 Okay. There you start. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to GRIPS Forum. My name is Izumi Ono. I teach International Development Policy here at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies based in Tokyo, GRIPS. I will be serving your host today. Today, we are very honored and pleased to invite a special guest from Taiwan, the country's digital minister, Audrey Tam, here on the screen. This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us to learn Taiwan's experiences of creating open and inclusive societies with digitalization, which can be called as Taiwan model of democracy. We want to think together about each of our country and society should do and how we can contribute to making the world better as in besides under the SDG. I also thank you so much for the strong interest in participation with many, many audience. I think 500 people capacity has been fully reached registering today. It's the largest group forum we have ever had. So, hi, Audrey. Thank you for joining today. Hello, good local time, everyone. Wonderful. Yeah, we are so appreciate you are spending important precious time. So, let me briefly introduce at the order is a profile. Okay. So, Minister Audrey Tam is a best known as a central figure of mobilizing digital power to protect the citizens from COVID pandemic to advance social innovation and democracy. In 2016, she became Taiwan's youngest ever minister at the age of 35. She's incredible genius and self-educated. So, she began programming work in Taiwan at the age of 15 and then started her own IT company at the age of the 19 at the Silicon Valley, so successfully. She also advised Apple on the high-level AI artificial intelligence project. Before assuming the ministerial position under the current Tsai Ing-wen administration, she was also active in civic tech community called Dao Zero, which proposed to rethink the government role from zero by using digital technology to change the traditional way of policymaking. What is really wonderful is that she has committed to using her digital skill and intelligence to create open government, which is transparent, accountable, participatory, and inclusive for the whole society and citizens of the world. Okay. So, how Minister Audrey Tam has been engaged in this admirable task? And how is the Taiwan government focusing us to maximize the benefit of digital power for creating open and inclusive societies? These are questions we want to think together with a discussion with Minister Tam. And such questions are very much relevant for all of us, whichever country and organization you are from. This is also timely for Japan, since the digital agency will be established in September in two months ahead. So, there's a lot to learn from Taiwan's model of democracy. Okay. So, let me briefly talk about what today's program is. Minister Audrey Tam has kindly agreed to make this forum very interactive with the audience, including with students as the future leaders. So, I plan to organize three sessions as follows. The first session may be very short session, about 15 minutes. I will make a brief introduction of her achievement and the innovative measures and also have a few conversations based on the pre-selected questions from the group students. Then, the second session will be about 40 minutes. We will have a panel discussion with six group students from various countries who will directly interact with Minister Audrey Tam. Lastly, we have a Q&A session, maybe 15 minutes or so, for the floor, so that you can also make a comment and question by raising that the fundraise function. Okay. So, let me start with the first session. Okay. So, let me share the screen first, just a few minutes. Okay. So, this is that the first example is a very famous example, a fight against COVID with innovative measures. It is a typical example of her digital social innovation, together with an IT expert, that she created an application to show face masks inventory and location at the glance, so that people can know where to buy masks and get them clearly. And also more recently, she has just prepared this application for a nationwide vaccine booking platform to indicate where people can get vaccine shots safely and effectively, such as hospitals, clinics, public and private facilities. I think from July 4th, this is made available. She may be explaining later, more in detail. And then this is public digital innovation space, PDIS, the HR office. So, orderly gives a lot of importance to open government and also working with social entrepreneurs and also working with young people. So, this PDIS hosts collaborative meetings to collect voices from various people, including minority people. So, here is the very example. This family is talking to the orderly term for some family affairs or some questions or consultation, but appointment is open to everybody. And then those meeting records are shown transparently in the PDIS platform. This is another example of PDIS function. It is online public policy participation platform. So, people can submit the proposal through online platform. And then with more than 5,000 petition signatories, then Taiwanese government is required to start thinking about seriously how to make this proposal put into action. So, the discussion session, the situation, so those things process can be also monitored. This is an example. For example, increase passengers free facilities as a proposal. Then petition has been made and you will know where the status is, how many people are endorsing it, and then when the government will be responding. So, this is a kind of very user-friendly, participatory platform. Then once the particular policy is adopted, it is also possible for the citizen to see how the implementation process is. So, visualization execution process is also important. This is a diagram of what I have created based on my understanding how the Taiwanese government works with the minister orderly term. So, the president appoints the prime minister, then the prime minister as the CEO that manages the executive branch appoints 32 ministers and also head of council. And minister orderly term is a minister with portfolio in charge of digital sector cross cutting way. Very much impressive thing that the minister term has created a space to communicate with citizens and also allow citizen participation interaction with the public policy making process. This public digital innovation space is just as explained in social innovation lab. She has an office hour every Wednesday to meet with social entrepreneurs to get their ideas and also add that civic tech solution to make available. There are also reverse mentoring for the young people around 30 people age are invited to be advisor to each minister to the ministers. Then also each minister is required to appoint participation officer who is responsible for talking to the government's policy ministry's policies and so getting feedback from the citizens and then consulting what can be done better. And then they also work closely with PDIS office. So, citizen has been brought in this space. Then outside the government that the civic tech society has been very much active like the zero which I mentioned and then minister term came from these communities. So, there are various mechanisms within government to allow citizen participation and fostering mutual trust. This is digitalization with warm power is a strong belief as I understand that the minister term. She encouraged that the we don't have to worry about the weakness. This is a kind of that the favorite favorite lyrics by the Canadian singer-songwriter. We don't have to be a perfect there is a crack in everything but this is how rights gets in to make the world brighter. In otherwise in the other ones it is okay for the government has some deficiencies but this is the opportunity rather to find out that the issues how to improve working together with the citizens. So, it's a quite positive thinking and then government citizens work together for co-creating solution. Last few slides is that the annual event is hosted by the president and then she's a quite important figure here. And here a ministry of that economy and economic affairs together with SME