 So, myself and three other members of the planning club will ask questions. Let me introduce the new questioners. First of all, Mr. Huzi Akiyo, chair of the Agitawayo Committee of the Nihon Kewa Shimbunis Vapor Company, Mr. Kurosawa of the Asahi newspaper company, Ms. Motomura of the Nihon Shimbunis Vapor Company, and Mr. Hadi of TV and television. My name is Faji Afuq, I want to take a session, but thank you so much, Minister, for joining us. So, on behalf of the team, I would like to start with the question about the COVID-19 countermeasures. Would that be agreeable? May I? Well, thank you. As far as Taiwan is concerned, ever since COVID-19 began last year, Taiwan was known for being successful in continuing controlling COVID-19. Your country was praised for the control of COVID-19. But in the recent days, we see some of those that are of concern to us in the recent days. It seems that there is an aspect, further spread of the virus once again. So, how do you see the recent expansion of the infection in your country? How do you see the current situation? And what countermeasures are you taking? According to the recent news, I understand that you're developing a new tool to contact, to trace contact, versus. And we did this in a very short period of time. Can you share that information with us? Thank you so much. Minister, please. Thank you. Just to check that my voice is okay for you to listen. Okay, excellent. Thank you for the great question. Indeed, last week, we wrote out the new contact tracing tool, the 1922 SMS. 1922 has been instrumental in being the toll-free number since last January that has received more than 2 million calls that ask for real-time clarifications that report emerging issues like the pink mask and so on. Everything was done through the toll-free number which received more than 2 million calls last year. And this year, in light of the recent spike, we made sure that 1922 is not just a toll-free number to call, but also a toll-free number to SMS. Adding to that, we make sure that all the different places has this QR code for checking in, so people just scan it and does not need to type anything or install any app. And just by pressing send can check in to the toll-free number 1922, which in effect is stored in whichever telecom the person is holding. And this ensures that the data privacy and cybersecurity measures that existing telecoms provide is already in place instead of trusting a third-party processor on the Internet which has any number of midpoints, we make sure that we use the SMS protocol so no Internet connectivity is necessary, whichever telecom that the person is associated with now receive the random generated code symbolizing the place, but the place address or the registration number and so on is not stored in the telecom's database and in that way the telecom keeps it for 28 days before having to delete it by contract. And so because of that, the telecom has no incentive to sell the data to advisors or anything because the data is entirely randomized and anonymized beyond the SMS number. I take the time to explain in technical detail because we were able to design this with the leading developers of the masquerading team of Xero, the original band of people who wrote out masquerading about one year ago. So with the existing mutual trust and the existing infrastructure for 1922, the toll-free number on one side ends the masquerading on the other, so we were able to complete this development in just 24 hours and then testing for another 24 hours and then we announced on the third day. Thank you. Last year, the masquerading team started up on the same team that developed a new tool effecting outside the government or inside the government. In Japan there is a plan by the government to establish the digital affairs agency so there's much interest on this topic. So what is the decision-making process and what kind of a team? Yes, this. This is what I call a people-public-private partnership. The people or the social sector, as in the GovZero community, the GZeroV community, an open source, open innovation community, first tackled the mask map. So the map is not invented by people in the government like me. It's invented by Howard Wu in Tainan and later on Fijianqiang also in Tainan and so they made a crowdsourcing map to display mask availability. But they set a norm that people really like. So the government's role here is what I describe as reverse procurement. The specification is done by the social sector, by the civic technologist but we make sure that the API for providing the mask availability is robust, is refreshed every 30 seconds, is secure, cybersecurity-wise and so on. And then we work with more convenience store chains and so on in the private sector to also implement the same protocol so that not just pharmacies but also convenience stores and vending machines and so on can join this norm that's set by the social sector. The importance of this is that the social sector like a swarm can experiment thousands of different designs and converge very rapidly on one or two designs that made sense to the broad public. If the government used that as the specification, it's much more likely that whatever policy and infrastructure we wrote out will get public acceptance because it's already tested, tried and true in the social sector. So this time the 1922 SMS underwent exactly the same process. It's designed by a couple of people in the GovZero community, primarily Ace Chen and Pichu Chen, and they prototyped the simple system, of course not using 1922 using their own phone number. And then we implemented