 Rebecca you're muted. Thanks. Welcome everybody. Sorry to be muted. I think folks are slowly trickling in so Maybe as folks join I will ask our guest speaker to describe Why we are not using zoom and why why we're using WebEx today. Yeah, we're negotiating with zoom and because Zoom had previous records of kicking people out that didn't You know warned in beforehand when they talk about things sensitive to the PRC vision regime And so we're we're negotiating with them so that if they implement proper controls for that sort of things and into an encryption on Web clients and so on then maybe we'll be back on better terms But for now, let's use this more ancient version of some I guess Awesome. Um, so like I said, welcome to our guest today. My name is Rebecca Williams. I'm currently a fellow at Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center's technology for public purpose Project in this seminar as a part of that series I'll I'll go over like a couple logistics and the run of show and introduce our guest speaker tonight and then Go through a set of questions. I I think we're already recording and this will be published online afterwards. So That's the first like logistical notes Don't put any questions in here that you don't feel comfortable having publicly available online afterwards forever Another logistical no Folks are encouraged to put questions into the Q&A chat Throughout the session session. We'll get to them in the last 15 minutes or so as many as we can So just trickle them in there In terms of Run of show, I'm hoping to cover Three different types of topics tonight with Audrey. We'll see see how deep we go into each But I wanted to talk a little bit about Different opportunities and responsibilities across sectors So Audrey's worked in the private public and social sector. I've worked in two of those as well And I think it's a shared experience. We can talk about So all the angles of play there the second topic that I want to go through is discussing Participatory versus passive data collection techniques For folks that are familiar with my fellowship work, I'm researching smart cities right now and this comes up a lot and It's deeply involved with Audrey's work So I think we'll have some interesting things to talk about there And then the last just sort of looking at things from different angles question will be Global relationships. So anything that you can think of there East versus West different ways to think Think that is it for run of show I'm I'm excited to talk to Audrey as mentioned because we have these shared experiences of working inside and outside And I think that helps you to appreciate Challenges as well as opportunities and how these issues are very collective and everyone has to join in In terms of Audrey's bio Audrey you're welcome to describe sort of like you're coming up story But in preparation for this, I just got it down your job description Which I know you've said many podcasts before but I think folks will appreciate So folks that aren't familiar Audrey Tang is the digital minister for Taiwan and wrote their own job description. It's a poem prayer It goes when we see 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 then when we hear the singularity is near let us remember the plurality is here So I think that's beautiful and also sets us up for this many angles discussion So Yeah, without further ado Audrey Tang. Welcome. Thank you for being here Welcome and yeah, and I might add that when we see the smart cities is near let's remember smart citizens are here Yeah, yeah, oh very good write my job description So maybe a first question in that first section of Question sections What do you see as unique opportunities and responsibilities across sectors and maybe drawn from your own experience or? colleagues certainly so my work involves building people public-private Partnerships meaning that the social sector sets the norm the public sector Amplifies the norm and the private sector will implements but also scales out the norm and in this social sector led approach for example during the presidential election in 2020 January in Taiwan the prevailing norm was that The counting of each vote is public Livestream recorded by youtubers of all the different political parties Even if people don't believe the other parties youtubers will they sure believe their own and they all develop their apps That's tallies the count and so because of that remarkably low penetration and Spread was seen on the disinformation around election manipulation and people Actually claim it for that from the social sector Since 2014 actually since much longer, but the Occupy move in 2014 really put it in focus So people for example went into the national auditing office Bringing out carbon copies because there was no open data about campaign donation expanded to advertisement and so one and then We in the gov zero movement helped digitizing it using what we call OCR or taco character recognition So like solving captures people help restoring the digital numbers from those canned copies The national audit office was like you can't be sure even if three people look at each cell You can't be sure it's 100% correct and we're like, yeah, of course you're in the public sector You should amplify the norm you should publish those numbers so the investigative journalist can't do this job So in 2018 the public sector after being pressured for four years did actually open Data the raw data of the campaign donation expanded so and then everyone discovered That's the social media companies like Facebook the advertisements was not classified as campaign donation or expenditure It was not seen in the audit office records So the campaign donation is domestic only but foreign sponsorship of advertisement in 2018 was possible And they are not required to disclose anything and so Facebook of course pushed back a little bit when we negotiate that But because the social sector threatened social sanction So we did not actually pass any new laws vis-à-vis Facebook But actually Facebook in 2019 time I became the first restriction where they implemented this whole real-time Open data advertisement library thing But that's not because the state is particularly strong But rather because the state has previously already resisted and failed to resist and therefore joined the social sector in their norm setting So this is just one small anecdote But I hope that you see the shape of the people public-private partnership on this Yeah, absolutely for viewers that might not be familiar with Gov-0's work I certainly became familiar with gov-0 when I was working at the NGO in the US Sunlight Foundation And we had like a couple collaborative events even with like the open legislative data And I was very encouraged but also for folks who aren't familiar with it gov-0 their URL is g0v Yeah g0v It's the equivalent of if we had like whitehouse.gov that there was a zero in the house and that was sort of this antagonizing Activist group improving the White House data site. It's very it's very clever And inspirational. I appreciate You being very clear about who sort of sets the norms and the social sector something that comes up Certainly in the United States Tech culture is this idea of disruption coming from either private sector or even sometimes Government and not necessarily social sector norms. