 Hello, I'm Tamara Finkelstein. I'm head of the UK Government Policy Profession. It's a really exciting time for the profession with the launch of our new website and also our forthcoming policy festival, Celebrating People and Places. There is an amazing week-long set of events and we'll end the week with our policy awards where we can really celebrate the amazing policy work that goes on across government. So please join us for this fantastic festival of events. You can drop in on a few, you can drop in on everything. So please do join us and if you have feedback either on our website or on the festival we'd be delighted to hear from you. Good morning everyone. I'm Simon Parker, director of the Policy Profession and I'm really pleased to be able to welcome you to the third day of our policy festival. There are loads of really fantastic events going on across the week. Please check out the programme and sign up to them. I'm particularly excited about this one because we're here live with Audrey Tung, Taiwan's digital minister. I've been following Audrey's story for about four years and they've had an extraordinary career going from a superstar computer programmer through participation in Taiwan's revolutionary sunflower movements and finally into government where Audrey has brought the mindsets and ways of working of the digital world firmly into the heart of the way Taiwan operates to great effect during the COVID-19 pandemic. I think there's loads we can learn about how to use digital to deliver really effective outcomes and I think that's what we're going to hear about today. We are joined by some equally impressive colleagues from across Whitehall. Paul Modby, Deluxe Chief Digital Officer and Catherine Day who is a deputy director in the National Security Secretariat and among other things Catherine has been instrumental in helping us to set up the collective intelligence team in Policy Lab which is bringing some of Audrey's tools and techniques into the UK. One of those tools is a platform called Polis. Polis is a deliberative online polling tool which we've been using as part of this session so about 160 of you have already participated in the Polis debate. If we can get the link in the chat we've got some results from that. We'll continue to use the Polis tool during the week. Please do click on the link, have a play with it and it is really powerful. We've used it I think at its biggest with a group of about one and a half thousand people and generated some really fantastic results. I'm going to hand over to Audrey in a moment to talk about their experience. Obviously there is space on the slide over to put questions in. Please do give us plenty of questions and we'll come to those at the end. I think the talks today will be reasonably short and will maximise the chance for participation. So, on that note, Audrey Tung over to you. Good luck at time everyone. I'm Audrey Tung, Taiwan's digital minister in charge of open government, social innovation, youth engagement and so on. I'm really happy to be here to see that we're joined by all of you who according to this Polis conversation agree pretty much with everyone else pretty much all the important points except for one which is whether the UK communities have the agency to influence policy making. But aside from this divisive opinion, I think everybody agree that with modern technology policy making should be made a lot more interactive with the society and to directly engage the public and pretty much none of you believe that the journalists will weaponise the transparency for political purposes and pretty much all of you agree that it will offer real benefit to the average citizen. Now think about this shape for a moment because this is not the mental shape that we have for most of our controversial conversations in this society, usually in the more anti-social corners of social media or indeed mainstream media. People paint a very different picture as if that we put all our calories on the one polarized issue or two polarized issues and don't manage to discover that we're actually pretty much everyone agree on most of the things most of that time. And I believe this is due to the bandwidth of democracy in Taiwan. We've been working on digital democracy. Personally I've been working on that for a decade or so and we've discovered that if you increase the bandwidth of democracy allowing for more real-time engagement and participation and if we shorten the latency of democracy instead of waiting for a year or four years people can get real feedback in real time and then finally connect to more people in democracy then we actually get pretty good results. Now this is usually the time that I started saying this is how we countered the pandemic with no lockdowns not a single day of lockdown in a 23 million jurisdiction with just around 1,000 people of casualties or how we countered the infodamic disinformation crisis without any administrative takedowns but because we pre-commit to a gender setting by Polis and Slido I will only talk about these if people do ask those questions on Slido and so this is the time that I step back and wait for the Slido and panelist questions. That's my opening remark. Thank you Audrey. Paul, do you want to come in next? Thanks very much. So yes I'm Chief Digital Officer at Department for Leveling Up Housing and Community so I'm in charge in my current job of the digital infrastructure of the department working on services helping the department make policy fit for the internet age and spreading skills and understanding about digital. But previously been I've done a range of things on more transparent government so when I was back in the cabinet office I looked after things like data.gov.uk helped set up policy lab back in the day and did things like the work on the open government partnership which was a multi-lateral organisation that does a lot working about government transparency working with civil society. I just think there's so many interesting things in this mix and similarly to Simon I saw Audrey I saw you speak 2018 at a GovTech Summit in Paris at the time and it's super inspiring and I think just captures a difference of what it can mean when you've got folks in very senior leadership positions as ministers indeed with that sort of different background. I mean where's the story I suppose some things around you know there's something here about different cultural assumptions and ways of working between digital folks and policy folks which I've always found quite interesting you know in digital world we don't code things from scratch each time we stand on the shoulders of the folks that came before we use open source it's just normal to collaborate in that sort of way you can only really build digital services in that way and it's a very different starting point I think from some other bits of government particularly policy profession there's some things about what radical transparency means in the UK and whilst we don't have that perhaps statement right from the top in the way that we actually did once have like a maybe nearly 10 