 incredibly fortunate. We want to welcome you all to this event. Audrey Tang is here. Audrey Tang is Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation. Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Pearl, which we all use in Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan's National Development Council's Open Data Committee and the 12-year Basic Education Curriculum Committee and led the country's first e-rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography and with social text on social interaction design. In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to GovZero, that's G0V, a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society with the call to fork the government. I am so delighted and honored to be here tonight with Audrey Tang. Hello, good local time everyone. Good local time from the future. Just a few hours in the future, I guess. So how shall we proceed? I thought that we will begin immediately into the Q&A after the introduction. That's what I've heard from my colleagues, if that's okay with you. That's fine with me. We're here. We're just delighted to have you. I wasn't sure whether or not you had a few words that you wanted to start off with. I mean you have quite a resume or if you just wanted to give us a big shout out about can you connect the first and the last? That is, on the one hand, thinking about Pearl and then thinking about the mechanics of having worked on Pearl, how does that contribute to your ability to do work on GovZero? Do you think in the same way but in a different context or is it just totally a different set of skills? I would say it's the same skill. The motto of Pearl is, and I quote, there's more than one way to do it, unquote, and that means a focus on plurality. Indeed, I learned from Larry Wall, the creator of Pearl, that he had a tweet that says, everybody's talking about a singularity is near. Why don't we focus on the plurality, which is here. And I think this is so excellent so that I turn it into literally my job description as if they dominated around five years ago. And my job description, I think, if you want a few words to begin with, I'll begin with my job description. And it goes like this. When we see the internet of science, let's make it the 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 a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. So it's all about listening at scale to the plurality. It's about using humor over rumor in a way that's fast, fair, and fun, so that we can overcome, say, the pandemic in Taiwan with no lockdown and overcome the infodermic, again, with no takedown. So this is a fundamentally idea about the government trusting citizens rather than asking a citizen to trust the government. We must first trust the citizen, the plurality. Let me ask you a question. That's a fantastic introduction, especially when hearing heard by American ears in these times. So when you think about like trust, so here, the question isn't even whether or not the government trusts us, but whether or not we trust the government. Do you believe that the philosophy still works? I mean, in some ways, who goes first, right? Yeah, I think the Dao De Jing there's a saying from Lao Zi that says to give no trust is to get no trust. And so the fundamental point about trustworthiness is not about a blind trust like from one abstract organization to another abstract organization, but about this day to day feedback mechanism. For example, and I really only have one slide to show, and this is the very cute Shiba Inu, the name is Song Chai, literally the spoke stock of our Central Epidemic Month Sansa. So every day at 2pm during the height of the pandemic here, everyone tunes in to this conversation between the Minister Chen Shi Zhong and all the journalists who get to ask pretty much everything. And the thing about RCECC press conference is that it's all about asking the commander everything and anything and anything that we did wrong, that we didn't get right. And so one is guaranteed a 24 hour correction, a very fast iteration cycle, and always that's for example, when a young boy back in April last year called the toll free number 1922, even though he's not a journalist. He said, you're rationing out mask, all I get is pink medical mask. All my boy classmates have navy blue ones. And I don't want to wear pink to school. The very next day on 2pm, the commander and all the medical officer regardless gender war pink medical mask. It's a act of gender mainstream for sure. But Minister Chen even said publicly that pink Panther was his childhood hero. So the boy became the most hip boy in the class for only he had a collar that the hero and the hero's hero wear, I guess, for some definition of wear. And so this is trustworthy. This is the real time feedback mechanism. That's just in the last year alone, there's more than 2 million calls to 192 to all answered on an individual basis that makes sure that all the epidemiology experts can talk in the way that shows the trust to the citizens to make use of those signs well and also explain it in a language that transcends disciplines and age groups, for example, our physical distancing rules says that when you're indoor, keep 3 shiwainu's away and outdoor keep 2 of them away. There's many gems like that. Why wear a mask is there to protect you against your own unwashed hand. So you wouldn't do what a