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts about? Private or gov disruption versus being set by social norms. Yeah, I think when the social sector sets the disruption It's often Communicated in a way that doesn't leave anyone behind But when the private sector does so Well, it's more like a fear of missing out right only their customers are the ones that are not left behind And so it's a very different thing at the social purpose versus the private sector purpose I think it's really at at play here in Taiwan Especially in our counter-pandemic work. We rely on setting new norms, of course in Taiwan We did not have a norm of physical distancing and I bet not in other jurisdictions as well And so we really need to communicate those norms But what we did is that we took how the social sector is communicating those norms For example at a time the the dog meme was really Popular and so we have a very cute dog the spokes dog names don't shy a sheba Who works as a companion dog of the Participation officer that's a team of people engaging trending hashtags in each ministry We've got around a hundred people there and so the health and welfare Participation officer lives with this dog and then we look at the memes and then we Engineer the memes a little bit so that we can say for example when you're indoor keep three sheba's away from one another Or wear a mask and when you're outdoor keep two sheba's away or wear a mask and as a plus This dog also tells you don't do this like don't put your hand to your mouth The mask are there to protect your own face against your own unwashed head again These are developed in a way that social sector first. We certainly did not originate Many of our memes they came from the social sector, but the state serves as a amplifier, right? It makes sure that's the science the clarifications the Epidemiological ideas and so on can be translated in a way that already speaks to the people and and I mean this dog is Like has intergenerational fan audience There's no, you know leaving some people in and leaving other people behind This is quite universal. It's been translated to like 20 National languages in Taiwan and so on and so it's maximally inclusive And so while it's quite disruptive to keep physical distancing or to wear a mask all the times the Creativity and the ability to remix in the social sector in the people public Partnership made sure that this doesn't leave anyone behind Yeah, that campaign reminds me of in the US there's certainly been Government Twitter accounts a few that take to this sort of like remixing memes as part of their strategy And it certainly is an example of one of your philosophies if I will like You've had other interviews about how you believe in humor Over rumor as a strategy and that's an example of that as well as radical Transparency as being a core ethos. I wonder what your experience has been living those principles in different sectors I imagine radical transparency Has a little bit more friction to it as a public sector employee than it would when you're an activist Or how do you feel about it? Yeah? Well in a social sector as part of the free software and then also open source movements Radical transparency is really our thing right at the the idea is that anyone with an email account Well nowadays with github and so on you don't even have to have a Email account you can use other social media login and so on but in any case This basically means that anyone as long as they're willing for their contributions to be on permanent record for the descendants and people who read the Arctic fold to to Look at state they gain agenda setting power. They can actually set how the Poor requests go how the project goes and so on and the power builds upon those Botanist connections between people who don't really know each other But because of shared keywords shared values and so on they discover from their initially very different positions There are worse wild things to work on together So that's the core of the organizing principle of the social sector that forms the free and open source movements Now in the public sector that interestingly I didn't meet any resistance because I'm not Imposing this on other cabinet members I'm just saying that each of the ministries can send the condiments my way And we work out loud, but we're not forcing anyone to do so So the upshot is that the people facing ministries for example the initially the ministries of culture of Finance public diplomacy National communication education, you know the usual suspects they all send people around 12 different ministries But for example the Ministry of National Defense never sent anyone maybe they're not that used to radical transparency And that's entirely fine. And so the nature of conversation I would say really changes because I hold office hours Anyone can talk to me booking my time for 40 minutes at a time and there's also walk-in and people see that I have this public park as a office. So like literally they can walk in we tore down the walls and This is just this very open space But the nature of conversation as I mentioned tend to be pro-social It tend to be social sector and maximally inclusive simply because they know they will be on permanent record It will look actually very bad if they lobby for something for this generation at expense of the next generations Or if they lobby for something within their sector at the expense of other sector, it will look quite bad So the same dynamic is also a play where the table recorder or the video cam stands for the future generation or stands for the missing stakeholders at a table and Pretty much all the arguments I hear from my office hours and visits and lobbyists are about to come on good the sustainable goods So maybe last one of my questions about cross sectoral work is More about your maybe your personal feelings and like skills involved in each of these roles. I'm curious Certainly like going from social sector to Public sector you're going for more of a participant role to a facilitator role and just how does that feel skills wise? Do