathons and so on then we effectively increase the bandwidth democracy taking full advantage of whatever the problem as a human rights condition that the society currently enjoy and so we're not restricted to just three bits per four years per person who's voting and could then afford to tackle much more structural issues by the way of rough consensus and running code this type code means actually a legal code so having the democracy itself as a social object as a type of technology that even 16 years old or 13 years old can contribute meaningfully i think that's a general direction yeah very good direction to go and that's for sure um great well i want to thank you for your time again um i find your work very inspiring and sure people all around the world do um so yeah i very much enjoyed um being able to talk to you i will send you the link when the article is published um have you been recording this meeting as well no but i can just use your recording because skype is both ways but if you want i can also send a local audio to you but i don't know whether the audio quality was good or not for you um it was pretty good i recorded with my phone just as backup but i wouldn't mind having a third backup if you want to send me right so do i need to embargo the publication of the video until you publish uh does that mean like not release it no i mean you said you're you're publishing uh a write-up right uh yeah some some journalists prefer uh that i publish the video after they publish the transcript but it's all up to you i can just publish it to youtube right now if you're okay with that i'm totally fine with that yeah that works great for me okay thank you for the contribution to the commons of course yeah and i admire that you know everything is so open and accessible and that i was able to able to contact you so easily as well sure yeah all right well thank you so much adria it was a pleasure talking thank you live long and prosper oh you too bye