 The local time, everyone. This is Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister. It is my great pleasure and honor to be here virtually at the 2021 OJP Academy and share some thoughts with you about Taiwan's digital democracy. As Digital Minister of Taiwan, I suppose it makes perfect sense for me to travel digitally across time zones and boundaries to be part of this very meaningful event. However, I believe many of you would also agree when I say it is really a pity that a pandemic made it difficult for me to join you in person. I remember the last time I traveled to Korea. It was mid-January 2020, literally the week before the pandemic, and I had an opportunity to have face-to-face discussions with so many top-notch experts and scholars and shook hands with friends from all over the world. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic threw the world off balance. It brought drastic changes. In many parts of the world, we have seen symptoms of democracy in backslide, and some authoritarian regimes have tried to justify the measures of state surveillance and restrictions in the name of public health. Of course, there is never an easy way to tackle emerging challenges, but I see opportunities arise among the biggest global crisis of our time when we are faced with this shared challenge that confronts the global population. In Taiwan, I see digital social innovations continue to accelerate democracy and also deepen collaboration across all sectors. In Taiwan, democracy is seen as an applied social technology that improves when more people work together to achieve a common goal, just like any other technologies. It works as a vehicle to turn the energy spread across different agencies and sectors into a driving force for policy innovation. And the trick is to enable the concept of working with the people, not just for the people, to permeate public policy decision-making. In other words, it is important to unleash the power of crowdsourcing democracy. So how do we start to bring ourselves to work with the people? Well, for me, the answer is simple. It's to trust our citizens, because to give no trust is to get no trust. And the first step towards such mutual trust is transparency. A few days ago, I met with a delegation from the European Parliament. One of the delegation members have heard about how facial recognition was used by some authoritarian regimes, and he was curious about how AI and digital technologies are seen and adopted in Taiwan. And my answer was that in pluralistic democracies, AI should stand for assistive intelligence, rather than authoritarian intelligence. And while digital tools are used to make their citizens transparent to the state for authoritarian regimes, in Taiwan we are using digital technologies to make the state and our decision-making process radically transparent to the people. And that is why in Taiwan we have dedicated ourselves to bring technologies into the spaces where citizens are, rather than expect citizens to adapt to the space where the technologies are. So much like how the tip of Taiwan raises two or three centimeters each year because of the earthquakes from clashing tectonic plates hits us, we have built resilient democratic infrastructures to invite completely different ends of the spectrums. Those ideas, thoughts, feelings with markedly different initial positions to come to the virtual table to discuss and also to co-create. A great example is the one-stop online civic participation platform called Join The GOV.TW, where anyone can file a petition and participate in policymaking. Face-to-face cross-ministerial collaborative meetings are held twice monthly to explore ways to incorporate ideas from the petitions with more than 5,000 signatures into policymaking. Literally anyone, not just citizens, but residents, global citizens, people younger than a voting age, they can and they do play a role in our decision-making process. So far, we have held more than 100 collaborative meetings this way. As of October 2021, there have been close to 30 million visits to Join The GOV.TW, and Taiwan, well, we're just a country with population of 23 million. And we're also using digital technologies to cross our solutions to address globally shared challenges from a presidential or a country-wise scale. For example, we have a dedicated annual event called the Presidential Hackathon, which invites citizens from around the world to propose solutions based on open data to global issues such as climate change, and also anti-corruption, smart cities, and so on. Every year, five winning teams receive a trophy from President Tsai Ing-wen that carries the promise in the form of a projector of realizing their ideas on a national scale in the following fiscal year. We'll turn on the projector that projects their presidential promise. So with this mechanism, mutual trust and dialogue between the social, public, and private sectors are reliably discovered and amplified. Digital democracy also played an important role in our fight against the pandemic. I believe the reason we are able to counter the pandemic with no lockdown and infodemic with no takedown is based on the three pillars of fast, fair, and fun. Fast is for fast response, fair for fair access for all, and fun for humor over rumor, turning outrage into creativity so we can overcome difficulties together. So with these key values, we can find opportunities for people, public, private partnerships, and even a small idea can be augmented and amplified into a strong force for a good. A good example was last February's face mask mask. Initiated by social entrepreneurs working with the decentralized community of join.g0v.tw.gov0, a group of civic technologies in Taiwan. To prevent the panic buying of medical masks, we instituted a national rationing scheme. In February last year, we also released the API, the application programming interface to provide the public with real time location specific data on mask availability. And within just only a few days, more than 100 different months and chatbots were created so that people can look at the details of where masks are stock and their numbers. And just after one month, it was adopted in Korea. Similarly, in May this year, when Taiwan faced the real first wave and early wave so far of COVID, the early measures to record the contact information for those entering and leaving public venues, led to the quick development of the 192 to SMS contact tracing system, again from Gov.0 in just three days. So it's not a government technology. It's intuitive. It's up free. It is an easy way to check in at public places without any compromise on anyone's privacy. You don't have to download any app. It's based on the well understood principle of QR code and SMS. And anyone can look up who has accessed these records from the contact tracing offices in the past four weeks. And we're also using the power of crowdsourcing in the people public private partnership to fight against the infodemic to relieve the pandemic and science that has still the flames of disinformation. Instead of using any centralized takedown, shutdown, lockdown initiatives, we focus instead on a decentralized human centered approach. The humor over rumor tactic, for example, gives the public room to laugh at non factual information. We also put an emphasis on media competence instead of media literacy, such that the people can see themselves as contributors to journalism. So middle schoolers, for example, can fact check our three presidential candidates in real time as they were having their debates. Compared to the censorships, I believe this is a far more long lasting solution or vaccination of the mind to the ongoing infodemic. The word democracy comes from ancient Greek that combines demos, people and kratos, hawa. It means power according to the will of the people on behalf of the people. And in Taiwan, we're making efforts to demonstrate how the use of digital platforms can strengthen democracy by giving everyone a voice and enabling a government that works, as I said, with the people. Supported by meaningful and affordable internet access, even on the tip of Taiwan, broadband costs just 15 US dollars a month, no restrictions on the data rates. Because we believe that human rights, freedom of speech and democracy are not to be traded in any shape or form. There is a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in. We're faced with this shared challenge that confronts the global population and opportunity emerges to form shared goals. Bringing all hands on deck to crowdsourced for ideas that unlocks our collective intelligence and connective intelligence to march toward a free, open, democratic and resilient world. To conclude, I would like to share with you my own job description that I wrote when I joined the cabinet in 2016 as a digital minister. It goes like this. When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you all for listening. Live long and prosper.