you have a preference? Do you do long for a time when you're back in the social sector? Do you not see a big difference? How do you feel I'm a slash, right? So I'm digital minister that TW slash board member radical exchange slash board member council democracy foundation Slash advisory board go off laugh slash many other things actually seven Social sector rules. So I'm not missing social sector rules because In all honesty, I see myself as a kind of Lagrange point That is between the gravity wells of the social and public and private actually sectors And in a way that facilitates communication cross sector But is not captured by the gravity well of any particular sector But to answer your question about skills involved I think the public sector is all about like the reducing risk so people feel safe and Reducing the chores so that people can listen better like the more signal less noise and so on and While in the social sector these are also important in social sector We care more about the purpose itself the mission itself Building trust around those missions trustworthiness and so on and less so about reducing risk Less so about this psychological feeling of safety across the entire Population so I think both sectors can learn a little bit from from each other because the social sector can learn from the public sector too If they become de facto public sector as many digital service from cup zero eventually became then we need to take care About people who are of very different cultural backgrounds very different age and very different digital capability Say compared to the developers We need to be more inclusive and diverse and the public sector can also learn from the social sector saying You know if we have a shared common purpose like 75 percent of people have to wear a mask and wash hands Then actually the public so it doesn't have to come up with all the answers We can actually work with the social and private sectors so that they actually Contribute to the shared purpose and mission if we can articulate the purpose and the mission in a way that is Shaped like a call to action, which is something the public sector definitely can learn from It's a good segue into our Yes, I know I'm a bit ambitious trying to get through all these questions Okay, so next next section is on this this idea of Participatory versus sort of passive data collection and maybe passive isn't the right word, but I feel like participatory probably is But I've certainly been looking at it in the context of smart cities and Something that's come up time and time again when I've talked to Activists from around the world, but many in the US a major concern right now is just prolific surveillance and also that it's attached to US police and all the also other enforcement Mechanism ticketing like all these sort of punitive Goals of sort of watching like big eyeballs on all these policy pieces, and I'm wondering Youth you think about listening at scale and how much that is something that looks like This scary surveillance and how much of that is just sort of voluntary Yeah, this is a really good theoretical even philosophical question Now, I think listening is a active skill Someone who listens is actually quite active, right? I you're listening to me and I can see your your attention the alert level deciphering the messages and Trying to segue into the next section and so on and so it involves a very complex Affective and cognitive of course Behavioral processes and that is requires a lot of motivation to do on the other hand a tape recorder Probably doesn't have these skills and probably doesn't have motivation per se And if it's simply sitting in the background collecting voice I wouldn't call it listening at all and you call it surveillance or surveillance for passive data, and I think it's exactly why it's because When the raw data is just audio data some spectrum waveforms and so one and it carries no no cultural meaning It is not a social object and so one and so when we're listening. We're not listening to data We're not listening to audio data. I would never describe our conversation this way I'm listening to to your arguments to your questions to your feelings to your reflections And so on these are on the meaning level of things This is reminds me that I just a couple weeks ago explained that there's no data norms per se Just like there's no text norms. There's a norm for journalism. There's a normal academic publishing There's no for many forms of text, but there's no text norm It's meaningless if you like abstract it out to the text level and the same goes for the data level So I think the intentionality the engagement the activeness of the listener I think that's what differentiates listening as a human-to-human action versus data collection Which is ultimately a machine-to-machine action Yeah, that that speaks to I think a lot of at least the The up-and-coming local laws in the US are very data tech bounded and then they get into Oversight discussions but outside of the the law itself and they're not contextual the way you're describing. They're very like audio Yes, audio. No Yeah, so following up on that. I'm curious What you see? I'm thinking like again like local US news Recent police shootings that are more available to us To organize around as a social sector because we have video Because we have these other technologies that help us campaign certainly technology is not what made that possible People make it possible, but it's a facilitating tool What what other sort of uses have you seen in Taiwan in terms of technology providing social sector Capacity and also ways for sectors to talk to each other. Yeah I talk about the technology of scanners and computer vision and crowdsourcing OCR Turned some very blunt papers in the national audit office Into issues of common concerns in the social sector when it comes to integrity of the election and election related campaign donation and finance And things like that which is a well you work in sunlight So, you know exactly what I'm talking about If they if they sit as papers or even like obscure PDF or JPEG images Then of course people cannot organize any rallies around that. So that's a very clear example I would add to that saying that pretty much anything that allows the social sector to set agenda about the common situation is a good technology and I include in my Word technology also facilitative technology such as open space technology Which is the bread and butter of the gov zero hackathons and the OST? Well, it causes of a technology, right? It's a social technology and non-violent communication MVC also a Interpersonal technology that could be adapted and learned by pretty much anyone and I would go even far as