agency has been inviting that SME people and also that the entrepreneur to solve their technology with a problem. And then she's also active globally and also domestically to work with the young people to promote this social innovation toward achieving SDG. So, this is the end of my quick overview and I hope that my understanding is correct. If that's correct, Audrey please add that they're corrected. Okay. So, based on that I have three top questions that are selected by grip students. So, let me share with you. First question Audrey is as follows. How can we overcome digital divide and create an inclusive and democratic system? Because there are elderly people or remote areas people who may have a difficulty in access to digital technology. How do you do it? Thank you. I'm really happy to be here and I think one of the main ideas as the digital minister not the minister for IT is this idea that digitalization is about connecting people while IT is more about connecting machines and therefore in digital services we are bringing technology to where people are we're not asking people to adapt to where technologists are. So, the idea of participatory design where very old people including my own grandmother 88 years old and her younger friends of 77 years old are invited in the co-creation of digital services related to the daily affairs. One example is the mass curationing application. It was developed around a year and a half ago and I consulted my grandma and her more younger friends in their 70s and instead of our original design which is in the convenience store using the automated tele machines the ATM to insert your debit card to press a key to wire the mask purchasing money a few dollars into the center for disease control in return of the receipt from the ATM and you can use that receipt next week to collect the rationed mask and then use the same ATM to renew or even do a recurring subscription. It sounds like a great design but my grandma and her friends said if I do this design they will go back and queue in line in pharmacy to buy a mask because they are afraid of entering passwords. They're afraid that people queuing after them will see their password. They're afraid if they press one extra zero they will wire 10 times the money out to the CDC and these are not unreasonable fears. These are true and real issues so if we push and force them to use mobile payment or ATM our most important metric which is to get the mask availability to as many older people as possible will fail so I instead asked so if you are the digital minister what would you do and then my grandma's younger friend in her 70s said well when I queue in line in the pharmacy I use my national health card I don't have to remember a password I just insert it into the machine and out goes the mask rationing the pharmacist help me through the entire process what if I can use the national health card add a kiosk of the convenience store machine because I don't enter password it doesn't matter that the kiosk is an open place instead of AP ATM which has a protecting screen I don't insert the card to type password I just insert the card to get the receipt right and I take the receipt to the counter to pay in coins because I will take exactly this number of around two US dollars with me I know for sure that I will not mistakenly wire out money that I didn't intend to pay and that makes them feel safer so I think to reduce the risk that is to make the elderly feel safer is the most important point and once they learn that this is a safe space they will take care of teaching the 66 years old and so on and so they become our advocates our evangelists of this better experience so working with as old as possible like nineties that's even better and they will make sure that this safety and this experience of lower risk and saving time will be transmitted to their you know children's and so on in the 70s age I see thank you so much I saw that in the design stage the kind of the preference or comfort of the different stakeholders including elderly people are embedded and this is one of the reasons why you chose to use the national health insurance system in the mask application I see thank you very much the second question is that because that our students are many students are coming from the various developing countries and they are wondering how can the public sector increase this ICT capabilities because the government is important but can we train the existing official or outsourced IT engineers what kind of service maybe a provision model is available ready made or we should be using much more tailor made so those are question raised by our students there is not a forced choice in Taiwan between ready made and tailor made if you use open source technologies then it's both ready made and tailor made open source means that the authors relinquish part of their copyright so they will not sue you if you decide to host the software on your own computer that is to say if you like the experience of using for example the Firefox browser but because it's open source you can change it to develop extensions that are tailor made to your needs for example I use a extension called Facebook feed eradicator to take away the Facebook feed completely and replace it with a like such saying and so on so I don't get distracted at all I use Facebook like a blog so this is both ready made as a browser and tailor made as extensions so I would suggest to use as much as possible free and open software that are mature and well adopted and then you can tailor made that to your local preference I see I see but but but for that they need that the people who are really understand that that's how how those system works not at least at the same occasion of the people are needed yeah yes so I will suggest make it part of your basic education in basic education when learning digital competence many people now use open source tools such as well the Arduino open hardware kit or working with the Wikipedia open street map community or raspberry pi or MIT scratch and so on so these are all very welcoming communities so instead of the teacher having to hold the standardized answers the students can immediately reach to a global community who can serve as mentors to these young people and once they get more involved in the architecture level of software then they become your future partners in designing the digital services for the public sector I myself have published textbooks a few years ago called architecture of open source applications or AOSA that teaches the young students and this is also a free book free of copyrights you're free to also share it I see thank you very much yeah from my last question very quickly um the government is often vertically you know that's for it and also with a sometime vested interest so how and why can Taiwanese government that reflect citizen voices so quickly to the public policy no resistance at all well we are the resistance right so remember back in 2014 we occupied the parliament the legislature for three weeks yeah the sunflower movement so so we are the resistance and so the point I'm making is that when we occupy the parliament it's not a demonstration like a protest it's a demonstration like a demo a demo in the software world means we are showing people a proof of concept that does something better right so when we occupy the parliament working with the 20 or so non-government organizations we showed that it's not just about broadcasting of televisions and radio because that's about speaking to millions of people if you flip this around using the internet using live streaming and many other technologies you can listen to millions of people concurrently just as now we are using a software to listen to each other and also 500 other people so this is one possibility to get people to care about something that's not happening in their neighborhood it is to get a virtual neighborhood like a digital public square and back in 2014 we developed this concept of digital public infrastructure where people can listen to one another constructively on social objects such as the petitions and the budgets that you showed in your initial slides so my suggestion is instead of thinking it