 Yeah, thank you, Richard, for moving on here and I had to move to the other platform now, to the Hop-In platform directly to the backstage and I'm now happy to welcome our opening keynote speaker. It was exactly one year ago, in early September 2020, when I met Audrey Tang at an online event hosted by the Bertelsrand Foundation and the title was Digital Democracy What Europe Can Learn from Taiwan. There was a topic for the hour and it was extremely impressive to hear Digital Minister Audrey Tang talk about how Taiwan is trying to constructively engage the population in complex decision-making processes using the latest digital technologies through collaborative meetings. Audrey started programming at the age of eight, attended three kindergartens, seeks elementary schools and dropped out of middle school at the age of 14. I can't tell that my son who is 13, you know, Audrey has lived with her parents in Germany and in the United States and she has worked for Apple on the Siri voice control system, founded several companies and continues to write software until today. In 2016, Audrey Tang was appointed to Taiwan's cabinet as a minister without portfolio and is now Taiwan's digital minister. I'm delighted that Audrey has agreed to deliver the opening keynote for our DDTA conference in 2021. Please welcome with me Minister Audrey Tang with the talk Digital Social Innovation. Thanks for joining us Audrey. Hello, good local time everyone. I'm really happy to be here and I'm told that I have like 18 minutes TED Talk-ish but this presentation as Audrey said is one hour long so I will skip some slides and I will try to leave some time for the Q&A. Now Digital Social Innovation in Taiwan means it's everyone's business with everyone's help and we've boiled down this formula of Digital Social Innovation into three key ideas and that's fast, that's fair and fun. And this is what enabled us to counter the pandemic with no lockdowns in the past couple years. We're down to one local case today and also counter the infodemic, the disinformation crisis with no takedowns. The fast part pertains to collective intelligence. You're looking at the PTT which is Taiwan's equivalent of Reddit but unlike Reddit it doesn't have any shareholders or any advertisers. It is a national Taiwan University student pet project governed in an open source fashion squarely in the digital civic infrastructure space and for the past 25 years has been one of our most trustworthy radar on emerging situations. So at the end of 2019 when Dr. Lee Wenliang from Wuhan posted that there were 7 SARS cases in the Huanan Sifu market, end of quote, it got triaged on PTT almost immediately resulting in on the first day of 2020 health inspection for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan. And this says two things, first that people trust the government sufficiently, right? This is a freedom of speech of assembly environments and also the government trusted the people with the newest signals through collective intelligence platforms. Now for people who are not so used to text posts, maybe the younger generation, the older generation doesn't have the same digital savanness. We also provide like 1922 which is a toll free number. Anyone can pick up their landline or mobile phone and call this number and share what they want to get answered from the Central Epidemic Command Center or the CECC which hosts a press conference every 2 p.m. So for example last April, there was a young boy that called 1922 saying, hey, you're rationing out masks but all I got was pink ones and all the boys in my class have navy blue masks and I don't want to wear pink to school. People will laugh at me. Well, the very next day all the medical office including the Minister Chen Shizhong of Health and Welfare wore pink and Mr. Chen even said that pink panzer was a childhood hero and suddenly the boy became the most hit boy in the class but only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes hero, I guess, wear. And so this means that gender mainstreaming is not a top-down thing. It is just from people's real time input, the signal become something that we can amplify and set new social norms with. Another example pertains to the mask rationing. So the team that built the G0V or GOV0 community movement for the past, while it's been 15 years now, basically proved that people don't have to wait for the government to make digital services but rather in the past 10 years or so and the past decades, whenever people see a digital service that's not done well or missing from the government instead of waiting for something that GOV from TW to happen, people can just prototype things by themselves and call it something that G0V, the TW. So just by changing O to a zero, you get into the shadow government that's always more fun and open source and basically it's like a swarm approach where people can try various different ways to realize the digital service is always open source. So it means that, for example, last February when a young civic technologist prototyped through G0V, the real-time visualization of mask availability in pharmacies, well, within three days, we saw that this has really gained popularity. So we did a reverse procurement. It's a civic technologist doing the prototype and it's we, the government, trusting the citizens with real-time open data which enable more than 100 different tools including the mapping, chatbots, and so on to help people to locate the PPEs and also made us realize that our previous distribution methods wasn't really fair because people wasn't using the same hours of time to travel to the nearby pharmacy and so on. So in light of this data bias, we again adapted to the real numbers and then changed our distribution method to allow for pre-registration and so on within 24 hours after this has been revealed by the civic technologists. Now, of course, real-time data free from bias is very good, but also to make it participatory, we also need to make it fun and so we call it humor over rumor. As long as the science, the clarification spreads to more people than this information, then we will always get people who want to contribute to science. So for example, when we introduced physical distancing on the top left, we said this very cute dog is actually the companion animal of the participation officer of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. We've got around 100 people, sometimes themselves are comedians or they work closely with comedians, but anyway, they realize that if they make the scientific literature into memes, so when you're indoor keep three Shiba Inus away, when