 Welcome to those who are joining us now online for the path to digital democracy Kristen founder of sunk seat has joined us right now. How are you doing? I'm very well? Thank you, Louise It's great to be back and it's really good to see you here today I think I'm gonna hand straight over to you because I can see Audrey Tang is with us. She's here great Wonderful Audrey welcome. It's great to have you with us here I'll just introduce the subject very quickly the subject here is the path to digital democracy And when thinking about democracy our minds can often turn to countries like the u.s. The uk or Greece Which is in fact the cradle of democracy where it came from? Demo's meaning of the people and Chrissie meaning rule of but over time It can feel like the the power of the people has faded and today it can feel like we just have a slight Perfume of democracy in fact which is being able to vote every couple of years However, there are nations out there that are embracing technology to explore new forms of democracy and government digital democracy Digital democracies describe open-source governments with transparent information and practices and one such nation is Taiwan Audrey please welcome from Taiwan Audrey Tang digital minister in charge of social innovation Audrey welcome Hello, good luck. Oh time everyone. It's great to have you at Viva Tech 2021 Now you're originally a software programmer and you took up your position as digital minister in 2016 However, Taiwan's digital path to democracy started back in 2012 when gov. Zero was created set out to rethink the role of government from zero Audrey, can you please tell us what is gov. Zero and give us an overview of its path from its creation in 2012 today? certain for the past almost 10 years now gov. Zero is a community with more than 10,000 active members at any given time Contributing online our alternate imagination of digital services You see in Taiwan all the digital services from the government ends in something that gov. TW But for each and every of those digital services if the citizens doesn't like it They can fork the government meaning that taking it to a different direction by creating an open-source counterpart as something that G zero V that TW so just by changing an O to a zero on the browser ball You get into a shadow government. That's always more fun That's always open and stand ready to be merged back So it's a soft fork to be merged back into the public service. We got our national participatory budget portal this way We got the mask rationing map this way We got a better text file and experience this way by people prototyping What's it like to have a better digital service by demonstrating not as in protest but as in demonstration like demo Thank you. Can you you've given a few examples there of how this is empowering? Citizens, can you maybe give us a few more about things that citizens have actually Applied for and and have come about and changed as a result of gov. Zero One of the more visible a result of gov. Zero's participation is in 2014 as part of the sunflower movement people occupied the parliament for three weeks Demonstrating how to deliberate a trade agreement with Beijing at a time at a time more than 20 NGOs each took care of one aspect of the trade deal for example There's one in an occupied parliament street corner talking about whether we need to allow the Beijing regimes Component in our then new 4g infrastructure. So the same discussion people around the world having been Discussing in the past couple years for 5g, but we did that in 2014 And gov. Zero's contribution is making sure that this conversation doesn't stay early in the parliament But rather broadcast it transcribed Transliterate and translate it to more than half a million people on the street and many more online and as a result of that This nonviolent demonstration Resulted in four very concrete demands which was then accepted by the head of the parliament Which then emerged like victorious a occupied that actually resulted in substantial change in Taiwan's political landscape And after that this listening and skill devices has been used to deliberate everything from for example the regulation for multi-purpose taxes including uber X and such as well as our policies around Montenegroing about our ocean policies about of course counter pandemic and so on Thank you. So there's some great examples there of effectively how the citizens are participating One of the things that I want to ask about is trust around the globe trust in institutions in democracy has taken a few knocks in fact and Trust in technology and social media especially is an issue today. How has gov. Zero addressed this trust and Tech issue do you believe that tech can be used to build a bridge between a citizens and government? Democracy is in fact the form of technology social technology The kind of voting that you just mentioned is maybe equivalent of uploading Three bits per person every four years, which is not a lot of bit rates considering modern communication technology So if we think about democracy as a form of technology for collective sense-making to reach good enough consensus There's a lot of ways to build such more pro-social Conversations not necessarily relying on the more anti-social corners of social media, but rather we can't build our own E-petition website Participatory budgeting presidential hackathon Sandboxes and such that makes sure that democracy is a day-to-day continuous thing not something that only takes Effort every couple years for referenda and national and mayor elections in fact every day people join in national elections and petitions and things like that for issues not for people voting for people is still a Like fixed interval like one or two years, but voting for things that can take place any given hour Okay, and you mentioned presidential hackathons. This is something that Taiwan has been doing for a while and in fact is an amazing Practice that's been put into place But hackathons are often thought of as just being for the those that can code and the developers out there How are you in Taiwan using technology to increase inclusion and ensure that everyone is able to participate? The presidential hackathon differs from most other hackathons in that is a three-month process so more than 200 teams each year propose their Solutions data collaboratives to tackle one or more of the sustainable goal targets So each case each project need to correspond to one or more of the 169 SDG targets because it serves a common interest We use a new voting method called quadratic voting or QV to make sure that once we get the top 20 The other ones that didn't make to the top 20 We still have sufficient information to discover the synergy they have to work with the top 20 So in that sense everybody wins not a lot of people lose when you use quadratic voting this way And this prototypes which may tackle say water shortage on a small scale telemedicine on a small scale Things like that. They actually after the three months proof of concept worked five of those teams Receive a trophy from the president, which is a micro projector that went on projects the president promising the team Whatever they did in a local scale for the past three months will become national policy with all the budget personnel and Regulatory approvals required to make it basically national within the next 12 months or so Excellent. I love it seems that you've inspired by Star Wars to make your trophy a projector of the president That's exactly right. Yes. Okay. So within digital democracies Identity is one question that often comes up