as a public sector or private sector thing think of it as a social sector thing as a what I call people public private partnership because we are all voluntary citizens in these pro-social civic spaces and when we co-create something new there it is free for all to use including private sector and public sector so instead of thinking we need to work across the silos in the government we just encourage each ministry to publish open data publish open api do their crowdsourcing and crowdfunding even events and then the public servants from the next ministry may actually just be a citizen participant in those open spaces that's my answer I see I see so you try to bring the public sector to the citizen space too yeah I see exactly yeah because they are also citizens when they're off work I see I see and then they feel everybody's watching so they have to do something together yeah exactly yes okay thank you very much okay then I maybe I should not monopolize after precious time with you we have a student king to have an interaction with you so uh let me uh let's go to the uh discussion session with the students um the for the panel discussion uh so could do yeah I would like to invite six group students from now okay can we show that the their face and also before that let me uh explain that that today uh due to the uh minister terms that the commitment we will be finishing grips forum itself entire forum at 6 p.m and she will be leaving uh the five minutes before uh the six so we will have a wrap up afterwards but please uh uh for uh that accept this and I will try to uh make that that discussion efficient as much as possible okay here uh everybody's here okay we have a gallery view okay okay here okay so we have um six students um let me uh the the introduce uh one by one uh we have a Joel from Uganda okay yeah he's from central bank of Uganda we have a nolana from Bangladesh hello universities yep we have a sidra from Pakistan working at the national database and registration authorities we have a second from Kazakhstan he's the office of the president okay and bboy from the pdp working for nether national economic development authority in charge of development planning and aid management and we have a yuhi uh kuwata from japan from the local government Yokohama cities okay so we hope we have a lot of interesting discussion um who wants to start uh maybe uh nolana you want to start yeah okay thank you very much uh to give me such kind of wonderful uh opportunity to be a part of this discussion actually also many questions one part is done earlier but now i wanted to ask like how peripheral peoples or peoples who are living in very rural area or uneducated peoples in taiwan uh how they get the opportunity to this i city i'm an opportunity this is my first question thank you this is an excellent question in taiwan broadband access is a human right indeed our constitution and constitutional amendment define a state's concept possibility of delivering services of health learning and communication as inalienable which means that since the doctor tai yin wen our president's first presidential term we've been very much focusing on empowering even on the top of taiwan almost four thousand meters high everyone is guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second and it's actually both ways so download 10 megabits upload at least one megabit for very affordable just 16 us dollar per month so even in the very low resource areas we use microwave and soon maybe lowers orbit satellites to make sure that everyone gets the basic broadband access because we understand if you don't have that uplink then it's the internet is the same as television right you can watch and download things but you cannot participate for example in this forum so we need to make sure that this is guaranteed before even entertaining about health or education rights because telemedicine and telegnosis and teleeducation builds upon this broadband as human rights and i make this commitment very publicly saying if you don't have that access is my fault like personally and so i get emails from the yangming mountain for example when people are at the quarantine center and at that side of mountain they don't get reception from the five telecom they say oh it took them half a day to send this email minister you promise broadband is a human right i'm suffering 14 days of quarantine with no human rights as the email and then i will call the national communication commission and in two weeks that telecom tower gets set up and they enjoy the broadband rights of course by that time that man is already out of quarantine but he made a point of driving back measuring the speed test and posting it on social media and so on to hold me accountable so that is the kind of commitment thank you yeah it's a human right that is a very impressive and you can up on that maybe sidra you have some questions yeah first of all i'm very glad that i have a chance to ask question to you it's my pleasure my question for you is in your point of view but are some serious threads that technology poses today and what can government do to deal with these rapidly rising challenges thank you so i do believe that in democratic polities we're all suffering from the infodemic in the public sphere sorry i didn't get the last sentence can you repeat the the last part in your point of view but are some serious threats that technology poses to date threats okay yeah so how can government do to deal with these rapidly rising challenges in the public sphere because of the invention of both the addictive touchscreen and the more anti-social corner of social media because a message that makes people feel polarized gets people instinctively click share to click share is actually easier than clicking comment and because of this this information spread very quickly because it has a higher reproduction value like a virus like literally like a virus of the mind it will share from people to people and instead of taking anything down which would be like a lockdown in taiwan we don't do take down instead we face the threat of this information crisis with humor so we have this idea of humor over rumor meaning that when we see a trending conspiracy theory or something we take its RNA that's to say its elements and surround it it in a very cute corner like with very cute spokes dogs and so on and everyone after seeing this very cute post of dispelling the rumor and laughed about it uh well the potency of the original this information disappear so what i'm trying to get at is that the threat of this information can be countered very succinctly by having a very cute spoke stock the son chai as she by inu explaining for example that's when we're doing physical distance you really need to keep three shiba away from one another indoors and outdoor to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing and also wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands and these are very catchy once people see it is very hard to still get mad or outraged when you see a mask related this information so it serves as kind of vaccine of the mind when we roll out this humor over rumor campaigns yeah humor over you and also that the yes thank you very much okay um thank you very much is that okay yeah maybe norendra maybe wish to follow up about the threats issues yeah uh yes yes thank you very much again uh actually you discuss this matter but my supplementary question is that have any policies from the government to protect the misuse of icity opportunities misuse i wanted to refer here like fake news or threat to cyber security or online harassment uh it could be men women anything or girls so have any government policies to protect that's a really good question instead of relying on laws we rely on the social norms collectively enforced by the threat of consumer sanction i believe this is the most effective way to counter this systemic issues one example during our 2018 referendum national referendum and mayor election we discovered that instead of uh doing campaign donations many people from outside of taiwan choose to buy targeted advertisements on facebook to incite the kind of hate that discourage people to vote or to mislead people