dog is doing here. Again, this appeals to rational self interest in a way of communication that is humble. That is definitely not top down or lockdown or shut down. Well, we are suddenly opening up the floor to questions. I mean, otherwise I can just keep going on. This is a fascinating conversation, especially talking about the pandemic because the contrast to what we're experiencing here is so radically different. But I also want to bring it into the role of the of the platforms that we have here. So like how do you institute that? How do you institute that philosophy into like social media or into a platform or is it solely to be applied on the relationship between the government and the people? Yeah, I think the current generation of social media, which I sometimes refer to as anti-social media, it doesn't quite do listening as skill that well. I mean, it does broadcasting or speaking as skill so that everybody can speak, but not so much listening across differences. On the other hand, we take the motto, don't hate the media, be the media very seriously. So we built our own pro-social media out of civic technologies, which in Taiwan is essentially the same as government technologies because we work very closely with the free software slash open source communities. And so, for example, one example is that we use this Polis system originally innovated in Seattle, but now it's open source as part of our digital public infrastructure. So at Polis.gov.tw, everyone can resonate or not with any public statements that people make, for example, on the Uber case, which is the inaugural case that we use the Polis technology. And so this is very visual. So I guess I'll have to show a slide anyway. So this is the UberX conversation. And what you see here in the blue circle represents the person using the system. And the clusters are my friends and families who are all over the place that feels differently about the UberX case. Now the thing is that instead of jumping from facts to ideas, Polis is designed to listen to people's feelings. And the interface design is in such a way that each citizen's feelings, like I feel that passenger insurance, they're important. People would disagree or agree with it. And as they do, they move toward me or farther away from me, but there is no reply button. Without a reply button, there's no room for troll to grow. And people take pride in proposing some nuanced ideas that brings other people together, rather than just focusing on the ideological problems. For example, is Uber even a sharing economy, is time sharing sharing? Is it a gig economy? Is it platform economy, which is of course, very nice academically speaking, but it doesn't really get people's feeling together. So people agree to disagree on the more pro social side of social media. They respect each other's ideological differences, but doesn't spend calorie on it. And we get a rough consensus, meaning that people agree with each other's feelings most of the time, actually on registration, not under cutting existing meters on insurance and things like that. And that's why we legalize Uber just in a few months after this consultation. And Uber is now a local taxi in Taiwan, but it elevates the co-ops and existing taxi companies and fleets as well, so that everybody wins or at least doesn't lose in a setting of rough consensus. Now, so we say the binding power, it's only on this sort of digital public infrastructure. We do not use, say Facebook or other parts of the digital realm that are more like frankly speaking, nightlife district nightclubs, selling you alcoholic addictive drinks, private bouncers, and all things like that. We don't use that as town halls or public parks or public libraries. We use public digital infrastructure as digital infrastructure. So you showed me that incredible graph of how sort of a crowd agreeing in general. That's right. Yes. There's this part of me that says, but what is that person at the end, the one guy that's hanging out over there? But these are the statements. It's not people. And oh, those are the statements? I'm sorry. These are the statements. So these are the more ideological statements that each one divides the people into halves, essentially. And if you look at the more anti-social corner of social media, that's what everybody focus on. That's what dreams people calories. But what we are doing is essentially letting people see a reflection of their own statements and sentiments. And they're the more nuanced one that brings people together, like literally bringing people together shows that there's actually much more in common. We share the same value, even though we start from different ideological positions. Academically, it's called overlapping consensus, but it's much more easy if we show it in a way with this need to visualization. So, so what about full expression? Like one of the things when I think of parole as a language is it's not just that it's many ways to represent something. It's also just like one can exhibit a style in parole and another person can have a totally different style. And to what extent, how much how much flexibility do can I get in the in the presentations technologies you're describing? Yeah, I think fundamentally, this is about who sets the agenda for public deliberation. And the design of our Polish platform, even though it's called Polish.gov.tw, it means that all the