this design and talked to the five telecom to waive the SMS fee. And then of course we worked on popularizing it with people who are convenience stores, who run their own shops, even night markets and so on, who can all issue and print their own QR code and because it takes less than five seconds to complete a check-in compared to pen and paper, this is actually faster to most people so people voluntarily adopt it. If we design a specification, that would take 10 seconds or 20 seconds. Of course, even if we do it in a top-down way, the private sector would not accept. But the idea that it takes less than five seconds, that comes from the social sector. Thank you very much. So we are the minister responsible for digital, and we introduce a new tool and have taken control of just the quality with the spread of COVID-19 in the rest of the days in your country The many companies that have stopped holding shareholders, meetings and also many classes are now turning to online classes. How do you see the impact of the Taiwanese economy? For example, how do you see the impact of the capacity utilization of the semiconductor factories in Taiwan? This has a relevance on a huge amount. But how do you see the impact of the Taiwanese economy and what about the outlook for elimination and eradication of COVID-19 going forward in the face of the recent expansion of the spread? In the short term, we have seen impact of course on the social sector as well as the service industries. And we have applied for extra budget. The extra budget act is now in the parliament and we will send a budget shortly after to make sure that people can be taken care of during this time of level three. But level three measures does not mean that we stopped going to work. It means that teleworking is preferred, but for the manufacturing industry, where going to the plants and so on are still required, level three is not a lockdown. We do not, for example, prohibit commuting and so on. Only if instead of the curve being mostly flat, as we see in the past week, if it spikes, of course, we might have to go to the level four, which will have real impact on the production manufacturing industry. But if we continue on the level three measures and the curve remains flat or even going slightly downward as we expect, because this is a lacking indicator, right? We announced level three and then if it does work, then we expect the curve to go slightly down. If that happens, then I expect that the manufacturing industry will remain relatively unharmed. So level three was mentioned? Another point, this has become a hot topic in Japan and that is vaccination for COVID-19. Taiwan was successful in initial response, so Taiwan was successful in continuing the number of those who test positive. But on the other hand, like Japan, your vaccination rate against the total population is released at about 0.9 percent and Taiwan seems to be behind in terms of vaccination. I'm sure many measures are in mind with regards to vaccination, but what do the lessons learned with regards to vaccination, what do you regret and what are your views on vaccination going forward? What should you be doing? When I get vaccinated in April, mid-April, people around me, I try to tell them to vaccinate as early as possible, but most of them said they would rather wait until July when the homegrown vaccine, which should be quite safe, although the final numbers is not out yet and effective. And they said, well, we'll wait for that instead of going for AstraZeneca. Well, that has changed now. All the vaccination spots and so on are fully booked. And so I would say that indeed you can say because for most of the last year, we do not really have a pandemic situation. And for example, the school never stopped until last week. And so there's no urgency to get vaccinated in people's minds. And therefore, if we push any very stringent top-down way to get people vaccinated, the compliance risk is actually quite high. But since the past week, of course, the vaccination willingness is no longer a problem. And we do see pretty good progress in not just getting the overseas Covax vaccines, but also the homegrown production is showing pretty good trends. So I think I wouldn't say it's a regret, but I was having a real difficulty mid-April convincing my friends and family to get vaccinated. I see. So in your country, the people... Do you have... Is there a likelihood to be able to secure sufficient vaccines to cover all the publishing time? Have you secured that? Our existing procurement, I believe, covers 30 million jabs or so. And of course, the homegrown vaccines, there's two in phase two right now. So if one of them, and we expect both of them, prove to be okay to use, then we can, of course, procure extra from the two domestic producers. In Japan, vaccination has begun and the booking system faced many problems, bugs. And even in various countermeasures against COVID-19 measures, cash transfer was not smoothly done. And digitalization did not proceed smoothly. And because of those problems, the government is working to establish a digital phase agency. You asked many questions from Japanese journalists and you've been interviewed by Japanese media company, but as you observe the situation in Japan like the level of digitalization, you said the price of non-government is important, but how do you currently view the situation in Japan today? In our experience rolling out both the mass creationing and the 192 to SMS, we found that being inclusive is really important. When we roll out, for example, convenience store, prepaid mass ordering, we