to say Democracy to me is also a form of social technology. It's also technology We have voting which enables three bits per person every four years uploaded a very constrained bit rates from the modern standards, but we also have say the presidential hackathon in Taiwan Where we elevate the top social sector and public sectors Cross-sectoral ideas and every year we give our five trophies, which is a shape of Taiwan But with the micro projector underneath so all the good ideas that are cross-sectorally called to action They need only to prototype that for example Telediagnosis for example in order to reduce carbon footprint people can use augmented reality to plant trees together For example going to a Pokemon go like tool But actually learning about drinking fountains and refilling bottles instead of buying new plastic and things like that So all these call to action once they receive the trophy they can turn on the micro projector and project Dr. Tsai Ing-wen our president and and the president she hands the trophy to the teams in our ceremony promising Whatever they did will become national-level public policy soon as possible usually within 12 months And so that's presidential power as a amplifier as a hackathon prize Which I would argue is a much higher bandwidth bit rate compared to just voting Of course, we're not using hackathons to replace voting far from it But we're using hackathons participatory budget sandboxes many other things to augment and to make That's citizens agenda setting more in the here and now anyone can start a e petition In our national participation platform called join soon as they collect five thousand signatures minister have to come and Answer if it's cross-ministerial we have to meet and things like that and again They don't have to wait for four. Yes, they only have to wait for like 60 days at most I guess yeah following up on that. I've heard you talk about When folks in the social sector are upset about some sort of government platform outrage This product doesn't work. They're invited in to participate And co-creating the next version of that with all of those things that you just said like in mind How what a couple things are going on in the US that are trending one is our Surveys for our statistical data sets are getting less and less responses people don't answer telephone They're looking for new ways to either Fund those programs or use other collected data to like augment Because people won't respond to surveys Another thing that is like very common in US public comments at the local or federal level is it's this usual suspect It's not sort of representative of the whole population And there is like a slight crisis of sort of bots just sort of copy and pasting The same comment again and again and is that representative or not? There's been a couple innovative techniques like I think it was Drexel University was doing some Sample-sized surveys for public comment where they really tried to represent the full population demographically And do all this extra legwork instead of come to the meeting at 6 p.m. If you can I'm curious like it what do you do to promote participation or is this culture just different there that more people want to participate and then What work if any is done to try to make it as representative as possible? Yeah In 2014 right around when we occupy the parliament for three weeks or so Well, that's a sort of engagement I guess but the approval rate of the cabinet at that time in 2014 was less than 10% And so immediately before the occupancy January 2014 if you ask random people on the street They probably don't really care about political engagement and many people express Frustration and the same sort of frustration that we see in other jurisdictions today Are really prevalent in a very prominent writer said even if you know 10,000 people pressed like on Facebook on the social cause when it comes to call to action Nobody shows on the street, right? And so I think this is something we can sympathize because In 2014 it was like that in Taiwan too and no design of surveys can cure that What we've found is that people are only willing to actively engage and endorse any Survey or any tool including text filing and if they participate in the design process and and this is really key This is really that the most important thing and the Polish technology We use for example to resolve the dialogue about the UberX situation So that people instead of debating endlessly about what's sharing economy Should it be gig economy platform economy? whatever can actually focus on the common values of Insurance of registration not undercutting existing meters and so on so the tool that does so Polis basically is what we call a wiki survey. It's a survey, but all the survey Items are other contribute or other citizens contributions So it's just like upvoting and downloading we crowdsource the Hundreds of different survey items and when people press yes, no, yes, no They can resonate with one another much more Visualizing it and then also propose something that they feel strongly about for other people to resonate about And so if you structure the survey as a wiki survey, I think much more Likely that people will participate and people will also invite their cross-sectoral friends to participate and resonate Together and the important thing here is not just statistical representation, but also that's all the Minority opinions and feelings are Represented it's not representation per se because it's the person holding the feeling actually typing the feeling There's no representative between them and the system but the system because it highlights The minority positions as long as they're distinct enough. They don't actually Get left behind simply because they can't get 5,000 people on their side Actually, we don't even count the the head counts when drawing the shape of the police conversation What you're seeing here is the actual Uber X conversation The blue circle is the participants and their friends and families on the social media are shown in different sectors But the sectors area represents the diversity not the headcount So even if you mobilize 5,000 people to vote exactly the same way the size doesn't change It doesn't even increase the chance of that particular group's ideas into the shared agenda You have to convince people in all the different aisles. So what I'm trying to get it Is that if we design the interaction carefully so you highlight in an inclusive way highlights diversity then you don't Need to worry about Representativeness that much because no one is oblique to represent other people Everyone can just resonate with one another on the other hand on the more anti social corners of social media