citizens, including the press who have used it to deliberate anything from the national ID card strategy to like random killing and whether, you know, corporate punishment need to be abolished and whether that will encourage random killing probably not and things like that. And so the agenda setting is done by the social sector, by the people. Our national participation platform joined the GOV.tw, which is like regulation.gov, I guess, because we publish our pre announcements of regulations on it. But very importantly, it connects a participatory budget interface so that people can comment and raise new ideas even after the regulation takes effect. And people can start new initiatives with 5,000 signatures. The ministry need to respond to it on a point by point basis. And so on the whole life cycle, if people have an idea, they can do a full expression on that particular idea and start a new policy conversation without getting any approval from the government. So this is not just GOV.TEC. This is what I refer to as what we call people public private partnership with the people side first with the social sector setting of the agenda. Okay, so this is fantastic. So I want to offer, I want to, I want to understand more and I'm going to do that by asking a kind of contrast point. So if in the United States, if we have a new regulation that we want to, that our government is thinking about, they open up what they call a public comment server and they invite people from the public to tell us what you think so people can respond. And they can say anything they want. And then the government takes all of these comments, digests them and provides a summary at the front end of whatever the regulation will try to answer their questions and so forth. But if I've got this right, the model that you described would look different. It would be instead of them saying this is the new regulation we're going to put it out, they may actually poll questions to understand better what kind of resentment they want to know that the public has. And then as a member of the public, I could then respond to the particular questions in a kind of multiple choice manner or binary manner. And they would get that feedback without the discourse. Is that a fair comparison? Yeah, it is. I think fundamentally this is a combination of two ideas that's previously not connected in policymaking. One is that of a citizen's petition or a citizen's initiative. The US also has we the people, which is the online platform for this sort of petitions, where you basically just collect signatures without much substantial deliberation. And the second part is a weekly survey. But unlike survey that's done by the government by a fixed set of questions, this is survey that is crowdsourced. Each person can share their sentiment for other people to respond to so that the system basically surfaces the rough consensus by a kind of friendly competition of who could raise the point that appeals to people with very different initial positions is a way to listen at scale without people having to do a top down design of survey. And these two independently speaking are done in many parts of local and national governments. The later part is done, for example, through open space technology through citizens assembly and things like that. While the first part is mostly just petitions and a list of names to hand to a counselor or to a legislator or to a minister. But we combine these two together. And the social norm that shapes it is much higher than each particular methodology. Indeed, the UberX conversation wasn't set or started by the government. In 2015, the ministries are still figuring things out. And it's the GovZero or G0V community that decides to talk about UberX, to talk about Airbnb and things like that. So how do you give equality to the voices? So in the example I gave before, if I create a bot, I can distort public opinion because my bot gives me more voice than the person who has to type it in by hand. Can I go on GovZero.dtw and distort the public opinion by using my bot on there? Right. If we look closely while the clusters, which is by K-Means clustering algorithm, measures the diversity and preserves the minority ideas or opinions, it doesn't, what it doesn't do is that it doesn't really care about the same cluster's population. So this 205 may be a small cluster, but it's not because it has 200 people in it. Actually, this one was just less than 200 people. It has a larger area because it measures more diversity. And so if people get a bot in like 500 fake accounts, which is difficult actually, they have to register 500 SIM cards, but suppose they do that, 500 SIM cards all voting the same way. Well, it may actually add a zero to the population count here, but this area doesn't grow a bit. What each statement must do is to convince people across the aisle. And we early hold as agenda the things that reaches this cross-group kind of supermajority. And this in-group coherence is just one factor out of it. And spamming that by voting doesn't really work. So what does it mean to be a voter on GovZero? Is it that I would register with a particular party and therefore the diversity is a measure of the party? Or is it my gender? Is it my race? Is it my income? Or do I register all of those things and the diversity measure is the sum of all these intersectionalities? Because this is a weekly survey. So