And I want to talk about in the pandemic as we've all been working remotely I understand that Taiwan has been doing something quite interesting with your digital identities to enable to people to actually Authenticate and identify themselves remotely. Can you tell us a little bit about that? certainly we have a national electronic ID card reserved for healthcare use only and The national health insurance card that covers not just citizens, but also residents So everyone in Taiwan as soon as they're born after 10 days Receive such an IC card that they know is guaranteed by law can only be used for public service purposes and nothing about advertisement or other commercial purposes and we have that format the IC format since 2004 Right after SARS because it was discovered that paper-based Insurance cards was just not very effective during a epidemic in 2003 when SARS hit Taiwan So after 15 years or more of development nowadays through telemedicine and things like that We have an NHI Express app. So on the health insurance app You can display a dynamic QR code so that over the video camera like we're doing now I can show you the dynamic QR code you can scan it and that completes the authentication You don't need a physical card reader for that and we use that for for example the mask pre-ordering and very soon for vaccine Reservation as well Okay, you mentioned that the technology was around beforehand, but that of course the pandemic has enabled you to accelerate this Now open government and digital democracies are spreading around the globe Taiwan certainly, but also Hong Kong and Italy. There are other examples out there How can we Make these digital democracies and how do we go about creating digital democracies? Where we can involve citizens more in government What are the right things to do that you've learned from the experiences? What are the fundamental things we need to focus on and maybe what are the things that we should avoid doing based on your learnings? The fundamental things are three universal broadband as a human rights Universal digital competence and media competence not just literacy learning programs for basic and lifelong education and finally a Civic Infrastructure in the digital realm the first two probably goes without saying like anywhere in Taiwan If you don't have 10 megabits per second for just 15 euros amongst unlimited data It's my fault like personally But the third thing the civic infrastructure requires some explanation You see we need to avoid a case where people hold town hall deliberations in the venues such as the nightclubs That is to say Facebook. I'll just name it which is like very noisy People have to shout to get heard Dictive drinks private bouncers and things like that. It simply does not make good quality deliberation Now of course with all due respect. There's a place for the nightlife district in the city It's just the place is not the town hall the national parks the libraries and the academic campus grounds So we need to build a digital equivalent of these grounds and make sure that it's the social sector the civil society Maintaining it free from the administration's meddling free from the capitalist meddling Okay, now you mentioned that the pandemic has enabled you to accelerate things like the QR codes and the identity What else have you been able to accelerate as a result of this recent a health situation? Indeed in Taiwan we have been working with this counter disinformation strategy for quite a while We call it humor over rumor that is to say whenever something That's a conspiracy theory or things like that appear We rely on people in the give zero community to create tools to allow flagging like spun flagging some email as fun You can flag something as potential disinformation and once we see which ones are trending the professional fact checkers Work on the ones that are actually trending, but we don't take anything down Rather we make sure that very cute spoke stocks a sheba inu of the Ministry of Health and Welfare Comes out and make fun of that conspiracy theory and spread scientific Clarifications without taking anything down by adding the context to it and this humor over rumor while it was quite effective during our Presidential election in 2020 January it has been amplified a lot during the pandemic to counter the infodemic Okay, and where can we go to find out and and see humor over rumor? How do we take a look at this? If you search for humor over rumor, I think all of the first page is the Taiwanese examples Okay, fantastic. We'll check that out Now as a front-runner Taiwan a front-runner of open government and digital democracy What is next on your path? What do you want to get out there and achieve? What's on your roadmap and also? What are the key ideas? technologies and innovations when it comes to Making your way forwards Sure so in Taiwan what we're doing now is making sure that the very young people like people not Even 18 years old who nevertheless have a lot to say about democracy They just don't have the right to vote are fully empowered to set an agenda for the public policymaking That's one and another one also for people with no voting rights for immigrant workers for people with different Native languages the English or Mandarin they must also have the ways to express Especially taking care in the budgeting around what concerns them basically nothing about us without us with no one left behind That is our vision and also we're now extending this idea of democracy to extend even to the future generations Because Taiwan has more than 20 national languages most of which are indigenous There's this idea of natural personhood of attributing the benefits of a river or a mountain spirit and things like that and Include it somehow in the common sense making a democracy process This is something that I believe New Zealand and Canada and many other nations with indigenous first nations are also working to So this is also something that we're working to it Fantastic now thinking again beyond Taiwan globally. What do you see as being the challenges? for digital democracy say in the in the next couple of years in the next decade Sure, I think the main Challenge is that during the time of pandemic? It's very easy for people to see this kind of forced trade-off of Public health on one side and the need to kind of sacrifice a little bit of freedom of democracy As the other side by so the top down shut down take down lockdown Measures are justified into new norms in Taiwan so far with counter the pandemic with no lockdown and the infodemic With no take down, but it was not easy So this conversation we need to constantly have and reevaluate whether we're Concentrating the power to the center or distributing the power at the edges and digital democracy only works If we truly empower the people closest to the pain Audrey Tang thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you and I hope to see you again soon Maybe back here at Viva Tech next year. Thank you. Thank you. Live long and prosper Thank you so much Audrey Tang and thank you to you Kristen as well for being with us here today You can head back to your seat my pleasure. Thank you. Well enjoyed the rest of the show. We finished We're joining it again at one o'clock this afternoon, of course for the next step So the session has come to an end unfortunately a big thank you to all the speakers that have been with us this morning It's been really rich really interesting, of course We're reconvening here online in an hour for tech for the environment and a special focus on the smart cities Bye for now and thanks so much for connecting