That's design isn't seen right so with the reply buttons and with the you know memes pictures and so on people get More divisive over time and then you don't see this kind of shirt comma agenda anymore So I think most of it is in the design of the interaction and one need to really engage the people who are Least likely to engage in the previous paradigm So that they can co-design the new paradigm and therefore more willingly participate Yeah, it's like a meta answer working on the this the survey design is how you get people I mean, I mean, I saw the Differential privacy being introduced on the federal level, which is great as someone in applied Computing as mathematics, but because that's certainly from the watching afar. That's certainly not co-designed By the participating states and participating jurisdictions and so that Controversy is less on the differential privacy that epsilon value the mathematical model itself, but rather on So what about nothing about us without us is this design without us? But in Taiwan we applied differential privacy also quite early on the initial detail and conversation about Data privacy protection actually the recommendation was differential privacy, but it was a joint Resolution a joint recommendation by people who actually used to sue each other People in the human rights groups in the national health insurance agency in all the different stakeholders around the private data And they actually explained that They could switch to better tools They don't want to make that Privacy usability trade-off and then people generally understood what differential privacy entails and so on and then gradually made that shared recommendation much as how we did a recommendation on the Uber x situation So while the technology is the same the socials technology to introduce it to a national audience Was different and I think that affected the popular sentiments as well Yeah Common theme that's sort of giving space for folks to come to these consensus ideas on their own Oh No, we are running at the time. Okay the last data question I see folks are putting questions in the Q&A to start to ramp up and do that because we'll Pivot over to Q&A last sort of data questions since since I spent a lot of time in The open data space. I wonder what thoughts you have Sort of government funded data as like a public good for folks and like what data that should be collected versus not and also An observation that I've I've had in this space. It's very reminiscent of gob zero is NGOs collecting their own version of a data set not just necessarily reengineering open street map or something but like a non-government version of a data set Augmenting or challenging. We had like the COVID-19 tracking project a lot of our police data conversations have been about like you're missing data Like what responsibility does the public sector have with its funding to like provide these sources? And and how should that be decided? Yeah in Taiwan? Basically anything that's not related to privacy or stay secret trade secret and so on is to be published as open data We have this very strong directive and soon as I become digital minister in 2016 I also said that it needs to be published upon collection that is to say all the system integrators and vendors in Taiwan they already have to build websites that are Accessible for people with blindness that works as well as with people with sight That's just non-negotiable if they say they have to charge a lot more money to build a version that serves people with blindness They could be disqualified for being unprofessional right and so we augmented that language and said They also need to build a open API version upon request so that it speaks to robots and if they say they have to You know charge a lot for that they could be disqualified for being unprofessional and Discriminating against robots when we don't say that but that's the effect So because of this API first design approach it changes the risk Matrix the risk formula for the public service because in the traditional Freedom of Information Act workflow there's some public servant that needs to be there to look at a Quality of the data to vouch for it to approve its release to make sure that it's redacted so when it needs to read acting And so one on the implementation phase on the runtime and so they tend to be quite conservative in making the data release on the other hand if it's released upon collection as part of the system integrators system then just like our mask availability data in the 6,000 pharmacies in Taiwan every time people queue in line to buy some ration masks last year They can use their phone to go to more than 100 different mobs and see that's for real time people who swipe the national Husqvar before them after just 30 seconds at most the new data the new numbers gets reflected on their phone and there's no Oversight from any public servants. Of course, nobody can review every 30 seconds 6,000 different pharmacies So it's entirely automatic machine to machine and so even if people detect data quality issues data bias and there's quite some bias in that data People tend to see it as a joint social object a social problem that everybody can contribute to solve Rather than pinpointing or blaming any particular agency or any particular public servants for missing it because everybody Understood that nobody could be reviewing as just machine to machine So my idea is that open data needs to be as much as possible open API And once the API is available the social sector can develop their own Applications and introduce their own data like building the air boxes to measure air quality Contributing to climate science and so on not only augmenting but also setting their own agenda about Decarbonization and things like that and that is very powerful and the public sector Can actually also join the social sector many gov zero Data project that challenges the public sector actually is Joined by the public servants who join in their spare time right when they're off work when in the weekends and so on So in a sense that's a way for the public service to innovate within the social sector if it doesn't work They can say oh, I'm just participating in a hackathon, but if does work Maybe they get a trophy from the president's and so to me I think the public sector can make sure that the infrastructure Anything that's part of the decision workflow must be published as soon as it's collected and that radical Transparency says the norm for the private and social sectors I have lots of questions about that, but we got to keep going So final sort of segment and then we'll move to Q&A and this will be short, but this is Talking about the world more broadly One of the other