did not take away the pharmacy rationing, the queuing, because many local elderly people already trust the pharmacists to support them in, for example, getting them the recurring subscription drugs. And, for example, in 192 to SMS, we do not force people to use the SMS system. People who simply do not have a phone with them can still use pen and paper to write down their contact number, and that's still legal, that's still valid. We're not saying that you have to be digitized. We're saying we are rolling out a system that's considerably quicker than pen and paper. And also, the more people use the SMS check-in, the less people use the pen and paper, the less risk for people to crowd through the pen and paper registration form and therefore reduce the chance of infection. So the SMS using people also help the pen and paper using people. So my experience has been not focusing on replacing pen and paper, but developing something that's less risky, that is faster, that builds more trust than pen and paper, and then the digitalization is quite automatic. In the past week or so, the top three downloaded apps in the tools category in the Google Play Store, I just checked this morning. First was the Cocoa-like Bluetooth exposure notification system, the Taiwan Social Distancing app. But the second is a free QR code scanner. So, obviously, people help each other, very elderly people, to get the tool they need to facilitate digital transformation. But they do so at their own pace with their own network instead of feeling that they're being forced to do that. I see. Well, here in Japan, with a good usage of net, the elderly population, they're not able to utilize the network and digital technology, so that's a problem for them. And also, you talked about contact tracing earlier. For example, you mentioned that even in restaurants, you're going to leave your information behind. And there's a sense that people are quite sensitive about leaving personal data. You don't understand the trust you have between the people and the government. What are the feelings about this matter, any thoughts on this matter? Yes, and this is why we designed the 1922 system. So, the data is stored not in the government, but in the telecom. There is a difference, because in the five telecoms, people have a choice. People do choose the telecom that they trust more or at least more familiar with. So, almost by definition, if you have a phone and you use a certain telecom's offering, you probably trust it at least as much or more than other telecoms. So, because of that, by deciding to say, let's have a contract with the five telecoms where we procure not the data, but the ability to build a system to respond to contact tracing queries and keep the data in a specific purpose, not using it for anything else than contact tracing and destroy the data if no contact tracer has looked at it in the past 28 days. This is very, very important, because this is the assurance, the same assurance. For example, your pharmacists have, when you give them your national health card, they also assure you that they will not, for example, sell your data to advertise, because by law, the national health card can only be used for public service this way. And the pharmacists have also have to use their own business IC card to make sure that there is an audit trail in the app that everybody can check who has make use of the national health card. So, using the national health app, everybody can see when was the last dentist visit, when was the last doctor visit, when was the last rapid testing, or RTPCR testing, what's the result, and so on and so forth, vaccination result, right? The fact that I was vaccinated, I can look it up on the app very quickly. And when people see that whatever written to the data could be subject to oversight later by the individual offering this data, the trustworthiness is gradually built so that people understand it will not be used for extra purpose uses. The Japanese government also is explaining that they will please wait on privacy matters, but it's not really persuasive to the general public. But in order for the government to gain trust from the general public, what is necessary in this area? What's the most important thing? The most important thing is not forcing people to use it. So, if at the end, you don't trust the telecoms either, well, you just use pen and paper. So, instead of saying to people that you have to trust the telecom or you have to trust the governments or you have to trust your municipality or whatever, we offer an extra choice. So, if you trust your telecom, for example, use the SMS, but if you don't, but you trust the business owner, well, you can leave your name card there, right? And say, call me when this place confirms that somebody that enters the shop the same day has tested positive. You can still do that. That is still legal. I have a question about democracy and digitalization. Under the pandemic of COVID-19, relatively speaking, countries such as China in authoritarian countries still have been more successful in controlling COVID-19 compared to democracies. Now, for one, it's a democratic nation, but that type of view is now spreading. On the other hand, with the digital transformation, SMS has developed, and some say that the spread of SMS has led to the spread of disinformation and rumors, and as a result of this, could undermine democracy. That type of argument is also seen. So, the digital transformation in democracy. What is the year of the minister? How do certain relations between the two? Under this question, I don't understand, but