you're outdoor keep two dogs away from each other or on the bottom right, why would you wear a mask, wear a mask, protect yourself from your own unwashed hands, explain this very cute dog named Dong Chai. So basically by translating our scientific literature into this memes, which allows for free remixing and so on, we engage the community to further remix these sufficiently humorous information so that when the disinformation about mask use, about vaccine and so on come, well, we can rely on this community participation of people who already understand the basic science. And so this may, when we really had our first wave, the same people who designed this memes and who designed the mask rationing map, again, banded together to create a checking method called the 1922 checking method. Again, without installing any app using your phone's built-in camera, without even unlocking your iPhone, you can just scan the QR code, send an SMS, and within just a couple of seconds finish this check-in. And then the QR code simply describes the location code of that particular venue. It's an entirely random code and it says on the text for epidemic control use only. And so what this means is that when people do not have a scanner or if you're using a feature phone, you can always manually type in the 15 digits random code and send manually to 1922. And then after that, it's kept not in the government, but rather in your telecom. So the telecom keeps it only for four weeks and you can do a reverse check to make sure that all the access from the contact tracers, actually you can see which contact tracer, look at which checking information of yours. And the greatest thing about this is that it's always self-service. The posters, the use of this QR posters in various venues, such as transportation and, you know, small night market and things like that are all supported by the social sector. That is to say the same people who built and maintain the PDT, what we call the social sector provides the service and assistance to get people to print those QR codes. So we get more than 300 million SMS sent in the first four weeks and that very successfully reduce our contact tracing from hours into well, minutes. So to summarize a little bit, to counter both the pandemic and also the infodamic, we rely on universal, not just healthcare coverage, but also broadband as a human right. And then we focus on the research and development universal access so that in our basic education, we're not just saying a media literacy or digital literacy, we're saying media and digital competence. That is to say middle schoolers can contribute to climate science, to political science, to all sorts of sciences by simply making the memes and participating in the online community such as Cup Zero. And this is how we thought the infodemic was no takedown and the pandemic was no lockdown. And this corresponds to President Tsai Ing-wen's idea during her first inauguration speech. She said, before we think of democracy as a showdown between opposing values. But nowadays in the new century, we must think of democracy as a conversation between many diverse values. By the way, this is my office, like my real office in the social innovation lab in Taipei City. Anyone can drop by. This is an open space. It's literally a park. And anyone can request 30 to 40 minutes of my time, as long as they agree to speak on the record. Indeed, I publish all the conversations with lobbyists and journalists and so on, either as Creative Commons transcripts or as Creative Commons video footages. And this enables this open innovation style where people can talk to me about their latest ideas, but they always make the case based on a pro-social thing, sustainable development, because it will look really bad to the future generations, because everything's on the record if they make something that is only good for them and sacrifice future generations. So this is how we make sure that we can co-create the norms on self-driving vehicles through presidential hackathon, on water supply repair, and all sort of data collisions. And because I don't have time to go through the details, but this a prototype of the mask rationing map was completed a few years ago before the pandemic, also by the GovZero community, so that each middle school students can learn about data competence by maintaining through the what we call Internet of Things, a PM 2.5 and other sensors on a climate measurement device, and its shares to a distributed ledger, so that people can learn about data stewardship, data bias, data controller, and things like that. The very abstract notions of GDPR suddenly became very easy to understand because they participate in climate science by measuring the things and sharing with the world how they're measuring it and contributing to the climate. And every year, we use a new voting method called quadratic voting to surface the top 10 and then top five social innovations in the past year. And the president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, gave them this trophy and promised whatever they did on a smaller scale will make it into national scale infrastructure, like a digital public infrastructure within the next year, just like if it's a presidential promise. So basically, we scale the social sector's ideas into the public sector, and then the private sector collaborates with the norms that's already ratified by this partnership. So I call this a people-public-private partnership. And we go into the rural areas, the small towns, and so on to surface the local social innovations and, of course, use digital to connect them into the sandbox experiments. Now, this time-limited experiments, which may be three months, as in the presidential hackathon, or six months or a year, after we gave them this license to experiments, we must decide whether this is a good idea or not. Just like in 2015, when UberX first started operating in Taiwan, we used the same method, Polis, is a free software visualization tool, an assistive intelligence-powered conversation where people can see, this is my reel, like friends and families and how they feel about UberX at the time. So by publishing the Fox as open data and using this online deliberative space to only collect people's feelings, we dedicate three to four weeks of time to these feelings. And when feelings resonate with one another, then we can call these ideas good enough consensus or rough consensus and ratify them into law. And so, for example, on the UberX case, I would say, oh, I think passenger liability is very important. And if you agree with me, you move toward me. And if you