people could and they did. For example, when we deliberate about the UberX case, the initial demographical questions are, it's actually a personal feeling. So I feel that even if a taxi passes by me, I still reach for my phone and call Uber. So that's one thing about personal feeling. And one is that I have a professional driver's license. I drive for a living. That's another thing. And another thing, yet another thing is that, for example, I take taxis as part of my daily work. I'm a commuter by taxi. That's another one. And as you said, there are also personal feelings about economic preferences, about the places that I live and I live in the metropolitan areas or not. And people who care about diversity on any particular aspect just add that to the weekly survey. But how do they do this? They just write, I aim a taxi driver, enter. And then other people start responding to it. I see. I see. So let me see if I got it right. I want to do one of these. And let's say we were going to do it at Harvard on Harvard's campus. So we would start with the overarching question. People would come to the platform. And that one overarching question, though, has multiple other statements that people are starting about themselves. And that's how we, I say, very clever. That's very clever. That's very clever. I'm so excited talking to you. I may not be giving enough room here for people who have questions. So if you do have a question, just raise your hand and I'll call on you. We do have a question here. And Alice, do you want to ask your question? Yes, thank you. This is a fascinating conversation. My question is regarding this year's theme of the conference, which is resilience and shared experiences. And I wonder if Minister Tang, you can share some of the advice on how we can build resilience from within ourselves and among one another, perhaps drawing inspirations from your personal experience or from the unprecedented experience we have lived through in the past year. Thank you. Thank you. That's an excellent question. Personally speaking, I think what I mean by trusting the citizens also means that we need to be aware, be humble of the shortcomings of our own designs and also to explain in a way that invites co-creation rather than defending any particular policy or personal decisions or things like that. The humility is the main thing that I learned working in the counter-pandemic task force. One very quick example. Last February, February 6th, we wrote out a very interesting policy called real name mass creation. And in which more than 6,000 pharmacies across Taiwan participated and anyone can take their universal health card is an IC card to the nearby pharmacy and get the allotted musks at a very, very cheap price. Now, people don't want to queue in vain. So around that time, a civic hacker, the names how we're all invented away so that you can see which pharmacy are out of mask and which pharmacies still have some so you can go to a place that still have some masks. It's entirely open API powered. So we published every 30 seconds the real time numbers of availability so that people who prefer chatbots and so on can access the same information in a way that's maximally inclusive, more than 100 different tools. But on the day that they launched, many pharmacies independently innovated and did what we call a take a number system. That is to say, instead of handing masks in return of swiping the IC card, they in the morning ask for the IC card and store it in the store and ask the customer to go back in the evening and take those number badges and in exchange to the mask and the IC card while they process the IC card during the lunch break. Now individually, these are to both the map and take a number system, very good innovation. But together, they just explode like Mentos and Coca-Cola. And that's because when you look at the map, you would see this pharmacy didn't sell anything until lunch. And then it sells everything. And so much so that a nearby pharmacy even put a large banner said, don't trust the app, exclamation mark. Now I didn't sleep well that night, but I did go through the public comments and the 1922 feedback from the frontline pharmacies. And there's some real gems in it. If I take away all the exclamation marks. And so the very next day, we apologize publicly, we didn't anticipate it. But because we're on a agile timeline schedule, we say we'll fix it next Thursday by implementing this very good suggestion of on the map, we will show two time slots, one for collecting the number and one for collecting the mask. And that ameliorate a little bit of the problem. And later on, the pharmacy's brainstorm and did something clever, which is just disappearing from the map. Soon as those numbers run out by entering, I received negative 5000 masks. So they kind of hacked the system. And again, we didn't say that they're hacking the system. We said we need to institutionalize that. So we put a button that if they click it, as soon as the numbers run out, they'll disappear from the map for the day. And so just by apologizing very swiftly, but always following it saying, we will implement your work around as a institutionalized response next Thursday. After three such iterations, there's not so much problem anymore. And to me, that's resilience. That is to trust your fellow citizen to come up with better design based on the one design