please, thank you. All right. So, let me just check the question. The first one is whether democracy is a liability or a plus when it comes to counter-pandemic. And the second question asks the same thing, but on the infodemic, which includes disinformation and misinformation and more information. That's right, right? Okay. I think in Taiwan, democracy is definitely a plus. Without a democracy, without a freedom of speech association experiment, we would not have a social sector that come up with the design of the mask map or the 1822 SMS system, right? Because these are not from the government. These are from the civil society, from the people who are free to experiment. Had we had not a democracy, we would not have the early warning from the PTT, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit. But it's not really like Reddit, because for the past 25 years, the PTT has been open source, open governance, subsidized by national Taiwan University, but run quite independently, having no advertisers nor shareholders. And so it's in the social sector. So without a thriving social sector, we will not have the advanced warning. We will not have the collective intelligence. We will not have humor over rumor. And so all these will not be possible without democracy. So Taiwan model depends on democracy, on universal broadband and universal healthcare. These are the three foundations of the Taiwan model. Now, when it comes to the infodemic, which is defined by the WHO as, and I quote, too much information, including false or misleading information during a disease outbreak, end of quote. I think the infodemic is not particular to SNS. Indeed, the WHO observed that there is digital infodemic, also physical infodemic. The rumors do not spread only on the SNS, but also on many other platforms. For example, on the end-to-end encrypted chat channels, WhatsApp or Line is actually a place where a lot of infodemic spreads as well, as well as, of course, on non-digital ways. And again, we engage the public and utilize the freedom of speech to make sure that there are interesting, clever, funny ways to dispel this information by bracketing this information into a frame, and then outside we provide some context saying this is not true and the reason it's not true we present it in a funny way. So this is a little bit like how vaccinations work. You show your immune system the entire virus or the important part of the virus, and then you tell your immune system how to manufacture antibodies, but you do not actually harm your body, right? It's, in a sense, deactivated. And so we use the same idea, like human over-rumor, against infodemic just like we counter the pandemic. Thank you very much. We are currently at Japan National Press Club, which is an association of journalists. So, digitalization and journalism or digital transformation and journalism is another topic we would like to ask you. With digital transformation, journalism is encountering change and printed newspaper subscription circulation is drastically coming down. On the other hand, digital newspaper is going up. Digital transformation versus journalism, what is the role of journalism in the age of digital transformation? When I was young, I've learned the word democratization means that everybody can participate. But nowadays, the English word democratization have come to mean something like it's inexpensive or it's very easy to access. So I think journalism should be democratized in the first sense, in the last century sense. That is to say, people can become journalists and receive journalistic training and think in a way that respect the sources, check the sources, aware of the framing, providing context, and so on. All the important skills that journalists have are essential in our digital competence curriculum in our basic education. That is to say, instead of saying that primary schoolers need to have media literacy, which is about being consumers, right? When you're listening to radio or watching television. We talk about literacy because there's literally nothing else you can do except being literate about it. But nowadays, with Universal Broadband, which is bidirectional, everybody can provide important contextualizing service. Everybody can check some sources and even start live streaming and join fact checkers and so on. And so in a sense, everybody can contribute to journalism. And so the professional journalists are like the people who are teachers to the, not just primary school, but everybody in the society to contribute to journalism by doing their part in democratizing journalism. Thank you. So we have a major role to play. Thank you for that. So that's all for my questions. I'd like to turn to the other three panelists on the podium. So I'd like to invite my colleagues to ask questions now from the podium. Thank you, Eva May. My name is Kurosawa from Asehishin Banyan, and thank you so much for this opportunity. So I want to ask two questions about COVID-19. This goes back to the relations between democracy and deserialization. So the relationship of trust between the government. Here in Japan, this is something we don't understand being able to trust the government or relationship based on trust. You mentioned that people should not be forced. That's what you mentioned. But I think maybe you could see that because the government in place has in just a very high approval rate or was it an inherent high level of trust for the government and the civil servants? Who is the best one? Who was it like before in Taiwan? Can you talk about that, please? Thank you. Certainly. To give