on social and political issues during our mayor election and the referendum because of that the social sector that is to say the people in the community and social technologists they demanded first that our national audit office the control yen to publish our campaign donation expenditure reports previously you have to go into the building and access it with paper but because of the social sector's insistence they actually took out the printed paper and crowdsourced the otaku character recognition or ocr crowdsourcing people to type it back to open data so investigative journalists can look into campaign donation records in 2018 they convinced the legislature to force the control yen to publish as open data the campaign donation expenditure so because of this social sector's push we see very clearly for the first time that the social media advertisements are not declared as campaign donations and expenditure and it's clear for everyone to see and then the people went to facebook saying you have to treat those political and social advertisements the same as how our control yen treats political campaign expenditure and donations that's to say to disclose who placed what advertisement to which people and to what effect and also ban foreign people from paying such advertisements because well foreign people cannot participate in the domestic campaign donations either that is to say it should be the same social norm but in this norm first responses note that we did not pass any new law this is rather the investigative journalists the people who use those platforms collectively saying if facebook abuse democracy we will not be using facebook we wouldn't be using the social media that have side art this counter disinformation accord and so facebook very quickly i believe taiwan is one if not the only jurisdiction around that time in 2019 early 2019 to receive the promise and later implementation of honest advertisement during our election session so the 2020 presidential election is relatively free of this online paid paid speech during election time so i go into this detail because i believe that the norm set by the social sector outlasts any particular administration and actually results in a better response from the economic sector because they don't want to lose the consumers i see i see so in the sense that certain maybe um kind of but um people have a kind of social sector or those kind of social entrepreneur itx but have some kind of moral obligation that that to to to make sure the information there is um they've said accountable and then they they have to make sure that that is a safe not for yeah trustful yes i see so those are the culture you you have fostered i see um maybe next question for us to raise uh maybe yuhi yeah okay good afternoon i'm yuhi kuata from the city government of yokohama japan i'm very glad to have opportunity to talk to you and my question is how can we enhance the people's trust in the government to manage personal information so let me explain the background of japan in 2016 uh japan tried to adopt an identification number system that managed all personal information such as tax health insurance and pension to realize e-government however uh at the moment at uh this april still only 28 percent of citizens own this personal number card in japan one of the reason is a less opportunity to use this number however i believe that another reason is net lack of trusting government such as information leakage or peer of controlled society so i think taiwan is very advanced in this field so that is the reason i would like to ask this question thank you indeed in taiwan while we do have uh the paper based national identification card we have the electronic health insurance card since 2003 and when in 2003 it was being piloted in penghu or the pescadores islands uh that was when sarce or now that i should call it sarce 1.0 uh hit taiwan uh but the ic based health card proved to be very convenient and successfully enabled the kind of measure that are simply not possible using paper based cards uh in the pescadores island at that time so one year after in 2003 everyone in taiwan also begins switching to the ic based health cards and i believe that ic based health card gets this adoption for three reasons one because of people's access to the trusted doctors and pharmacists they see that the doctor and pharmacy have also to use their own card to complete a transaction such as prescribing a uh some drug from a pharmacy or prescribing a diagnosis that is to say if things go wrong they know who to blame that's that doctor or that pharmacist to blame so so a accountability trail backed by a real person you trust very important the first thing and the second thing to give no trust is to get no trust so the state need to trust the people to make good use of their own data so in taiwan everyone with the national health insurance express app can download all the i don't know x-ray scans i think nowadays even CT scans diagnosis of course the COVID-19 rapid testing or PCR testing records you name it you can download it on your phone and use some third party application on your phone if you so prefer to enable more creative uses but the calculation is done on your own phone because people trust their own mobile phone more than the government database that's the same for everyone around all jurisdictions this trust of citizens to be the controller of their own data is very important and the third thing is that it also enable public purposes uh and we call it the data collisions or data um uh collaboratives i believe the japanese term is the info bank uh and so the idea very simply put is because you can use the national health insurance card uh like my grandma kid can use it to order the musk rationing or you can use the app also to order to your nearby convenience store but if you have plenty of musk and we're talking about last april or so if you happen to have plenty of musk before the pandemic then you don't need the daily ration of three uh pieces per week but you can save it like that so you can simply not order it but after a while it will accumulate as your quota right and using the national health app you can tell our foreign service to donate your musk ration quota to international humanitarian aid and so using this app more than seven million pieces of medical musk uh rations are dedicated to international community uh and half of the people choose to remain anonymous but half of the people get a token of appreciation of audrey tong 17 pieces dedicated to international community is like a non-fungible token minted by the national health service and so people use that not just to fulfill one's own need but once our need is fulfilled use it for something higher purpose that is to deliver musk to around the world building a data coalition and everyone can check the record by their phone very quickly so they become the controller of their own data and therefore less fear because they don't have to guess and it serves a community purpose i see this is very impressive no yeah i see so hmm but but so that i think you have to really make sure that those kind of various different system would be integrated and also be utilized for motivate people that i am contributing for something for the society or world yeah so um this is really yeah unbelievable and also very yeah important maybe can i invite other maybe students maybe second yeah you want to know yeah how the government works maybe yes minister you mentioned that there is a difference between the minister for it and minister for digitalization that's why my question relates to how the government in taiwan is structured in terms of who responsible for policy into in the sphere of digitalization who is implementing is there any separate body for cyber security for telecommunication issue for mass media all of these are related because before you mentioned there is a difference for me it was one thing but as you said there is a difference so could you just explain how the government in taiwan structure thank you certainly it stands for information technology so naturally the ministry of science and technology maintains the development of technology including it and also the ministry of