that may not be perfect, but there's a crack in everything. And that's how the light gets in. I have to just ask you a quick question. How agile is it? How fast did you get that system set up? Three days. That's pretty awesome. Look, we have lots of hands up. Let's say, I think Valerie, you were up first. Thank you very much, Minister, for being with us today. We're very excited. So I am curious, being on technology from a government's perspective means a reallocation of power. Who will own the data? Who will be in charge of controlling certain platforms, new platforms? So what strategies have you used to persuade public leaders that might feel that they're losing some power due to these digital transformations? Thank you. The strategy is to have an outside game. The main talking point is that it beats getting the parliament occupied by occupiers, because that's what happened in 2014 when people perceive that there is no citizen control, democratic control over, at that time, it was a trade deal. Then people just occupied the parliament and took the matter to their own hands. Non-violently, I was there facilitating the live streaming. More than 200 different topics were deliberated by more than 20 NGOs, half a million people on the street, many more online. And we did get above consensus for the months, not one less, that gets then ratified by the head of the parliament. But everybody agreed that this is very time consuming. And if we can replicate some of those facilitated open space technology using digital means, then amortized, this is actually less effort and less risk, and also more trust as compared to get all the controversial policies that ends up getting the parliament occupied again. So the short answer is that there has always to be an outside game that threatens direct taking over by democratic and motivated people if the government doesn't respond in time. Thank you. Leone. Thank you. Actually, my first question was already answered, so I'm going to ask a new one. I am from Germany and what you're talking about what has happened in Taiwan and how Taiwan has responded to the pandemic feels very part of the reality that I'm experiencing. So one thing I was wondering, like all of these very advanced digital tools, what does it take that other countries also adopt this model, either tools or also just that model of engagement? Do you have any advice on that? Yes. I think there's two main requirements. One is, as I mentioned, a public infrastructure view on the digital. If the government essentially outsources public discourse to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, there's probably no room for this kind of civic tech to make into the gov tech. So a commitment to broadband as human rights, a commitment to digital competence, not just literacy in the basic education curriculum, all that is needed so that this digital public infrastructure includes people without excluding anyone. Indeed, anywhere in Taiwan, if you don't have 10 megabits per second, both ways for just 16 euros per month, it's my fault, like personally my fault. And so that's the one requirement. The other requirement equally important is for the career public service to be on board. If the career public service understand that this is the way to save them time to increase the mutual trust, and most importantly, to reduce the risk of zig-zacking or flip-flopping, that 49% of people feel that they have lost and suddenly increased by 2%, and the public service have to redo everything again. If they understand this social norm actually increases stability in them doing their public work, then they will support it. And once the career public service takes the initiative, the politicians for them, there really is nothing to lose. How do you get away from power struggles within the career community, within the career civil servant? Yeah, the power struggle is very real. It's always there. And my office, for example, maximizes diversity by inviting volunteer succumbents from any ministry, but each ministry can only send one succumbent at a time. So all the 12 public-facing ministries and councils have sent succumbents to my office, but they must work out loud. Although they still report to their minister, whatever they co-created become in the commons that all the different other ministries can learn from. And so this is deliberately designed in a way that's horizontal leadership. The vertical structures are always there, but within our office, the public digital innovation space, there's simply no room for that because each one offers a very fresh perspective. And it's all by volunteer basis. So to date, the Department of Defense never sent anyone to my office, and I'm fine with that. Jamie, you want to ask your question? Sure. Thank you so much for joining us. It's really an honor to have you with us. Having shared understanding of plural experience, I think, is so important to building societal trust. In your experience, what are some of the most effective ways that you've been able to build shared understanding? Yeah, I think really nothing is more important than taking all the sides. This is my personal practice. Of course, I went personally through two puberty. So in my mind, I don't have this binary category. Like half of the population is somehow more distant from me. To me, it's just a large homo-savians community. And if I find that there's