no trust is to get no trust. In 2014, when we occupied the parliament during the sunflower movement, sometime that year, I think the approval rate was something like 9% or so to the government. So it was really low. And the reason was not just because the people was angry or was upset or whatever, but because people perceive that the government did not trust the people to participate in policy making. And so people receive a already made policy without much deliberation or discussion or any room for co-creation. And so whenever we make sure that people's contribution can appear early, that is to say when we're still ideating, when we're still trying to figure out the best way forward, when at that time people can participate and set an agenda, then it means the government trusts the people. And some people, of course, trust back. Some people, of course, don't trust back and choose to hold us to account. And they are very important contributors too. And we thank them for it. But my point is that without trusting people to co-create, then you lose even the part of the people that would have trusted back. And that is the most important part, which is why for people who complain about any government services, we always say now that, well, it's everyone's business, so it requires everyone's help. Well, if you can help design it, show us your prototype, and we will adopt if it actually proves to be better. In 2017, a designer petitioned against our tax filing system, saying it's an, I quote, explosively hostile, and end of quote. And instead of defending the policy, we just asked everybody who complained to co-create a tax filing experience of 2018, and that won 96% approval rate, not because it's a particularly good design. It's pretty good, but because thousands of people contributed, and they now say, what the tax filing experience? We design it, not the government, and that led to a higher trust rate. The system will later on be adjusted because it's based on API, so like Lego blocks, be adjusted a little bit and became the mass-creation pre-ordering system. And later on, it will get adjusted a little bit and become the stimulus voucher pre-registering system. And this time, just a couple of weeks ago, it got adjusted a little bit and became, well, the 192 to SMS QR code-making system. So a co-creation can benefit not just the ministry of finance and the tax agency, but pretty much everybody who co-created, which includes public servants in other agencies. It's persuasive, but it's difficult. Go together. In a way, government can do everything alone, so help us. If the Japanese government says that we will probably begin to criticize the government, there are things the government can do and cannot do, and that should be made transparent and be disclosed, and then the general public order manufacturers that can collaborate with the government, is that what you're suggesting in terms of the relationship? Yes, and the previous question about journalism also plays a big part here because journalism, especially investigative journalism, provide the very important context that shows the structural errors of the existing interaction between stakeholders and also points out if each stakeholder can commit to do something together and then we can go better. And so this is like mutual accountability. Everybody helps everybody else to account, and indeed, this is the only way forward for large-scale digital transformation. But without an independent journalist sector, without independent investigative journalists, then nobody is willing to share the kind of information that would privilege other stakeholders who will be suffering from the kind of perverse incentive where people are incentivized not to share the information. But once the investigation by journalists is done and publicized, unlike a court investigation or a persecutory investigation, a journalistic investigation is for public to understand. And once the public understand, it change the norm. That is to say the expectation. And then all the stakeholders will be mobilized and incentivized to change. That has been true for pretty much all the collaborative meetings we held as part of the Open Government Task Force in the past more than 90, I think almost 100 now, cases that we have processed. It's always engaging the civic media and also, in most cases, the journalism sector. Thank you. One other question about COVID-19 environment. We're here with this release to a previous question. I would like to ask about some specific issue about vaccination. We mentioned that, well, we mentioned that getting a booking for vaccination is very difficult. My colleague has a very aged parent and my colleague had to keep on calling on farms. And also, we tried to access the booking through the net here in Japan. But the elderly people in Japan, they're not able to accept digitalization. They're starting to think they'll never accept digitalization. So people who are left behind physically disadvantaged, what support can you render? What support are you providing in Taiwan to those people? Well, like my own grandmother, well, I have two grandmothers, both alive, but my maternal grandmother, I think the carers who provide daycare service from very beginning have asked for her willingness and a schedule and so on to get vaccinated. So she did not have to learn any websites or any digital services and so on. And the same has been applied to, for example, social workers, the nursing homes and so on. So basically, while we do have a self-booking vaccination offering, that's actually a small percentage of the total