years ago or so there's plenty of great examples across government and maybe we can talk a bit more about some of those and you know new ways of working here but just not evenly distributed and all that and I think you know there's something about for all the things that we do about transparency digital ways of working the mixture between digital and policy there's something that Audrey's talking about on we used to call it e-democracy I guess and I've been following some of that for 15 years is it and trying to get more people interested in I'm really excited about what policy can mean in the work with policy lab but it's striking the the sort of work that the Audrey's done and indeed you see great examples of this across across Europe and elsewhere internationally it's not taken hold in the UK and it's been quite difficult to get some of that going which I think poses some interesting questions about digital disruption into politics and policy in and our world. Thanks Paul. Catherine I think one of the things that's most interesting about your work is that I mean when I turned up in government and wanted to do policy the place it was happening was international security which you might be about to say this isn't true but it felt very counterintuitive to me because this is a world we often assume is quite closed and secretive and yet you were grasping some very innovative opportunities to open up and engage the public so I just really like to hear a bit about how you got there. This is true and it's true that it's also unusual for our community to be experimenting in this way just a little bit more about my job at the moment which I think will help to explain this so I'm not a technological person by background I'm a policy person by background but I've been driven to experiment with this stuff because fundamentally I want us to hand a safer and better world on to the next generation so my job at the moment and the way you described it what it means in practice is that it's all about making our future national security system fit for purpose and I'd really like our current one to be more fit for purpose as well so putting in place the capabilities and enablers we need to make it work and I see this sort of transparency as being completely fundamental I think for me this has come from three different sort of directions so I've done a lot of work over the last three years on our national security culture and we've done lots of big cross-government culture inquiries so trying to reach out to the 70,000 odd people working directly on this stuff and what always comes through strongly is that connecting with people is consistently not just there as the top priority but that the absence of it is also a national security vulnerability a vulnerability for our society for our country so this is not just a nice to have it's something that to my mind we have got to get better at fast just do it you know there's a lot of interesting conceptual stuff here that we could talk about I'm interested in accelerating that change the second direction I'm coming this from is I've had a couple of decades experience now working on national security and international work I've worked in Iraq in Afghanistan I've also worked in the centre of policymaking I've seen lots of failures and one of the fundamental reasons to my mind for those failures and the evidence shows this too is a basic lack of inclusion and transparency and engagement is usually a big contributing factor to that I don't know if anybody here has read all I think 13 volumes of John Chilcot's report into the sort of west invasion of Iraq in 2003 but if you take one lesson from that it is that the fact that we didn't have that inclusive culture that enabled us to sort of harness what was out there in society and understand how we were impacting people led us to make completely fundamental decision completely fundamental mistakes so I'd even go further actually than this sort of idea that it's important for democracy in our own countries it's important you know if we are going to sort of you know work together collectively around the world and sort of go out and do things in the world then we have to understand how that's playing out and we need to sort of engage with the people who are affected then finally the angle that brought me to this is my academic background as a biological anthropologist which means that I'm interested in evolution and I'm interested in how our societies and how we run ourselves evolve and I would really really like us to sort of pre-evolve so we know that there's big stuff coming down the tracks at us fast ocean acidification the effects of climate change I'd like us to pre-empt that and you know sort of aim off and put ourselves on a better track but you're right Simon it's very unusual that such a sort of closed bit of government is sort of experimenting so much with the work that you've been doing with edfo to get sort of collective intelligence up and running I see it as an existential thing though and you know a lot of this is guided by our new sort of UK national security international strategy I will put a link to that strategy in the slider it's called the integrated review I mean it may be because like I go to lots of events with people who think like me which is always a danger but it feels like we're having one of these discussions where we all agree passionately this is the right thing to do everyone on the police is agreeing even some of the cynical people in the police are agreeing that we need to be more open and transparent and yet we're not doing it I mean Audrey I'll come back to you I mean you know you were coming into you know into Taiwanese government with a very different mindset I mean how did you how did you find that were you welcomed with open arms was there resistance how did you how did you win people over yeah so in a sense we meet no resistance because we are the resistance and like pretty much immediately after we occupied a parliament for 22 days March 2014 that's a lot of us live streaming we've made it very clear that there's a clear outside game that if the government does not embrace transparency then people are ready to occupy again and so that's that's our context to just say it upfront and this occupy is not a violent one unlike some other advanced democracies this is a thoroughly non-violent one where people demonstrated not against something but demonstrated for something this demonstration is a demo of half a million people on the street and many more online on how to talk in a evidence-based manner about the cross-strait service and trade agreement with Beijing at a time being rushed through so the legitimacy theory was that the MPs were kind of on strike and because they could not deliberate substantially where the people are going to take their office and do that for them and so with half a million people on the street how can we get to a good enough consensus and that's where the live streaming the civic technologies people and so on under this large umbrella of g0v arc of zero so i came from a good zero background where