a particular viewpoint that I cannot say it in a way that I personally feel it as important as genuine, I always think it's my problem. And I would then spend a few days with that community, learn a little bit of their culture and language and so on on an ethnographic, or just hanging out with people until I do. And so taking all the sides, the skill of rotation is, I think, as important as the skill of listening or translation. Sachi? Hi, Minister Tai. Thank you so much for joining us. My question is, we live in a world of increasingly complex problems and there's a real strain on multilateral solutions working. And I was wondering, are you a global pessimist or an optimist? I can probably guess which one you are. But why do you think that? And do you have any advice for anyone erring on the pessimistic side? Yeah, I'm a optimist. It's a strange condition, I know, on the most pressing global problems. And my optimism stemmed from the fact that my first political system was the internet governance system that I joined when I was just 14 years out, but across the emails and the mail lists and the working groups, nobody really cared or even know that I'm just 14 years old. And so I feel included into the community. It wouldn't be another few years until even I get my first vote in the traditional low bit rate representation or political system. And so the internet governance is always based on the idea that it's what we call the end to end principle. If you have a good innovation that solves your own problem, and it scales in the sense that some other people maybe in another corner in the world also find it useful, they can fork it, meaning that take it into a different direction. And nobody between the two of you can say whether this is a legit innovation or it's an innovation that should be banned. That was the original design spec of the internet. So because of my experience in internet governance, which is open multi-stake holderism, academically speaking, I do believe that the emerging issues that we are looking at at this moment is all caused by the closer collaboration across stakeholder groups that previously need to go through intermediaries, but now work very closely together anyway. And the externalities, the social environmental problem that stem out of this close collaboration can only be tackled if we also apply the same close collaboration across sector way to work on it. So open multi-stake holderism I think is something that feels very natural to me. And most of my work in introducing this to the more pessimistic corners of this society is just to encourage them to make concrete contributions. It could just be one typo fixed on Wikipedia. I just fixed a typo a week ago on Wikipedia on the Equality Act, the HR5, the article, or One Street in the Urban Street map. And once they start contributing, they will start to feel that it doesn't really take this representative logic, which many people feel that takes too long a time, but rather it could just be a representation of whatever they feel on the moment and the contribution is reflected in the here and now. Minister Tang, you've been very gracious and you allowed me to call you from your first name. You're incredibly humble and very approachable. How do you square the authority that you have with your personality and your openness? Well, today's conference is about women in power. The kind of power that I think I hold is communication power. That is to say we make networks and the power is entirely in the collective intelligence that's at the edges of those networks. So as someone that makes those networks connect to one another, the more authoritarian that I appear, the less bandwidth actually, the different networks that through me connect, enjoy, like I become the bottleneck, so to speak. But by designing myself out or design for resign, if that's a thing, I make maximize the kind of communication that all those different networks, the civic tech network, social entrepreneur, impact investors and so on, that can connect naturally through those open spaces, those mechanisms like the polar system, the joint system, sandboxes, presidential hackathons and so on. Those mechanisms go on, those space go on, but I don't hold authoritarian power by myself. So you don't have to call me the right honorable or something. Well, you hold that honor with us for sure. Maddie. Yeah, hey, thanks so much for this. I'm wondering, because we're students and we're all interested in politics and technology and just everything we've been talking about, what advice you have for aspiring public servants and students like us? To have fun, to optimize for fun. That's my slogan in my pro six days, and that still sounds true. For in my personal experience, the online, anti-social, social media, the divisiveness, the outrage, the hatred, the toxicity, all of that is predicated on this phenomenon that outrage spreads faster than rationality. But humor, fun, spreads faster than outrage. And it's a one-way street. If one is outraged about something, but then think of a clever way to tackle some of the problem so the structural problem doesn't happen again or happen with less likelihood. That's fun, that's co-creation. And once anyone feels this way, there's no going back to feel outrage or hatred or discrimination about the same topic anymore. But if some people start with a very divisive worldview, you