economic affairs is currently responsible for the prosperity of the say computer digital service sector and so on as a trade like private sector so these are the main two ministries that relates to it based industry on one side research and development on the other side and these are vertical ministries meaning that they have a kind of commanding structure however in the premier's office in the cabinet office per se there are nine ministers at large or i call it horizontal minister some people call it minister with a portfolio doesn't matter so the nine people are specifically appointed to take care of cross sectoral issues in an interagency manner so if the vertical ministers are like the pillars then we are like the the ceiling right the connector the bridge that connects them together and so in our cases instead of having our own staff we invite people from all the 12 ministries to join my office as liaison or secondments and these secondments usually stay between six months to two years or so and then they are rotating basis so they go back to their ministry after a while and rotate someone else in but from each ministry only one secondment is in my office and that ensures the diversity of perspective and also ensure that there's no superior and inferior relationship even if the national communication commission in charge of the broadcasting and telecom operators sent a section chief actually the most senior section chief by the foreign service sends a section chief here right so a advanced bureau chief is in the same ministry always higher than a section chief but because they belong to different ministry initially and they join my office in a cross cutting way no one is the superior of one another and we're in a kind of learning circle relationship to one another so to maximize diversity ensures the inclusion in policy making thank you and the second question is relates to the laws because one question is how the government organizes and second is how it works and usually government works in accordance with laws so could you just mention some maybe basic or main laws in this sphere thank you definitely in taiwan we work very closely with the private sector in exploring horizons that are not anticipated by the lawmakers and it's variously called a experimentation act or simply a sandbox now i understand sandbox means something different in japan in japan means a locality like a municipality that are strategic zones where some regulation may be relaxed by in taiwan it means that a competent authority usually a ministry pre approves a set of six months or 12 months possibility of essentially breaking the law but you have to bring better alternative to the existing law system so for autonomous driving self-driving vehicles including flying ones for financial services the fintech sandbox and very soon for medical applications and health applications and so on we have our pre-ordained continental law system like sandbox acts that pre-approves these experimentations and so after six months if the people likes it then of course it becomes new regulations or laws if people don't like it well the risk is bounded so nobody much gets hurt so that is how a continental law system improves itself by essentially inviting time bounded and risk bounded experimentations second are you satisfied while you're still kind of puzzling generally thank you maybe later on if the time allows thank you thank you yeah because i think normally that i mean ministerial maybe rivalry also exists so even if you are seconded from the various ministry in the office sometime that some interest from particular ministry may plus no so yeah but that's because the numbers of people dominate if we allow 10 people to join my office from foreign service then we will become the digital diplomacy unit right so but only one person joined my office so nobody no perspective dominate the conversation this is very important and the other part is that in addition to the 12 or so ministry or secondment there's also 11 or so civil society experts so it's almost half half but the career public service always have one or two more people but the idea is that we are still a government organization of course but we if we discover that there are for example service design which does not have a ministry but it's very important to our vision then we import people from ideal from rca from you know the kopenhagen institute of design into like one service design secondment to my office but there's no ministry for service design unfortunately personally speaking but we still have an expert here and so we have experts from the civil society and i believe your digital agency also do something like that the planning access up to 100 people if i'm not mistaken are joining as civil society and industrial secondments into the 5000 people structure in the digital agency i think is a really good design professor on if you allow just would like to question once more question mr you mentioned that there was in the slides about the visualizing executive process so just could you just shortly answer is it who put this information is it done automatically or some public official yes yes so our basic idea of open data is publication upon collection and this is quite radical because it means that everything is opened up before any review from the public service in the old age of freedom of information act people can request any information but a public servant always look at it before it gets out that's the usual way however in our state it's not like that we simply say if it's not related to personal information trade secret and so on soon as we collect for example one piece of musk is being sold in some pharmacy we published that within 30 seconds to open data if it's updated every 30 seconds of course nobody look at it before it goes out and it encourages people to develop real-time applications such as the musk availability map that let people see exactly after 30 seconds how many pieces the people killing before you purchased imagine if someone have to run the FOIA process then we would not have 100 different applications to visualize this real-time data but paradoxically the public service loves this because nobody is to blame if the numbers are wrong because nobody produced those numbers this is simply machine generated so if things are wrong where we fix the machine but nobody resigns because it's not passing anyone's review and the real way to implement this is to implement your procurement contract template that any IT system that has a user visible data input and output field need to provide a equivalent API application programming interface for robots and in your contracts for procurement you probably already have a clause saying if you produce only for people with sight but ignore people with visual impairments then that vendor could be disqualified for not being accessible enough I believe Japan has that in your contract template but in Taiwan we say robots are a kind of people with blindness so if you do only human to human system but you don't speak machine to machine language you're discriminating against robots and could be disqualified as a vendor we didn't really say that but that's the effect so basically any new system are like legal blocks if we use the tax-paying application make a API change some parameter in three day it begin selling mask changing some other parameter it begins selling triple stimulus vouchers after a few changes it become an SMS QR code producing machine and after some tweaks it become a vaccine reservation system so it means that the API can be hooked into various different ministry system without each ministry having to reinvent the underlying infrastructure or cyber security audits and things like that and so this legal block like design API first design frees both the public service from the blame of the FOIA machine and also it frees new procurements so you can work with startups but still enjoy the bedrock of system integrators work beforehand okay it's getting beyond my comprehension but we really need a really real expert like you who are really able to find out what is the best technical solution no for the integrated services yeah maybe Joao that as a economist