there's already budgets websites that take the pdf files and show the visualisation there's already participation websites that takes those pre-announcement of regulation and so on and offer commentary and so on of course we're a pretty free and open jurisdiction so building upon that the g0v people built a lot of tools so that if you enter for example your company's name or zero number of registration it shows exactly which line in the bilateral trade deal affects you in which way and you can take that into one of the booth around the occupied parliament to talk about say four g infrastructure service security issues if you're working in the telecommunication industry and so on of course the world will talk about five g of you years later but you get the idea and so basically we crowdsourced what people felt about css ta and we focused on just two questions given our very different positions what kind of common ground things that we can live with that we share the same feelings and given those shared feelings what innovations can amplify through this half a million people on the street and many more online and the thing is that after three weeks we actually managed to get a set of very coherent demands which was there ratified by the head of the parliament so when i became the digital minister in 2016 i said i work with the cabinet i'm not working for the cabinet and my three working conditions are that it's entirely voluntary i don't give orders i don't take orders either i work anywhere is telecommuting anywhere in the world and finally every journalist every lobbies will meet me must publish a radically transparent record and so that's like the three immutable conditions upon which that i enter the cabinet but because i don't give direct orders so kind of by definition i don't meet resistance i only meet with the public servants and the people who agree to have this kind of co-creation and conversation and we've been doing more than 100 of those collaborative meetings some driven by popular e-petitions some driven by the youth councillors some driven by the public servants themselves raising those topics and we on average handle about one every two weeks or one week so i hope that answer the question thanks Audrey um paul i'd be really interested in your perspective on this because obviously i mean very very different context we haven't had our parliament occupied at least not yet um how do you see the kind of the the barriers we face in uk governments and what can we do about them sorry i think i'm having a look a few connectivity gremlins um is that to me simon it was yeah should i repeat it and just sorry and just say again sorry it was just a bit clicky oh please don't worry i was just saying um you know obviously our context is very different um to the one Audrey just described um and we're trying to sort of push this stuff through quite a big bureaucracy to make change happen how have you experienced that in your time working in digital yeah i think that's true and i think you know there's there's a there's it's not just a singular pursuit there is a you know a community of folks working in and around government that do see the world in that sort of more collaborative policy professions um way of doing things through the open policy making stuff that we used to do with with jeremy hayward back in the day so it's it's not new and i think there's some really lovely examples of it too so it's not something that is not done here it's just something that does not have the focus and drive and ambition uh in the way that the Audrey set out so what does that mean so uh within the digital technology spaces of course we folks share our code on github and that's open source of course um there's a lot around open data still so what we're doing on planning reforms um and i'll put a link in there you know it's it's a mate it's it's getting machine readable data that people can use to make other digital services on the back of some of those are around uh engagement with people about planning decisions in their area about that very contested question about land and its use but some of it is about other types of digital services that you know we may never have understood or invented yet indeed that drive productivity within those within those sectors that surely need it too um i think within government you see quite a different mix of this so at one level of course any good policy maker goes and interacts with the people that are using those services the frontline people that interact with them that's just been part of the policy um officials role for a long time but often it's not done quite so systematically you do see great examples policy lab has been you know really proud of the work from policy lab over what's nearly 10 years is it now um uh of the work we've done to push things like design skills user research by default into into groups but also i see things like having multidisciplinary teams so there is a one of the most annoying things about government as i say is this sort of split between a policy world and an operations and digital world if that's the sort of the focus and i think increasingly there's just like just multidisciplinary teams where you're thinking about the services and your understanding there are big questions here about scope and nature of the service but also lots of technical questions about how you do a thing different tools that are available to us in this modern age that perhaps you know sometimes i think policy making is i started as a policy official back in the day in the last strategy unit and in many ways the tools that i see in the way in which we do things in policy looks very familiar to that 2004 world that i joined back in the day and you know the internet's come it came for warworths it came for blockbusters it's come for politics but still strangely the UK government seems relatively immune from the disruptive forces of the internet but i'm surely surely it is coming and indeed we can use and embrace some of those changes but you have to you know sometimes it is going with the flow finding those opportunities and moments where you can make change where there's a space to open up change and i think policy makers are from very alert to how power flows how information is flowing where those spaces can be possible i think is is actually one of the deep skills of UK policy profession but perhaps the drive and ambition is something that we can help with. Thank you Paul. Catherine interesting reflections on that but i've just been having a look at the slideshow so i'll start pulling off a few questions from there and there's one which i think is is lovely for both you and Audrey because i think it's very relevant and it's about the international dimension here and you know if we are open and transparent about policy making doesn't that give foreign actors the opportunity to hack the way that we make policy making is is openness risky in that sense um i know Audrey has lots to say on that but Catherine i'd love to hear from you on it first um i'm more interested to hear from Audrey about that um