can't really convince them based on rationality alone. And this time acute Shiba Inu, pink medical mask, rainbow mask, things like that, trending hashtags, these really helps. So optimize for fun is my main suggestion. That's fantastic advice. I have a question for you as the last question came up. So many of the people at the conference are young students. So when you were seven, did you know that you would be minister tank? Or like, what did, you know, many students feel that their lives are already predetermined? This is where I'm going to be when I'm this age and this age. But in reality, that doesn't usually happen. How about for you? Yeah, I'm a slash. So I'm digital minister at TW, slash, board member radical exchange, working with Vitalik buttering on Ethereum governance, slash, Digital Future Society Barcelona, slash, Council Democratic Foundation, that's a bunch of occupiers in Europe and things like that. So I think it's not about any particular post, but rather about the connection between those posts, again, referring to the network and communication power. The more the slash become a dash that connects things together, the more holistic ones worldview become and the more practical this idea of taking all the side become for me personally. So I would encourage even if you think you have a predetermined role or position to to fill, it doesn't really exclude you to stop you from seeking other slash or dash positions. And once those new positions start to grow, you form your own new constellation. That's very nice. Sachi. Oh, sorry. I think that was an old question. But that's okay. I can ask another question. You said before about creating a culture where government trusts citizens and citizens trust governments. But how do you actually get that? What were some of the biggest hurdles that you've overcome to get to this equilibrium, which seems ideal? Yeah. Well, government must trust its citizens. The other part is optional. That citizen doesn't need to trust the government. I think the government should earn the trust and a citizen should trust us as much or as little as they want. So maximally trusting the citizens, I think is easier if it doesn't take extra effort. For example, the mask availability open API, say if we publish not 30 seconds at a time, but 30 days at a time with this monthly statistics approval review process. That's actually what most governments do through a Freedom of Information access plan. But that basically says that the more publication one does, the more burden it places on the career public service. Contrast that with the open API, which simply says, for things unrelated to privacy, national secrets, confidentiality and trade secrets and so on, everything else. We just publish whatever we collect and with all the quality problems that I just highlighted a few questions back. And when people see that the quality is off, well, that's invitation to co-creation. And the public service only respond to the collective intelligence mandated new ideas that's provably better than the original ideas that we had. So we do not have to do this power struggle of keeping information to ourselves. What about the quality? What about accuracy and things like that? We simply say, okay, this is what the machines tell us. It may or may not be right, but it's at no extra burden to the career public service. So automate it. This makes trust much easier to give from the government to its citizens. Jamie. It's me again. You should that you optimize for fun. If you have to give yourself advice when you were younger, what advice would you give? Yeah. First of all, I would start traveling across the world sooner, I guess. I did this poor earthish thing of randomly couchsurfing and staying at people's homes until they get fed up with me and suggest someone else for me to crash. And I did that when I was 25 in 2005, 2006. But I actually could have done it sooner if I learned to trust random strangers on the internet earlier. So that would be my main suggestion to my younger self to trust random strangers on the internet. Maddie. Yeah. I don't know if this is a question you can answer, but I wanted to ask as a student of US politics living in the US, we talk a lot about these issues of trust in government and citizen participation right now. And are there any politicians or parties you've worked with in the US that you've enjoyed working with that you recommend we take a look at? Sure. I'm slash international advisor GovLab. So I already quite closely actually with the data collaborative with the crowd law and many initiatives of the GovLab in NYU. So that's actually something that I can directly answer. Alice. Yes, I have another question related to women in power. I wonder as a great leader like you, do you have any women role model in this space? Or do you draw any leadership philosophy wisdom from any anyone or anywhere? Yeah, I signed up to this particular post literally because I was quite touched by our president Tsai Ing-wen in her first inauguration speech where she said before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values. But from now on democracy must become a conversation between a diverse set of values. I think that perfectly captures the new capacity that digital offers for us to listen not just speak at scale. And democracy in that view is a type of technology is a type of social innovation that