you have some question you wanted to ask right yeah okay thank you uh Honore Minister thank you for the opportunity I will go and ask to interface with you uh main is I would I would like to talk about taxation in Taiwan on the big tech companies could you can comment on how Taiwan has dealt with the challenge of efficiently taxing the foreign big tech companies my context is coming from the fact that uh technology has been a critical factor towards the economic growth of Taiwan just like most countries um Taiwan has allowed overseas big tech companies such as google facebook twitter and many others provide services in its territory um the organization of economic development and economic operation and development has been concerned about the difficulty faced by countries in efficiently taxing such big tech companies since most of them operate remotely uh without fiscal addresses in foreign countries um I wonder how Taiwan has been able to deal with this challenge of efficiently taxing the big tech companies well all of them the big ones have agreed to set up vat accounts so it's practically speaking not the big problem in Taiwan and the reason why they agree to set up such accounts is that as I mentioned there is a strong social um it's called a social support for the fair taxation and a strong social sanction if it doesn't work like that so the government's role is not to invent some new technology it's simply to make people aware that this kind of um I would not call it evasion um this kind of circumvention is going on and then people will feel uh that we need to rebalance it so that people get the fair uh taxation and also the fair representation in negotiating with these almost like said semi co-governor entities one example is uber who initially did not pay tax and employed people with no professional licenses uh in 2015 uh and in a cross sectoral meeting enabled by the polis polis technology everybody feel that fair insurance registration tax is like non-negotiable including uber drivers themselves and so because of this social support and implicit threat of social sanction uh uber after just one year agreed to commit itself to set up local company and now is a local taxi company now the q-taxi and the same law that was crowdsourced to make this possible also made it possible for the local church and temple serving the very remote and rural area to set up their own uber uh and taking advantage of this fair representation and insurance and taxation policy so it's again a social sector led people public private partnership I see I see thank you okay maybe um there are other questions which may relate to the big companies maybe before you want to ask doctor non-minister thank you for the opportunity do you think uh government should regulate big tech companies such as google amazon alibaba and tencent based on recent news and media reports there have been increasing concerns globally that these companies have become too powerful and therefore governments must intervene to protect the public on antitrust and data protection issues or do you think that big tech companies should self-regulate instead I think um the private sector and the public sector exist to empower the citizens the social sector and just this idea of social sector is very important because in many jurisdictions there's no such an idea people say oh there are some npo's right voluntary sector the third sector like it's the smallest one uh or something like that uh and so just this idea of social sector setting the rules is fundamental because when the social sector has good alternative like in taiwan we have the ptt uh which is sometime compared to reddit but it's not reddit it's um not a company it's open source it's a student pet project of national taiwan university running for 25 years now uh and it has no advertisers nor shareholders so it only responds to the community it doesn't respond to any for-profit uh motive so it doesn't even need to say i'm a social enterprise it's not even a enterprise it's just an open source group of people and so if you have a strong community like this then you always have a good badna when negotiating with the private sector companies we can always say you know the ptt does this brilliantly so if you do not conform to this or that self-regulation rules let's just go back to the ptt right so if you can say that to the foreign companies then that means they will more often than not conform to your local norms because you prove you already have a norm that's set collaborative by the people instead of you know just the public sector doing some pop-down policies that are not implemented anywhere domestically because you have a leaving proof that these policies are there because well the people force us to set this up right so there's a lot like trade negotiation if you have good alignment with what people want then you can negotiate much more um deliberately and also much more specifically b-boy are you convinced or you have additional questions yes but i have a follow-up question somewhat related to the first question uh in the last recent us elections twitter and facebook banned president trump and other republican social media accounts uh both social media dark giants uh they tried to justify the ban saying that uh they violated community standards and regulations however critics say that what transpired was a free speech censorship and that the president was banned because of differences in political views even some e-commerce platforms have banned several merchants because of similar reasons do you think these online companies have the right to censor speech or prevent them from engaging in buying or selling or monetizing from their platforms without too legal process well the oversight board is uh facebook's response right to the lack of um access to justice in actions like this essentially setting up a private sector court uh modeled after the court system now this is very interesting because having that process means that we're in a state of overlapping jurisdiction the private sector asserts its private law that's just a privilege uh on this uh communication space while the state asserts its own uh privilege uh jurisdiction on the same space and so i think these uh tensions are resolved not by laws unfortunately the internet is designed to treat the local laws if they infringe with how the internet end to end principle works the internet is designed to route around it as if it's damaged so always you can find in some corners of the internet that is impossible for the state to exercise its power to censor on the other hand it also means the social media companies are impossible to dominate to truly monopolize the market if the social sector develop viable alternatives to the more anti-social corners of social media so both a viable competition to the private sector services as well as a viable implementation of the civic ideas of communication space outside of state control these two need to be justified and implemented concurrently in things like the ptt or wikipedia before we have a reasonable way out of this seemingly zero-sum tension between state power and capital power uh and these spaces are what i call again public digital infrastructures it's like a community park uh it's like a academic campus ground and things like that only digitally and supported by a different norm than the state's norm or the capitalist norm but before we develop this and assign a public infrastructure status in national budget like the budget to encourage research then it's impossible for people to um you know work on this for a long time to provide viable uh alternative to the advertisement fueled uh capitalist platforms because of market incentives so in 2016 for the first time we classified these digital projects as infrastructure in our infrastructure bill which previously only pay for things that are concrete like literally made out of concrete and in 2016 special act we say no um even if this made of bits not concrete it's still essential public infrastructure and we got a lot of good public infrastructure funded this way that are at arm's length from the state control i see okay uh i think that we still want to keep discussing but i think that