reasons it's I'm so thankful that you made time to talk to me today about these issues is I look up to Taiwan's work not just sort of with COVID response non-data things But certainly your transition into government and a lot of the leading technical Not just apps, but your ethos is very inspiring and I enjoy being inspired by you and You're very generous with sort of your evangelism across the world I see that you speak a lot, but I'm curious what inspires you what other Government work or individuals in your life. Where do you? get inspiration from Practically speaking I get a lot of inspiration from the ethereum community and from my co-board member of radical exchange Vitalik Buterin and a lot of things like quadratic voting that we apply to presidential hackathon I think for the third year now this year started in the ethereum space and I mean you ask which government I guess ethereum is like a government's race Certainly a co-governor in the blockchain space, but because the fast iteration allowed by the blockchain ecosystem They innovate on such social technologies like quadratic funding through get coins and so on in a way That's really breakneck speed. That's much faster than any legislature could move and so Once their ideas not necessarily all good, but when it emerges Better practices then we can actually apply it to real-world governance because we Understand that the required technological conversations as well as social conversations has been in a sense prototyped In the ethereum community, so I'm very inspired by that community myself Is it just sort of the the technology capabilities are also some of the Social technology parts the definitely the social innovation parts. Yeah, and it's for a coach I wrote my poem prayer job description when I was visiting New Zealand I was in Wellington at the time and I was inspired by the Maori community actually Which shares some spiritual cultural line edge the Austro-Indian line edge from the eastern Taiwan site for the past thousands of years and I think this Maori a relationship and the relationship between nature and the governing Mechanisms New Zealand as you know has natural personhood Where an entire national park or a river and so on has the same legal standing as a company say And that's really to me is quite inspiring as well as the internet of beings that connects not just things Not just the capitalistic structures, but also natural structures Yeah, there's a there was a hot news story in the US where Mark Zuckerberg had a house on a Hawaiian beach and in Hawaii the beaches are open to all Not necessarily beach rights, but it was a good clash of sort of different value systems Just because you brought a petherium and blockchain and tribute ledger I don't know if you have a response to there's been a lot of critique about environmental impact From what I understand, that's entirely what is here in 2.0 is about to switch to a more in energy efficient way to capture Consensus and I wish them the best luck and it looks like it's on the right track This switch from the traditional proof of work system seems to be quite feasible and because of the carbonization And energy awareness, I think the pressure to implement this transition correctly is also quite acutely felt I actually talked with Vitalik when he visited in 2016 actually just in this living room Of course is on on the record that the video is still on YouTube and I pointed out that the Dow fork the fork of a theory and over philosophical differences and so on and with this impending zoom people Have to scramble to invent new ways to capture consensus and so on reminds me a lot about The climate crisis the climate emergency because it's existential thing But it can't be solved without all the sectors contributing in so it's like a mini You know Paris accord that was in the ethering community back in 2016 And I think this is quite important that we feel this shirts responsibility to share purpose But also shared agency like everyone can do something about it Yeah, okay great segue to my last question and then I'll look to Q&A only see one in there right now So I'll just keep asking questions and what unless folks have more to add But in the spirit of Paris Agreement for everything We're seeing a lot of different Not only data regulation, but internet regulation and trade agreements with regard to our communication tools I Don't know if you have thoughts about sort of like if we need a common internet as a baseline or how these different Norms really like not just rules, but thoughts like about use of biometrics Across jurisdictions there. They're sort of wildly divergent and and how you think that Those are sort of Going to evolve and also affect the way we handle global politics Right on different pages with our communication tools. Yeah, this just goes way back to this more cities more citizens conversation in the very beginning of our conversation in many so-called smart city deployments the rules Algorithms code and so one are not open for forking by the people living in the city And so in a sense, they lose agency become less smart citizens because of the smart city deployment And so the right to city and many movements around that idea Basically says that anything that concerns the city's Arrangement of resource and so one need to be co-designed by the city In Taiwan, for example, when we introduced self-driving vehicles We didn't start in the fast part in the trucks and so on but rather in bicycles Actually tricycles in my social innovation lab for a couple years There's an any number of mobility hackathons involving people looking at self-driving tricycles That are actually smaller than us and can be reprogrammed in a way that's quite Intuitive so anyone can actually work with these quite alien looking tricycles and I remember a elderly couple who just Was you know carrying some orchid flowers in ports because it's the jenguo flower market, right? Next to my office and they said minister what you're doing with those shopping costs, and I'm like this I'm not shopping costs. These are self-driving vehicles If you hop on one and tell it where you want to go it slowly drives you there, of course It's quite slow so no accidents no trolley problem, and they're like no We don't want to be driven around rather We are the elderly people that don't want to carry the orchid flowers that much. I want a shopping companion I want this Shopping cards to follow us so that I can buy some flowers put in there and once it's full It can form a platoon right as to invite new ones to follow us and based on this norm We co-designed it so that it actually shows the active listening like which person they're following They have to interpret the hand gestures