but i i would quite like to react to um the conversation that's just been going on because the sort of why don't we question just has hit us time and time again it really resonates with me um and i think something um there's something big about how we have evolved as a system and understanding the reasons for that um so that we're then able to um you know get over these barriers so there are very very good reasons that we're not automatically um set up to be transparent and some of the things that um just are quite interesting to reflect on just listening to Audrey earlier um i was thinking there's a very big practical um sort of motivation to do this isn't there and um John Murphy put a question in the chat about Chilcot and you know what we've done since then to try and counter that lack of an inclusive culture and things like that um all help to sort of build the momentum for that sort of change um but there are some quite practical things you know our civil service code is quite an interesting thing to think about because it sets out really really important values but then the way in which we um sort of see those values through is that we um are um we generally tend to account to the public through ministers and you know is that something that we need to think about so to sort of encourage us to account much more directly to the public um but the most important thing actually is this interest to my mind and you know these very very specific objectives about how this sort of engagement actually gets outcomes. Thanks Catherine so I mean the international influence question Audrey I mean you have a very large neighbour that's very interested in influencing you so how have you managed that? Yeah for us it's it's international and they're interested in calling it domestic that's the entire sunflower movement in one sentence so yeah we've seen one for example this is a information manipulation that we've seen um just leading to the January 2020 presidential election uh and it says Hong Kong's conversation exposed killing a police earns these people up to 20 million of course that's not true but it's designed to interfere with our presidential election and uh and it's linked to this very scary looking photo which was from Reuters but Reuters didn't really say anything about paying um these people to kill police but rather just there are young people in Hong Kong protesting and uh this alternate caption which is on the right actually came from the Zhang Xiao-jen Bawei Chang'an Jian which is the political and law unit to wae board accounts of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing but now if we do a net-stg style um you know takedown or we do any sort of takedown um if we censor it uh then it actually feels the conspiracy theories and the foreign interference actually gets this amplified result because the r value right the basic transmission right of their conspiracy theory actually increase if we takedown anything so we instead went for radical transparency namely notice and public notice once the independent journalist fact-checked the story we work with social media platforms so every time you share you see that this is being sponsored probably by the Zhang Xiao-jen Bawei Chang'an Jian right and and now this clarification now serves as a kind of viral vaccine because the more people share the more people understand oh there's information manipulation going on and the same goes for like on the election day another information manipulation that said the CIM made invisible ink for balance and so on again it's dispelled by radical transparency by people literally going into the voting booths and live streaming the counting process and we allow people from any party whatsoever the popular youtubers join it and then just a month later when the medical grade mosques become a something that people rush to buy again there's a cyber security phishing attack for people who shared this their emails don't get mosques but rather get computer viruses but it's again fixed by the zero people working with us where we published the real-time inventory of the medical grade mosque in each pharmacy upon collection so it's every 30 seconds in more than 70 different tools so people queuing in line can see that it's being distributed in a fair way and there's no need to panic but the opposition party of course work on the numbers and figure out that it's actually biased and then they did a interpolation in inquiry in the parliament and the minister simply say oh legislator teach us how to distribute better because well the MP doing the inquiry was VP of data analytics at Foxconn and minister was like yeah you should know better about data than we than we do so given the exactly the same data published upon collection tell us how to distribute better and so that turns opposition party into co-creation party and we implemented her suggestion just 24 hours down the line. Thanks Audrey. We've got lots of questions and lots of things I might sort of pick out polis next as a tool so there's a few people asking how we've actually used that and it's something that we can talk about from the UK perspective but Audrey sorry to come to you again but it will be really useful just to hear a bit about how you've used polis to inform decision making around issues like ride sharing in Taiwan. Yeah sure well we basically just use it like Google Forms now right but except of course instead of a survey that's being written by us is the survey that's only seeded by us and then co-created with everyone so we have this public infrastructure polis.gov.tw that all the public servants can just go there and start a polis conversation at any time. Now the first time we used that in 2015 that was a little bit more experimental and when we did that as part of the VTaiwan exercise it was 2015 and the Uber people you know were saying that it's a little bit like the distributed ledger people nowadays saying the code should triumph over text and norm because of their algorithm this patch corresponds better their algorithm should have a superiority over existing ride sharing laws because our laws are out of date or archaic or whatever but people don't feel the same so we set up this conversation where we asked people okay so despite all those differences how do you actually feel about this statement and then we actually get people to agree on pretty much everything people gradually converge toward the middle and instead of the Uber drivers and taxi drivers and union people and so on disagreeing on like just one thing whether it's called sharing economy or gig economy or platform economy or exploitative economy people actually all agree that insurance not undercutting existing meters serving the place is less accessible by a professional taxi fleets and so on these are all important points so we got the representatives from pretty much all the different sides just like we're doing now answering to the polis agenda that's crowdsourced by the people and we do not actually ignore any top consensus if it's broadly agreed by people of different stripes then we always just ask