because of the time here we want to also invite the other question from other that audience and then still your students know that they can continue asking okay because i saw the raising hand by like a mamoon um muhammed from Bangladesh and also i saw that one more persons uh from that the japanese um persons who wanted to raise hand but now it's um yeah but if you want to raise a hand please raise a function and then mamoon could you speak can you show your face mamoon muhammed okay then me while yeah mamoon is here okay yeah please please okay thank you senji for giving opportunities being a uh really a pleasure opportunity for me to you can show your face too yeah yes i i see i see mamoon i see mamoon now you didn't see me okay thank you so senji it's a really pleasure for me to see you uh uh at least after three years yes thank you senji um my question and especially thanks to honorable minister to uh raise the fantastic issue and a really time-bound issue but my question is the experience between developed and developing country is not same especially in digital rather in some in some cases if you compare the developing country it's increased the digital divide so especially in countries like Bangladesh even maybe india pakistan or this sort of countries uh there is a school there is people always that their mindset especially from the perspective uh service provider and service receiver so for example if you incorporate some service through digital device to internet it creates some third parties for their business because the most people or the people who are getting this service they are not quite uh they are not uh they don't have sufficient knowledge or accountability service so that they need to hire someone some uh uh agency or some people so do you think that it sometimes increase the divisions among the people especially the those who have and have not and another question is there is in your abstract you mentioned us to minimize the gap between rural and urban for information digital technology especially in rural and urban they have a separate lifestyle separate because if you want to see a place it has some separate uh life style and urban it has several life styles so how we can minimize this just only through information because their life style is different people are different profession is different and because some people are living rural because they like to live as rural so thank you minister for uh for giving me some thank you thank you very good questions just to check my understanding uh the first question is really about how to make sure that people overcome uh their um kind of existing disadvantages when it comes to digital competence uh and the infrastructure required so that there is a kind of positive attitude toward digital transformation and the second uh is almost a flip of that once we get people digitalized uh it disrupts its uh cultural norms because everybody watches Netflix or something right and then the lifestyles gets disrupted and the local culture and norms too uh and and become much more global but also it means that people lose something of their identity when it comes to their local culture did i get that right okay right okay so um yeah yeah but as i said that mamun is talking about because of the fundamentally there are kind of the difference among developed country and then developing countries on the maybe that the the level of technology and also human resources so that because maybe people are very much students are very much impressed with how taiwan is really mature everybody is so committed to the social and contribution and so the it sector people or even yeah so that so i think maybe many people feel like those kind of cultural or social basis may not exist or still premature or at the same time technically speaking there are lots of maybe differences between advanced and then this advanced country so he is struggling know that uh how how those things can be yeah uh yeah yes yes that that's my uh interpretation of a kind of path out of the current like have nots uh and uh more disadvantaged uh countries and so one and and this includes some very technical points like if you are on a small island in the pacific ocean then the internet connectivity is expensive for example if you're a landlock country that means that it's simply not able to get good negotiations price on internet peering and things like that so there are some like real economic factors at play here that's certainly true so um my my answer is first um taiwan did not start like this when i was born in the early 80s of course it's true that we have personal computers but we're we were at a time still under the martial law there was no freedom of assembly of getting the social organizations even the co-ops cannot take any political party attitude they have to say we're just working on environmental protection or things like that so it's not a very free political landscape uh in the time i was born right so uh i mean we were there it's not like we're always describing uh digital democracy okay so so i think that the point is that in taiwan even during the day of the martial law even during the day that we did not have problem as a human right there is a consistent thread of the social sector especially after the earthquake the great earthquake of september 21 what used to be different religions like this church and that's buddhist religion temple they start to work together like brothers and sisters because of that great earthquake and i believe the same thing has happened in japan actually many times over actually so what i'm trying to say is that i'm not saying that disaster is a requirement but but it is quite true that a common urgency not necessarily a disaster bends people together and the social solidarity that you learn from it then powers the necessary ladder of expertise that leads people out of the have-nots mindset we can see the same for example with how taiwanese people insisted that our country dedicate spare medical mask to the international community even when we're relatively still short on mask last year and in turn of course we get very generous the dedications and donations from uh well even little wania but also japan and so on on vaccines this time and so on so this is kind of circulation of goodwill and this is because we're facing the common urgency of the pandemic so my point is that to discover your common urgency with the international community it could be climate action right it could be any of those sdgs to discover the common urgency is to get connected to a much more positive some community instead of engaging purely in zero-sum communities i believe that is one possible way out and also the local cultures and norms i believe in taiwan as we have more than 20 national languages if you count the sign language also and many of which are indigenous so we care very much about the equity of the indigenous culture that they own the kind of sovereignty of first nation status when we bring technology to them and so this idea of uh transculturalism i believe is very important when we legalized for example i understand this is a sensitive topic marriage equality uh in a couple years back we made sure we did not change the civil code the civil code stays untouched we just made a new act and hyperlink this new relationship to the rights and duties by law but we did not mention anything about the in-law the families and families do not wed when the two same sex persons perform this this article two relation ceremony and so because of that it doesn't touch the family structure or the social norm and this is what allowed the social norm to continue to thrive without getting disrupted by this like well connected digital native idea of gender equity based marriage equality so if you understand what i'm saying is this bylaws is just the rights and duties the in-laws the family relationships is to be honored we must never let one side triumph the other otherwise the earthquake will not raise our island it will sink our island okay thank you uh we have maybe a few minutes uh only remaining before the minister but i think we have a two uh maybe questions so the two Kobayashi-san so may i invite both of you to