available vaccine now. The major percentage of vaccines is by bringing them to the people rather than asking people to register for them. And that includes, I think, people over 65 years old if I'm not mistaken. Thank you very much. My name is Tini's Paper Company and thank you for joining this session. I have one question regarding vaccination. China, PRC against Taiwan is saying that if a political barrier is removed, that PRC is willing to provide vaccines to Taiwan. On the other hand, to the Latin American countries with whom Taiwan has diplomatic relationship, China is saying we will get the vaccine. But in exchange for here cutting off diplomatic relations with Taiwan, that's the demand PRC is demanding. So against vaccination, PRC seems to be politicizing this act of a provision of vaccines. How do you take that? I'm not exactly sure this relates to digital systems. And so I may not be the most qualified person to answer this question. I would certainly say that among my friends and families and so on, they understand that homegrown vaccines are probably the most safe bet, which is partly why they did not get the vaccinated back in April. But beyond that, I think the Central Epidemic Command Center as well as the Foreign Service in Taiwan is more qualified to answer because I only work on things like the cross-country recognition of vaccination records and so on. And these are the digital parts of the question you ask. But in non-digital parts, I have no idea, really. Okay, point taken. You're a question about diversity, if I may minister. I've tried to think into your background. You enter the world of business at age of 15. In the 20s, you switched your gender. So you have taken a look at different perspectives, I'm sure. Yeah, around the world, there are people who are found by long-standing traditions in their country, any of their culture. They want to break free from that, but they can't. There are many people around the world who really cannot break free. Especially, there are many young people who are very hesitant. And in the history of these young people who are hesitant about breaking free. Was that a question? Because... Yes, yes. Okay, I heard... And a message to the young people who want to break free from these... Okay. Down them. Okay. I think the biology should not determine our destiny. That's my message to them. And having gone through two puberties personally, I do not have this conception in my mind that says half of the population is closer to me and half the population is less close to me. I don't have that. So this is what I mean by saying non-binary. And that is also a message, I guess, my personal experience to Chef. Thank you very much. I have a question here. This is completely unrelated to the previous topic. Mr. Tan, you seem to be interested in Japanese art culture and the activity of Japanese. Has anything you trade to in Japanese culture or Japanese people's behavior? And if so, can you specify? Well, there's too many to list. I would say that the resilience against not just earthquakes or typhoons and so on, I mean, the last two times I visited Japan, both of them I encountered typhoons. There's something about my visits and typhoons one in Osaka and one in Okinawa. And I witnessed firsthand how orderly it is for the message, for the communication, for the preparedness. It's not like we can't control the weather. We obviously cannot. But we can control our attitude toward such events. And I was very impressed. And so my point is that the resilience is not something that could be taught. It is something that is only learned. And when I visited Japan, I see this learned resilience very vividly. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. My name is Harima from TBS Television. And let's ask questions. Thank you so much. I want to go back to the topic of the rule of government and digitalization. So rule of government and digitalization. I can hear your comments. Because of the progress in digitalization, it seems that the expectations, what is the word to be played by the government and the word to be played by the private sector has shifted as a result of digitalization. So policy setting, implementation, that process itself probably has undergone a major change because of the digitalization. That is my impression. So this major transformation and change, the most important principle in bringing about such transformation is a transparent city, I think, with diversity and diversity of views or spread of participation. What principle was most important in bringing about this transformation? What principle can we have in order to create organic relations between the government and the people after pressure to advise? Thank you. Thank you. Before answering the question, I would like to fact check myself. Between my Okinawa Taifun visit and Osaka Taifun visit, I did visit like Tokyo and other cities. And there was no Taifun during the visits in between. So fact checking. So back to the question. I think here the most important, at least to me principle, is about whether we conserve the possibility for future generations to innovate beyond our imaginations. And this is what I call plurality. The other, the opposite ideal of singularity says that whatever the current generation of technologists say, like, I don't know, replacing individuals with machines, replacing individual jobs with machines, smart cities instead of smart citizens, whatever vision that the designers were having, if they adopt a singularity-based vision, then they would be essentially depriving future generations from contributing to the