and gestures and so what and of course That's norm is co-created by the people the local people in the jenguo flower market And which says that it need to yield first to the elderly and then to Handicap people and then to maybe pregnant women and then maybe to children But when the original designer these were from MIT Media Lab run the same survey the same Co-creation exercise with people in Boston. They all said that it need to yield to the children and nobody care really about the elderly So in each society, there's very different norms and when we're applying the smart citizens way of thinking I think what's common is actually the methods that we use to design such Local agreed norms, but we should not unify the norms because that reflects the cultural lineages that people want to Preserve and these are quite important for people to make sense of technology And if the technology is appropriate, they must be able to be appropriated by the local people according to their local norms But the way to form such consensus on the meta layer. That's something we can agree on as the core norms of the internet Okay, I'm going to questions now so questions First from Curtis McQuarrie. How important is making clear commitments as possible outcomes of the engagement? So this was talking about Consensus tools and what is a good starting point? Yeah, the good starting point is at the beginning of the design process You know the double diamond the ideal idea. So we we discover the Whatever positions that people have we commonly define our shared values And then we start to explore various different development options and finally we deliver the service That's the standard double diamond So the best starting point is at a very very beginning when nobody knows what to do When nobody knows what other people think when nobody has a theory of mind of others they hold us That's the place to start a consultation a conversation if you start a consultation at the very end of the process That become bike-shutting right that becomes just arguing what color to paint for the product But whether we need such a product in the first place well that could only be done in the very beginning so the idea of the participation officer is to Make sure that when people start to see something for example Many young people less than 18 years old they're responsible for more than one quarter of citizens initiative now in Taiwan Say that we need to ban plastic straws from our bubble tea takeouts and so on That may not feel as important as other political issues But obviously there's some young people just 16 or 17 years old that can actually speak to people And if you don't respond to them right away and wait until like five years later Then during those five years, maybe they stop attending school on Fridays and go to the streets on Friday Right and and so right before we even have any idea of what to do with those plastic straws We just start the engagement process and that's when people really feel that out They actually has agenda setting power and so that's a very good starting point and we commit to hold To ourselves as accountable as possible to talk about only the agenda that's set by the citizens in such Initiatives that is to say we will never say those Agenda are out of bounds that we don't want to explore together We would never say that this is our agenda and it's you know hired in your agenda So we'll just talk about what we talk I want to talk about instead We make very clear delineation of the scope for the citizen initiatives. So the presidential powers the national defense You know diplomacy and so on these things are off the table because it's not the duty of the administration But it's anything domestic anything that's within the administration We hold ourselves to account to talk about only those that set by the social sector by the citizens initiatives, so that's the level of engagement of our complete attention to talk about nothing but The citizens initiatives. I hope that answered the question Yeah next question as you implement your Impressive and inspirational changes within the Taiwanese government. How are you thinking about making those changes sustainable beyond your own personal tenure? Yeah, I'm really designing myself out so basically, whatever we did the participation officers the national participation platforms Presidential hackathon and so on. I'm not maintaining it. It's by myself This is the collective work of hundreds of participation officers and in many like Agencies level like not ministers level the third and fourth level They also have their own Participation officer team so that they can make sure that they adapt the national regulations about participation officers into their Ministries or agencies culture. So this is really a cultural movement that Listening and still actually reduce this risk and save time so that people have more time to rebuild trust I'm pasting our participation officer website including the full directions and so on and you can look through our collaborative meetings From this web page. It's in English And so I hope this gives an idea of how what we're doing is really changing how the public service itself Interacts with people. They're not here to work for me They're here the participation office our work with me and I'm working not for the people But rather with the people and so it's these voluntary association that binds us so in the collaborative meetings now We're at almost at the hundreds collaborative meetings now. I play no part whatsoever other than to hold the space I'll follow up. If anyone else has another question, or I'll do mark second question, too Related to that that statement that you just made about Holding space and having to work with so many people for any of this to happen. I know part of what made it possible for you to join the the Taiwanese government was The ice on fire Move all the pressure and new new political changes like if new people were not elected You would not be in the role that you are in so I'm maybe also in the spirit of marks question What what had to happen to make all these participatory tools and in Taiwan possible and relatedly like what haven't you gotten done yet? That you're hoping Hoping to do an excellent question. I think what it takes is a successful demonstration and Demonstration I don't mean it as a protest rather as a demo for people who have tuned in to the live stream during the 2014 Samplar movement people understand that the 20 NGOs each facilitating conversation from one aspect of the trade deal It was Beijing actually Benefit a lot from more people joining So instead of the traditional thought about you know people going nowhere the occupy movement going nowhere