those people who are wearing those different banners to commit like saying these are good enough consensus why don't you just commit to it and then we get this live stream to verbal commitment from all the different stakeholders and then we just ratify that as the diversified taxi act and so just not even one year later 2016 we ratified out and nowadays of course for a couple years now Uber's been playing really well with the social entrepreneurs here because they're a legal taxi company but the local churches local temples and so on can also form their Uber likes reusing the same piece of legislation that enabled this kind of diversified taxi so it's a win-win situation but the way that we can find this kind of coordinated action solution is entirely through this crowdsourced agenda setting that's seated by polis and and Audrey a few people in the questions are kind of asking about inclusion you know how do we ensure that kind of engaging online doesn't exclude people who don't have internet access who are less literate um how have you coped with the danger of amplifying um the voices you're already powerful online i will just point out that all the previous consultation methods share the same weakness so if we do not replace any consultation methods we just add to it then we don't actually suffer from digital exclusion what i mean is that i'm not saying that this polis conversation supersedes referendum or is supersedes focus group or is supersedes any part of policy making what we're is essentially saying is that instead of just running a telephone pole in the very beginning of agenda setting run also a polis and so we're not replacing any downstream activities what we're doing is just to crowdsource the kind of surveys that you run anyway at the beginning of the policy making cycle and so because of that it gives better quality information to everyone involved and the parliamentarians do not feel that their link to their local constituents are being threatened by the polis tool which is why we always run it on the very beginning the agenda setting instead of using it to replace any phase two phase ways and now the other thing i want to note is that this feels upon broadband as a human right so even theoretically speaking we're not excluding anyway in taiwan thanks i'm going to come to kathryn because um kathryn you know you're the person who when i came into government i discovered was using this tool so just be really interested in hearing a bit about how you've used it in the context of the integrated review so there are two things that i would say in response to that firstly i wanted to use it and hello you're meeting squid small dog in the background who i'll introduce to you if she comes close to me in a minute so that you can hear the yapping um i i wanted to use it to help us to shape the uk's future national security and international strategies so the integrated review ended up being a two-year process of you know sort of reviewing where we were on foreign security development and defence policy and you know setting out our sort of five to ten year strategy for the future um we didn't manage to for various reasons um get um get polish off the ground in that time frame um so what we did instead um for the integrated review itself um was a public call for evidence and um you know something sort of that looked like a much more standard consultation process which was pretty straightforward to get signed off um what we were able to do in the integrated review itself though um was pull out how um important this type of citizen engagement is for the future um so strategically um we have these sort of four big objectives that we're aiming for as a country um and we recognise that achieving them has to be a whole of society effort so in today's complex world there's no way that we can strengthen resilience at home and overseas or shape the open international order of the future for example um as government alone it has to be a collective effort and Covid's shown that um so we um we recognise the needs of this and then secondly we've put in some specific commitments to what we'll do in the future um so we um I've put in the slido we've committed to connecting with our citizens we've connected we've committed to making better use of these new platforms to improve our participative processes um for example and then there are some ideas in there that I'm um sort of really keen to build on as we get into our second year of integrated review delivery so I'm really delighted that one year on we've been able to run a public debate um sort of limited public debate a public debate nevertheless um on that strategy and how we're doing that's been brilliant um but looking ahead um I'd like to think about ways in which we can sort of more actively mobilise that um that actual effort and actual action it's not just about debating is it you know it's about enabling participation it's about um people being able to participate in an informed way I mean that is a very very important thing to think about I think and you know speaks to what we do with our education system and how we bring people up to understand you know the active part that we need everybody to be playing in society if this is going to turn out well for us um and then there's actually sort of you know mobilising the people who need to act so one of the commitments that we've not quite nailed in the integrated review is to a civilian reserve um as an enabler for that and then what that looks like you know I'd really like there to be a sort of big sort of transparent participative element to that and maybe this is something that we could shape together um I think that this group is a great start to you know sort of getting us working in different ways and it's tremendous to see so many people here um and I think that you know it gives me a lot of hope that um you know we can each I hope take from this a commitment to work in more transparent ways and you know let's try things out um you know I think that we're still at a pretty experimental stage that's what it feels like to me I'm not sure that there are sort of really clear front runners yet um you know I'm interested in polys as a debate platform um I think that we need sort of cleverer stuff to you know enable us to collaborate together so one of the experiments that I'm running now for example is um you know can we get a wiki platform up and running for our mission critical culture diversity inclusion toolkit so we've developed this toolkit which is designed to enable anybody um to improve our workplace culture and its diversity and inclusivity and um I want to try putting it on wiki to see if actually that's a good way of gathering in case studies and you know getting people sort of co-creating what we do about it um yeah sorry big ramble I'll stop there All right excellent ramble I'm um and I agree with your point about experimenting because I've sort of I've heard Audrey speak about polys before and I'm struck that for us it's this exciting new thing but in Taiwan you know it's kind of it's mainstream now this is no longer