design space. But if we instead say, well, let's do assistive intelligence, let's empower people closest to the pain, let's spread the power to the edges, let's make sure people trust the data storage, if they trust telecom, store their data there, trust their municipality, store the data there, somebody else store the data there, if we allow for dignity and agency under the idea of plurality, then we're not foreclosing our future generations from co-creating better. That is to say we need to be humble in our design and always invite co-designers. As a concept, but in reality, government, many governments use to dominate information to decide on the policy. And after they decide on policy, they would communicate that to the general public. And that has been the procedure in planning policy and implementing policy. But you're saying social sector people should come at the very beginning stage. And what would be the biggest barrier to enable such a procedure? And what should be done in order to remove such a barrier? That's a big question for me. The old way of how democracy works is limited constrained by the communication technology of whichever time that a democracy was first designed for that polity. So when democracy is designed, when only pen and paper is possible, then you get voting, which is about three bits per person uploaded every four years. A very constrained upload bandwidth. Now, of course, afterwards comes television and radio. So when the government decides something, it can use mass communication and work with professional journalists to contextualize it for the people, which is great. But it's not listening at scale. It's impossible for someone to listen to millions of people or for millions of people to listen to one another. So almost by definition, it's already done or almost done before it is pushed out to the public through the help of mass communication and journalists. But nowadays, universal broadband is bidirectional. So anyone who has a better design can do what we in Taiwan call fork the government. Fork is like a fork, right? It's going to a different direction, taking what government has to offer by providing it in a different way. Instead of PDF or fax machines, use an interactive map. Instead of waiting for people to tally the numbers of available vaccinations, well, use automated chatbots to help to do so. Instead of for people to wait for their decision makers to push out regulatory reforms, ID.8 and sign 5,000 petitions to push such reforms. Instead of agenda, instead of the city councilors making the budget for every year, people can participate in participatory budgeting every month or whatever, right? So every single example I just said is based on the idea of bidirectional, multi-directional communication infrastructure. And universal broadband as a human right, if you do not have that, then you're essentially saying only the rich people who can afford this much bandwidth can participate in the democratic process. And it will not be very plural. It will not be very inclusive. So I would still argue this democracy for this century is still predicated on not just the universal competence of digital and media, but also universal broadband access. Yes, I just heard your comment. It's very clear. Your comment is very clear. Now, up until now, I suppose it could be said that up until now, but up until such time as policies are determined, you don't want, it was more convenient for the government to inform the content of the decision. But in a new way, in the new era, from the first stage is important thoroughly information being publicized and that transparency of the process needs to be secured. Without that, as you mentioned, the delivery is going to go forward. Is my understanding correct? That's entirely correct. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Okay. So I would like to ask another question if I may. So we talked about digital transformation and digital divide. I won't ask about the digital transformation and digital divide. With digital transformation and digital revolution, many convenient things will spread. On the other hand, I'm sure you'll be successful in bringing with you the Silicon Valley. I think you did a lot of money, hopefully. With the digital transformation and digital revolution, a certain number of limited platformers and large digital companies and management became very rich. But on the other hand, you have people who are left behind and in terms of social income, there is a great divide now as a result of digitalization. What type of measures do you think would be necessary to respond to the digital divide? Is it possible to resolve digital divide with digital needs? What do you think you need government policies to overcome the digital divide? What can we do? What can be done? I would appreciate your thoughts. Thank you. In addition to the universal competence in education, including lifelong education and healthcare and broadband, I think another thing that we can do is to make sure that we come to the people. We make sure, for example, that in our 5G spectrum auction, a significant amount of the money goes to empower the most rural and remote places. So they are actually the most advanced. The urban places are still using 4G, but the remote places can already, for example, using the national healthcare app and virtualize their national health card through a QR code. And so they can access telemedicine, telediagnosis, even, I think there's people experimenting with drones carrying the pharmacy prescriptions and so on. Because there's a real need there, right? Public