It's all noise the no agenda means that there's no signal. They never agree on anything, you know, those common stereotypes about occupy movements the demonstration was actually no within just three short weeks We agreed on four demands not one less those demands were Ratified by the head of the parliament the occupy was a success and in the following national forum on economic affairs Everyone agreed that the controversial issues to should be tackled way before it passed the parliamentary floor It should be tackled all the different regulations and so one need to be tackled first on a online platform So that people don't have to occupy the parliament every single time But with the implied outside game that says if the administration doesn't implement such mechanism Well, we'll be back, right? So that's successful demonstration and the outside game I think is the political structure that needs to happen before the administrative structure Can happen, but nowadays is very firm very solid in 2014 It's true that I was invited as a reverse mentor to the cabinet, but the cabinet was at a time still the nationalist party the Kuomintang nowadays of course the cabinet is from a DPP president and the KMT the DPP and also the other two parties the TPP and MPP within the parliament they just last once signed on this open parliament national action plan so deepening democracy in this way and Building international links These are the two topics that all the four parties directly commits on and they compete on doing this more not on whether they This needs to be done or not and so this is a very clear cross-partism consensus pretty much The only two things they can agree on nowadays and we're operating within this political mandate that says So it also need to happen in local level in the municipalities in the townships Even district level participation is important and I think that's points to the next steps The next few years what we'll do is that we'll make sure that people who are previously Excluded people who are younger than 18. I talked about those people immigrant workers indigenous people whose Native language is neither English nor Mandarin and so on they all need to Participate in a way that feels comfortable on their terms not on the terms of the national government or the municipal governments So that in deep inclusiveness That's also something we need to work on in the next few years And I'm really happy that all the four major parties are behind this vision Yeah, I wonder looking To your work and Taiwan if it's like an alt reality Yeah, we've been post-pandemic for almost a year now, so we're literally in the future Yeah, but many regards just sort of having like political appetite to build these democracy Capacities so not just all type of technology you talked about the social technology and the other things I guess the last question to close this out the folks to have another Q&A related to this line of thought is Actually, I have no idea how you're going to answer this. I'm okay very curious. Um, if you had Advice or hopes for Jurisdictions broadly You'd use that The tricycle example is like hyper local norms and you've talked a lot about Democratic capacities polling tools day one Consultation open legislation open budget like what Would be sort of the priorities that you would you would want other jurisdictions to Be able to foster or you like that's not like this. It's up to them, but yeah To give no trust is to get no trust. So my main suggestion would be trust the citizens more In many jurisdictions, especially in light of infodemic and pandemic there's some Justification I guess about the more authoritarian movements that people feel like this they just has to intervene but Intervening is is is of course necessary But there's a difference between intervening with the people or intervening for the people and In any jurisdiction with speech freedom the freedom assembly and so on There's also if you really trust the citizens the approach of working not for the people Not with the people but after the people right when the social sector discovers something new that needs to be done Instead of co-opting them Bless this way of doing things and say oh those social entrepreneurs are now part of our Infrastructure team and so on and that of course Requires a redefinition of the word infrastructure that would include the open street map example You just pointed out right that any infrastructure definition that includes the open street map. I think is fit For the jurisdictional response against not just disaster recovery, but just everyday sense making Back in 2016 I work with the minister of culture and so on and the premier at a time To convince the national budgeting office that if we build something And that's not concrete like not made in concrete But just made out of bits as long as this bits can be shared in the commons Using creative common license as long as its production is in the commons so everyone can participate It should qualify for infrastructure status In our then new infrastructure special act is a special bill that defines infrastructure And it's very counter intuitive for the national budget office But they eventually came around to it And the digital part of the infrastructure bill is very special in that it doesn't have to contain any You know tangible investment pots as long as it's in the commons like open street map is and it It's not necessarily started by the procurement relationship It could be started by a social sector in a reverse procurement relationship We fulfill the APS necessary for this project to happen all these qualify as infrastructure status And that's what enabled taiwan During the infodemic and pandemic to have national level conversations on social sector designed and operated infrastructures the digital equivalent of town halls and museums and universities And so on rather than forcing ourselves to have the same conversation on the digital equivalent of night clubs, right? Facebook with addictive drinks and very loud noise and private bouncers and things like that So we're not forced to use the digital night clubs as digital public infrastructure We actually have digital public infrastructure So that view that trusting the citizens to build infrastructure together that would be my main advice to other jurisdictions That's great. You've given me two memes tonight Audrey the smart citizen and then also a social sector as infrastructure. What is infrastructure has been very memeing lately So I thank you for that and I thank you for your time Um, I think we have one more question, but we can answer that offline because we're over time. Um, thank you so much Yeah, thank you. Uh and lift long and prosper Bye Bye