experimental um but it does speak to the need to to try more things I think I'm particularly excited myself when I've followed been reading a book called super minds which talks a lot about an approach called the contest web which has been used to break down complex problems like climate change into sub-problems and run policy competitions on each of them and we're both quite interested in whether we could produce something similar for the UK policy making so that's that's my next one Catherine um come in Simon um always um Paul I was really struck earlier by your comment that um digital democracy and I guess it speaks to what I just said digital democracy is much more mature in other parts of the world and it hasn't really taken off in the UK in quite the same way I mean can we can we imagine a world in which we're using tools like like polys to actually frame policy decisions from the outset you know you're sitting in a policy department with a huge agenda right now could you imagine a polys debate framing a levelling up mission yeah and you know I think you know and I think I can see it in some of the comments on the slide as well and I think often when we think about okay this is all lovely what we're hearing on the screen here and um and maybe there's the sort of um the sort of paradise in little corners of government in the UK or a much more mainstream example until I want back as I'm sitting here as a policy official within government I just can't work out how I would do this within my current environment and I think there's something here about understanding where the space is to be able to do these sorts of things and there's something about where we work quick and where we work slow because of course we operate in a in a political environment one with a very rapidly moving news agenda and the the you know the flexibility of our of our ministers be able to move and deal with those is a is sometimes we see sort of the infuriating side of that on the other side but of course actually it's the genius side of actually managing those those movements too but I think you know sometimes the policy agenda moves much slower than we give it credit for because we all run around very quickly very busily every day trying to do all the things but actually you know the summer genders that have that space and that that opportunity sometimes it's because they're slightly less an out of focus so if things like um you know some the reforms we're doing on local government and digital capabilities software the way in which work happens in in local government I know you know an awful lot about Simon but um you know there's a space there actually slightly outside the frenetic political agenda where we can make those those shifts and changes and similarly the sort of stuff that Catherine's talking about is can you imagine her saying that on national security and you know defense of the nation these are not topics you would normally think about um perhaps in the recent past as with but actually sometimes when things are difficult you also have the space and time we worked on um the digital economy act back in the day 2017 was it where we were uh changing the law about data sharing and data access within government and outside of government and that is a very contested debate both by those that are very conservatively not wanting to do things but also those if you're like from a privacy point of view that are very advanced at a technical level but also see the dangers of doing that so negotiating a space through that we use policy lab we used uh uh an organisation called involve to bring some of those conversations together and I'm struck with what you know as Audrey talks about uh some of these things of actually that we are much more in common than you than we typically think as we go into the room with a more polarised debate and I think that's where some of these techniques can happen and it's something that I would say with with policy folks in the UK is spot those opportunities I think a second thing is thinking about these these skills are not super specialised or and they're the only you know it can be but there's no reason why our teams need to be so monocultural I still struck with you know whole teams of policy folks in government looking after a particular domain and indeed uh you can see that also um you know uh siloed in in digital and technology teams too but as I mentioned before this sort of multidisciplinary team thinking about services rather than policy or operations bringing those spaces together actually you get that into play between humans in our teams working together sharing their expertise and digital teams it's not just all people coding we have these researchers and designers and architects and uh yes developers and others but we have these these mixed team models um which is you know how we how we get things done and then the last thing on that sort of like how do you get started nothing I would say is the I sort of meant I hinted at it before didn't I but it's there's something about policy the policy world still feels um strangely similar to the to the one that I first came into when I came into government and I think there's a bit here which is folks don't get left behind this the world is changing and this thing is a question in the slider about look what can I read in this space and actually there's loads of stuff like the best thing is to go and do stuff right rather than perhaps for reading about it in an abstract but there are there will put some links in the chat but you know this thing about making it part of the normal policy making discourse not to go I'm not a techie how many conversations start with oh I'm not a techie we sort of just pushes it all off into a distant space that means you don't really have to worry about it some folks who work in the basement and fix the printers will probably come along in the minute and make it all right but actually these are mainstream skills these are mainstream leadership skills to understand the internet it's business models as much as the technology things like platform approach to government platform ways of thinking the way in which data flows these are these are fundamental shifts to the fabric of how of the tools that we should have in our policy makers toolbox in order to effect change that our ministers want and I think there's a there's an onus on all of us to to to get our heads around this stuff you don't have to be sitting there programming a pearl or something like you can actually there's a there's a depth into this space that that actually is should and should be expected in my view to be there and available for all policymakers and other officials within the within the government system that was bound to happen at some point um thank you paul um there is a great question on the slide about books that we would recommend which um I'll say I think maybe for the end if everyone could kind of come up with suggestion that would be amazing um Audrey there is a real theme I think in both the the police debate and the the slydo um which is we can try and