have a very brief questions and then uh already can maybe yeah answer yeah in the integral manner yeah so Kobayashi-san first the Hitaru-san first and then Azumi-san yeah okay the minister-san thank you very much for having the opportunity to talk to you i'm from medical policy so the my question is time to the medical that you made marbles achievement under the covid-19 owing to digital technology which medical domains do you still see issues in Taiwan and the where the area you could get to over the devaluation of digital technology that is my question okay thank you let me invite Azumi-san also could you unmute yourself yeah thank you very much for for your very best lecture my question is uh how do you think you can better use the power of digital in an also also real real country authoritarian country yes i see okay these are two very important questions yeah right we can run like two hour seminars on each question and i'm doing this in two minutes okay right so um to the second question um i was boring now authoritarian country right so Taiwan was a quite authoritarian and because of this i believe we have a unique glimpse into this questions answer which is simply that we see democracy as a kind of social technology if we think of democracy as not a time-honored condition or something but rather a technology like semiconductor design if you vote for president that's uploading three bits per person every four years not a lot of bandwidth but if you vote every other day on the online petition then using new voting method like quadratic voting you can get a lot more preferences out that's like kilobytes of transmission as compared to just bits of transmission so thinking about democracy not as some sacred religion nor ritual but rather as a useful social technology that everybody can improve i believe that is how we slowly and now surely walked out of authoritarianism by thinking about even our constitution uh or our referendum act as piece of social technology that people can design together so that's a very brief answer to your great question and the first question about the medical domains i believe in Taiwan we're now working in the kind of domains before the medical that is to say i think it's called preventative medicine or simply a health domain so before people get sick people want to know how they can change their behavior for the better of their family and themselves and during the pandemic this is doubly necessary because one person's bad public health habit becomes well a public disaster well now we're back to like 20 30 cases a day it's not feel like a disaster anymore but but it was the memory was fresh is what i'm saying so i believe a good data collaborative it's not just about pooling together musk donation it's also pooling together good behavior that encourage people to drink more for example when they exercise under high heat for example to encourage people to refill their bottles rather than buying a lot of plastic bottles when they do outdoor activities together about push notifications to change the behavior so that when people exercise they're also reducing carbon footprint and so on and so forth and because it serves the public purpose then it's of course fair to everyone involved but it has also to be fun like a pokemon go game i need to be fun so if it's fast it's fair and it's fun and it has real potential for behavior changing and once that is designed with participatory design then nobody gets sick right if they do this very regularly at least for a longer time and then we don't need to go into the medical domain that quickly is my answer is that okay yes thank you very much i think we need more time in really interacting and discussing and learning but i think that because of the time i think for the discussion with minister town maybe this yeah that concludes this so um i will have a wrap up later that after she leaves but for we really would like to thank you very much for ordering both very such an important time and then share with us how the taiwan social sector which include both public and private sector know have a progress over time and then commit it yeah to working together and technology is a part of this so that is a very strong culture yeah president tanaka do you want to say something at the last moment well i only want to thank odry thank you for your great talk yeah okay so let's yeah that's a thank you very much show the odry for that that's a long ride and then process and thank you very much we really appreciate thank you thank you arigatabasamashita thank you we will see you again yeah yes bye bye bye bye thank you please please still connected no yeah so thank you very much for everybody and then among the students yeah um if you have something your thought you want to share like a sidra or i don't know yuhi or saken or joy forever yeah if you have something you want to share after discussing with um odry that we we are also welcome yeah maybe we have a few minutes reflection do you see someone maybe that the taiwan's kind of culture special culture has been fostered through the histories and she mentioned that taiwan was also also italian regime and then but there are kind of people who try to commit in social improvement and then technologies become a part of this but um i really feel like this is a very important things if you have any thinking do you want to share together that would be very much appreciated no okay okay then uh maybe because the we i think we had a very much good time uh with um really getting idea and a strong vision and the impressive maybe achievement that taiwan has been making uh under the odry so uh let me go to this final maybe wrap up session so um i have to say that uh we learned a lot from today's discussion and also active participation from all of you and uh i think we are living in a digital revolution age of digital revolution and then current crisis pandemic accelerate this trend but i think we had a really important time to to learn together and i think let me say three three three takeaways which we learned from orderly first is that uh we have learned the model of people centered co-creative democratic governance in the digit in the age of digitalization i think she talked about many times social sector which covers both public and not the private sector citizens having us shared maybe uh the same common maybe goal she said the social emergency common emergency is a driver for moving people no so i think we feel like at the past government like a president like abahab abahab rinkan said about the government of the people by the people for the people but i think it's important that we will be working also government with the people as that is a very important message she gave us uh second at the same time for this model to work all of us may need to change the mindset so the government have to maybe change how to communicate with the citizens and also also change toward much more active engagement in making contributing societal engagement so revolution should not be just limited to the technology but also maybe mindset have to be changed then lastly uh to conclude uh in this digital age like you i think young people who must be societies and countries and the world towards a better society you know so means that time herself showed that that the model by herself she's a really great outstanding model in this regard so how can we foster these young leaders like her and who is good at technology and also with a very motivation for inclusiveness innovativeness so what kind of new capabilities needed so i think today's discussion made me really rethink and reconform the importance of mandate also the institution like us with us as educational and research institution so we must continue working hard to nurture young global leaders and conduct quality policy research which contribute to the achievement of sdg so uh i hope uh we had a very uh good inspiration for individually and we can bring back for our that uh that the life and also that the organization for society and the countries so i really thank you so much for your participation and also all the students in participating for this session very much thank you very much thank you thank you very