transportation is more costly there and so on. So by making sure that the state prioritizes social equity, we do not have to experiment only with the rich people that afford the latest gadgets. We can create a market where startups are incentivized to become social entrepreneurs. That is to say innovators that solves this inequity with innovative means. It's like the wing of social innovation to balance the wing of industrial innovation. In that sense, the role of the government will become even more important, I would assume, when we look around countries all over the world, it seems that governments have not been so successful in narrowing down the digital divide and they have not been successful in implementing policy that would contribute to the society. What is needed? Is it the people side that ought to change or is it the leaders that ought to change? What needs to be done in order for governments to be better respondent to the new digital world? How can they come up with better policies? Well, there's two different roles at play here. There's the citizens' expectation of the government or the norm as I mentioned. If the citizens expect the government to take care of everything, then the government do not have good input from the citizen for co-creation. And on the other hand, if the government doesn't trust the citizens with opportunities of co-creation, then the citizens would say of course my time is better to spend elsewhere than participating in public related affairs. So it's like a dance. Someone has to move first. So I always say the government need to trust the people first and demonstrate instead of, for example, responding through writing 60 days after a petition is made, we take action immediately. For example, my email I usually reply to the email very quickly except in the past week, but anyway, I reply to my email very quickly. And so a few months ago, for example, there was a person who sent an email saying, digital minister, Audrey Tom, you promised Universal Broadband as a human right, but I'm in a quarantine place near the Yangming Mountain. And this email took me an afternoon to send. There's no telecom with good reception in the quarantine place and I have to spend 14 days there. I'm suffering from a lack of human right and you promised you can take the blame and so I'm emailing it to you. And so I work with the telecom, the National Communication Commission, and in just two weeks we set up a new telecom tower near that quarantine place so this situation is resolved. Of course, by that time, he's already out of quarantine, but he made a point of driving back using speed test to hold me to account to see I have delivered my promise and share it on social media and this took just two weeks. If it took two months or six months people lose interest in participation but because stories like this make around on social media it incentivize more people to participate. So it's a two way communication between government and the people that's wonderful. Any other question? Yes, I have a related question if I may. Well, you talked about universal broadband access. That's also the foundation of democracy you mentioned but having said that in the past as technology develops each time democracy has changed outside of technology. Now, at this juncture you talk about two way communication I think that's very meaningful and I think this two way bi-directional communication is very important this isn't really about change, I understand now but then the old style politicians, old style companies we still have them, they still have the power these old style companies and politicians and this new change could actually undermine their position so you have this process of opposition I'm sure. Do you think that democracy can progress in the face of this old style opposition forces? At the end of 2014 when I was hired as a reverse mentor to the cabinet I talked in three public lectures to 300 people who are the most senior people in the public service so they're career public servants but they are the most highly ranked there's exactly 300 such people in Taiwan, level 12 or above and so at the end of my lecture one of my three lectures one of the person very senior public servant asked me, so what are you asking? Are you asking us to all resign so the younger people can take our place and I answered that is not what I'm asking I am asking you to work with young people and treat them as your peers as reverse mentors of course you have a lot of wisdom that young people can learn from but the young people also have a lot of new ideas and direction that you can learn from and so what I'm asking is create positions that are your peers that does not take decades for the young people to go to but rather like in my own office my office is exactly one half senior public career service and one half experts from the outside and the senior people in the public service come from more than 12 different ministries each ministry can only send one delegate a secondment to my office at a time so it's entirely horizontal and when the secondment goes back to their ministry someone else can take their place and that person who left returned to their ministry take this idea of co-creation back and foster a culture change there too and so this is an entirely voluntary association a very delicate balance where every person can learn something else from every other person who can go value or voice dominate to create such a place is much more important than introducing any specific expertise into the public service thank you for the great questions live long and prosper