engage citizens much more um but what about the citizens themselves do they want to engage are they getting overwhelmed do they understand the issues well enough to to engage with us and to really define the terms of policy be really interested just to hear your reflections on that yeah I think most of our collaborative meetings stem from a real desire from the citizens to get um uh accurate context of what's happening what you're seeing is the airbox network of literally all the primary schools in taiwan contributing at least one p.m. 2.5 sensors uh and uh people in their balconies and so on uh in the beginning of this movement in 2015 people barely understood what p.m. 2.5 does uh to our our health and gradually more and more people become aware of it and then they blame the government for only have less than 100 p.m. 2.5 sensors around the islands uh and then people just took matters to their own hands uh and then it it actually created a lot of pressure uh to the cabinet because uh there's just no way that we can invest into the high accuracy p.m. 2.5 sensors quick enough to answer the the communal demand so I I always say that uh we work with the people not for them so instead of asking people what they want uh work with the people that already are taking matters to their own hands anyway and then we set up this annual um sort of friendly competition co-presidential hackathon where 200 teams compete but they actually need to get cross sectoral buy-in we use a what we call plural voting a new quadratic voting method to surface the synergies between the 169 different sdg targets that those teams target and then the top five team get this trophy which is shaped Taiwan with a micro projector if you turn on the projector projects Dr Tsaiing when our president giving you the trophy promising whatever you did in a small town or municipality will become national level infrastructure with all the personnel regulatory uh and um budget if needed uh in the next fiscal year so we've been running that for five years and I think that's one of those nowadays more routine things for people to simply say oh let's just work with the presidential hackathon champions to figure out the data collaborative to take in the latest need by the citizens because there's a lot of kind of small cheap but cheerful wins across like just five championship teams every year and then if you're interested just check out presidential hackathon I think that's one of the other thing that uh start feeling avant-garde five years ago but nowadays just part of the social fabric around digital social innovation and I'm really struck particularly when I've heard you talk about about COVID and your response that having a really strong community of civic hackers outside government meant that you could move really quickly because they would be able to produce for instance maps of where you have masks very rapidly how important to your story has it been to kind of have one foot inside government but also a big movement outside of it yeah and really just the face of the cut zero movement is the thousands and thousands of people who look at everything that we do wrong from the government on the digital service side because the entire g0v thing is a domain name hack right just so that if they see anything wrong with anything that gov that tw they can just rename the o to a zero so if you don't like our national participation portal join that g0v that tw uh that gov that tw just change it o to a zero and you get into the shadow governments with better engagement and so on so it's always open source but this is nowadays what the young people are calling a soft fork it's a fork in the road that takes what we already have in the digital service delivery by trying to deliver it a very different way but always it's open source and in the creative commons so it's ready to be merged in any given moment it's not just mask rationing or very funny dog memes to teach about physical distancing and washing your hands but also genuine innovations like instead of a paper and pen based contact tracing this very natural building camera contact tracing where people just scan this random 15 digit code on 7 11 and other venues and then it sends this 15 digit random code through this built in camera into the 15 digits into the toll free number 1922 what it does is that it registers you're aware about in a way that cannot be used to identify yourself and it's posted only on the local telecoms accounts for 28 days so if nobody want to scan a QR code in your French corner maybe because they are 70 years or 80 years old you can use a flip phone as well but at the end of the day when the contact tracer need to figure out who has contacted which person in a venue they just get a record in a reverse auditable way and people can get to this website to see which contact tracer people in which municipality have looked at their data in a way that's reversely accountable so the point I'm making is that with this civic tech what used to be like large investment by Google and Apple or a large surveillance state invention and so on is now actually it could also be co-created by open source grassroots people who of course care about privacy enhancing technology and things like that and you get all of these for free and all you need to do is to kind of just step back as I did in a very beginning of this Q&A and say I don't I won't go on and on and I commit myself to answer to whatever that has the highest rough consensus on Slido and Pelletys. And I think one of the one of the again it's a theme that's coming up on the slide but one of the fears that people have about doing this in the UK is that the public will ask for things that we can't do or they will ask for things that politicians don't want to do or question some big policies that we have. I mean have you had a situation where you know a policy debate for instance has come up with consensus around issues where the politicians have a different view? How have you navigated the clash between openness and political accountability? Yeah definitely but as I mentioned Pelletys is just about agenda setting power so we never commit ourselves to implement exactly as asked we just commit ourselves to answer the really difficult questions that has the highest votes and so there's a very different view on things otherwise we'll be calling it a referendum because a binding quorum is a referendum right so we've already had a lot of discussions on either e-petition platform or a joint platform that does not agree with the governmental directions but that's just entirely fine because what we're asking is essentially a set of shared values outside of whatever polarization we have so we commit ourselves to implement only the part that has brought consensus including the public servant who participate when we co-create the tax filing system we deliberately included as the facilitator of breakout groups the participation officer from other ministries like the coastal guard or people who don't have anything to do with the ministry of finance so of course even they are public servants