everyone can contribute to. It's not just something that's fixed in stone. And so this democracy as a type of technology view, I think I draw very heavily from Dr. Tsai Ing-wen's leadership and also from the fact that there's more than 14 years now in Taiwan for gender mainstreaming. So the people public-private partnership work is literally grew out of the feminist movement that then grew into this intersectional LGBTQ friendly movements. And there's just too many names to name. But Annette Lu, our previous vice president, she was also very influential. I have a question. There's this incredible spirit about you that reminds me so much of what the internet was like many years ago, decades ago, before the United States became so commercial. And it seems like it's really shaped a lot of your thinking. Which came first, was it that the internet drew you because you were already like thinking, like of like minds? Or is it that it influenced you, that early way of thinking about the internet was a blank slate? What could this be? How could this work? And it was very open and very, let's all do, we're all in this together kind of thinking, which you certainly have really taken to a whole new level. Yeah, I think the early internet definitely happened first because it was born in 81 and the internet was before that. So there's a definite sequence of chronological events here. First the internet, right? And I was born around the year the personal computer was introduced to the world and Taiwan makes most of those personal computers anyway. So we do have a very strong ethics of just taking a new idea and then just make new forks to innovate, to reverse engineer what logic was there in the designing of larger mainstream computers and things like that, but do it in a way that is democratized. And I don't mean democratization in the sense of becoming more accessible. I mean democratization in the original sense in that citizen control, the agenda of the development of the type of technology. So I think Taiwan's own democratization, the lifting of the martial law, as well as the early personal computer and internet definitely took place first. And I'm immersed in those communities and cultures so that it feels like native to me. Yeah, I definitely, I can definitely see that and feel that and in that way it's a real pleasure. So back to COVID, so contact tracing, did you play a role in contact tracing? And if so, what does that look like in Taiwan? Yeah, so I'm mostly a poetician, so I mostly just write poems and recite them. And so the day-to-day operations I'm only involved in the mass distribution and not in particular the contact tracing. But the one heuristic that I helped define is very important in that we only collect data during the pandemic from the touchpoints that we were already collecting anyway before the pandemic. We do not invent new data collection touchpoints. And this is out of this respect to privacy and cybersecurity. Because for unknown systems, green field systems, the cybersecurity and the privacy parameters are unknown, literally to the people coding them probably. And so there is very much a difficulty in forming a social consensus on where lies the acceptable realm. But because we only use existing data collection points for, for example, location-based earthquake warning, flood evacuation warning, the national health IC card, and things like that, people understand very well the regulatory and the algorithmic parameters of safety. And so people feel safer because we don't have to declare, and we never did, a state of emergency that makes the administration grow and the legislation shrink. Everything that we do must be interpolated and approved, pre-approved by the legislature. So what are you working on next? What's new on the horizon that you can share with us? We just published a month ago, the National Action Plan on Open Governments in Taiwan. So instead of just one anecdote here or one anecdote there, this is now a system of 19 commitments to the global Open Government partnership community that we will institutionalize the kind of co-creation as evidenced by the examples that I just presented in day-to-day government work. In particular, I'm excited about this dimension of opening up citizen control to people below 18 years old. This is first because I'm very active as a 14-year-old, but I also genuinely believe that the youngest people, they have least legacy system view. They don't get trapped in the business as usual thought. And judged by the more than one quarter now, e-petitions that they raise on the joint platform, they care the most about sustainability and regenerated potential of the economy, long-term thinking and things like that, which I firmly believe is the direction to go. Valeria? Thank you. No, I just wanted to thank you so much, Minister. I know that you have to run for your next meeting, so I just wanted to thank you. And maybe, yeah, thank you on behalf of everyone, like these group of fans that you have over here. Professor Latanya, back to you. My next meeting is the cabinet meeting, so I thank you. Well, you've been gracious. We really appreciate it. What a great honor. Thank you very much, Minister Tang. And thank you for the great questions and exchange of idea until we meet face-to-face. Live long and prosper, everyone. Oh, I can't do it. Thank you. It's okay. Live long and prosper. Bye.