they feel very differently from the ministry of finance when it comes to the redesign of the tax agencies flagship app but when we talk about opening up the ocean for amateur fishing and so on it may be the financial supervising council's participation officer actually take the server side because they also serve in fish during their spare time and so on so what it does is that it creates this reliable mediator between the people who know few things about public administration but a lot about their domain knowledge vis-a-vis people who within that agency who knows everything about the public administration but not that well connected stakeholders the participation officers in other agencies and ministries in any given collaborative meeting serves as this middle ground to find the rough consensus that can actually be implemented in a reasonable time frame usually 60 days and then we just table the rest saying that we've not found you know good enough consensus there but welcome to start another round of conversation so just small and quick wins that builds trustworthiness over time. Thank you we're heading into the last few minutes of the discussion so what I think I might do is do a quick round of sort of final thoughts on all the panellists which could it could include the book please. So if we go for Catherine first Paul then I'll ask Audrey to round off for us so Catherine I'll do my book at the end as well. I'll think about the book there are so many I was just recently talking to a guy who used to run organisations he's committed the last 15 years of his life to studying neuroscience and he's thinking about the quantum organisation and we got into a conversation about well what the quantum government look like and Audrey I think that you're moving us towards it thank you. I mean just listening to the conversation was making me think back to my sort of biological evolutionary roots and I was thinking about society as a big organism and if we think about it that way for me transparency in everything that we've just been talking about would be the circulatory system so the thing that enables the lifeblood to circulate so the thing that brings in sort of ideas from wherever they are the thing that sort of mobilises people to play their part gets the bones and muscles to do their job but I think really what comes through strongly for me is that this isn't an abstract thing you know we know including from the integrated review work that we did that it's existential and it matters and we have to get on top of it now and so we can and must get over the obstacles there are practical things that we can all do I've suggested in the slide that we make this the start of something and build the network and support each other to do practical things about it and build on some of the amazing ideas Audrey I love that presidential hackathon and I just love the way that you have such fun with all of this stuff too which I think is such a good driving force for humans you know we're going to want to get involved with creating well I want to get involved with creating very funny dog memes I've always thought that humour is so powerful in the cartoons in Iraq when I was there just amazing and Russian humour as well it's fantastic so if we can each make that commitment that would be amazing and you know we will implement this we'll get there thank you Paul brief final thought and a book please so so for a book I sort of go back to 2010 and it's not directly it's relevant but it's Tim O'Reilly's government as a platform and I think it's like one of the foundational texts of sort of modern digital government it's all a bit west coast and it's 10 years or so out of day but still I'm always surprised because it speaks to me as a policy official as much as it does a digital official and it's something that I wish that if there was one thing I wish that the UK government policy folks had got in their head it's just those business models of platform government and platform entity so that but the real thing is I want to kind of follow with Catherine is like this is the internet we're talking about so the answer is not the most important person in the room the answer is us it's this community so you know are you looking at blog.gov.uk and looking at the great posts that are coming out from teams right across government of all different types is your team writing in that if not why not look at the great folks that are there on Twitter and other bits of social media so I look to people like Janet Hughes at DEFRA doing her work on Future Farming an old colleague from Government Digital Service our own local digital team there on LDgov UK on Twitter but essentially local digital just talking about what they're doing day to day here we are building a community building that alliance and I think this is the power of this moment it's not the top down hierarchical you know the most important person in government said that this is the thing so we should all go and do it and it sort of trickles down in that sort of ordered way but this is this horizontal collaborative network of people that's porous from inside government and outside government and the strength of that is a very phenomenal thing so it's use this as a perhaps a moment to go you know what I can do this myself and I can do part of this with my team and we can do part of this with our government department and I think that's the thing particularly as a network of people in the way that Catherine said we can do this together. Thank you Paul and Audrey final final thought for everyone. Okay well I've pasted a few links but if you want to feel upbeat and you want a new book I think John Alexander's book is pretty good it's called citizens why the key to fixing everything is all of us and I really think that really any book will lead you to pretty much the same insights and the important thing is just to simply start practicing to start to deal with and as often mentioned none of this is rocket science now they're all off the shelf technologies as robust as Slido or whatever google form we're using right now and there's tons of already pretty good experiments that's already been done before they're solidified so just feel free to share and enjoy and optimise for fun I guess. Thank you Audrey and I'll tell John you recommended him but be delighted. So last job of the day for me is to thank everyone for their time Catherine and Paul thank you very much for being with us this morning and helping us to understand how this feeds into UK politics and policy and of course thank you so much to Audrey I can see from the Slido that you have blown a few minds this morning which is definitely a result that was what we were looking for. So thank you to everyone on the panel thank you to my colleagues in the policy profession for making it happen and thank you to all of you for coming along I sense already lots of energy for continuing the conversation in some form so we'll look at how we can do that. And on that note I will bring the session to an end. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lyflaun Prasba.