don't agree with me, well, you move farther away from me. But after three weeks, everyone can see, pretty much everyone agree with all your neighbors on all the points, all the time. And the abstract ideological statements like whether this is a sharing economy or gig economy, well, we agree to disagree that we spend far more calories on the consensus statements, which then gets swiftly translated into new measurements of progress, and then into the decisions that is to say the regulations and laws. And this is how we can bring those different positions into shared values and into social innovations. So that's my talk. And I would like to share with you my job description to to wrap up this talk. So five years ago, when I became digital minister, I said, okay, my job is just target 1717 1718 1716, this effective partnership, reliable data and over innovation. But the HR department said no, you have to write in plain language. And so I translated that into a poem, I guess, which goes like this. When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening. And I look forward to the questions. Thank you very much, Audrey. Big applause from my side. And if you can't hear it, there is a lot of applause for sure from the auditorium. And especially for your very nice ending poem, which kind of resonates very well in the design thinking minds who are gathering here globally, because we are for sure focusing on diversity. We are for sure focusing on plurality and not singularity. I think that is a big, a big issue. And yeah, thanks, thanks a lot. I'm not sure how we, how we are. I see here now the questions we got. Actually, so there's a question from Romania, from Raluca. I would like to know how you made IT people and people, how you made, how you made IT people and people that could code to use the Gov platform? Right. So, so the government technologists, the Gov tech people, right, and the civic technologists, the civic tech people, how do I connect them? Is that a question? I think she was, I think the question goes into direction. IT people might, might get easy access, but how do you get the people who are not able to code also? Okay. Okay. To adapt to those platforms. Right. First of all, the idea of digital public infrastructure, like any public infrastructure, is that we adapt to the people, to the society. We're not asking the people to adapt to us. So, for example, the town hall meetings that I just showed you to deliberate into those Polish conversations. Well, it's me who goes around Taiwan on those tours. I'm not asking people on the rural and remote area indigenous nation to come to the capital city of Taipei. And so this means that when, whenever we're designing things, we're not designing for people. We're designing with people. And this is only possible because people see that it's as easy as picking up a phone and call 1922 and say you should do this better. It's as easy as set up a local like literally town hall and then being supported by the video conferencing tours provided by the local digital opportunity center. So they can connect to the other municipalities is also because they wouldn't spend an extra dime in any place in Taiwan, even top of Taiwan, which is almost 4,000 meters high, your guarantee to get 10 megabits per second broadband for just 16 euros a month. If you don't, it's my fault. Like personally, my fault. And so because of that, it costs almost nothing to transmit this conversation locally into a national scale. There's another question from you saying I'm very inspired, but also very curious to know how the governmental mindset there was shifted to promote or embrace this in the first place. When was the turning point and what were the strategies? It's actually a very good question. I'm asking myself also looking at Germany, what, where is the turning point and what, what do we have to, where is the trigger? Yeah. So in Taiwan's case, the trigger was in 2014 March, when we occupied a parliament building in demonstration against a trade agreement with Beijing at a time which wasn't being delivered to substantially by the people. And so 20 or so NGOs each occupied one side of the parliament. And for example, one aspect talked about whether we want to allow five G components at a time for G components from the Beijing regime's so-called market players into our telecom infrastructure. Now that was in 2014. Nowadays, everybody else is talking about this as well. But when we did that, and we did not have many other countries talking about this issue, so we have to handle the deliberation on the street as well as online. So it was half a million people on the street and many more online. After three weeks of nonviolent demonstration, we actually ended up on some very concrete consensus, which was then adopted by the head of the parliament. So the Occupy was a success and the demonstration was not really a protest. It was a demo, a demonstration, a software sense, a brief that's turned into a minimal proof of concept. And after that, in the end of 2014, all the mayors that supported open governments get elected or reelected and all the mayor or candidate that didn't, well, or didn't, sometimes surprisingly. And so after that, the entire kind of political culture in Taiwan shifted to the four parties at the moment at the parliaments, they are all competing by their competing to be more transparent and participate Germany. Wow. That gives me hope that there is also a chance in other countries to do that. An additional question from my side actually. So if I look at the population here in Germany, and also the kind of not being from a political side digitally enough through the past 20 years, well, there is still, there was still the saying some years ago by our chancellor that digitalization is Neuland, is new territory. And that was for me, that is 30 years ago, that was new territory. But for a lot of people it is still so is there the kind of digital education in Taiwan is that way more advanced than in other countries from your perspective, since we have lived in Germany for a while, and in the United States, you might be able to compare. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's because we prioritize the use of open source and open hardware, open API, in especially our basic education curriculum, so that the students learn to make things that is to say, instead of just saying, you know, you need to be literate, literate, meaning that when a large company decides that you can operate it, we say you need to be competent, meaning that you can design your own air boxes, or you can fact check the presidential debate and forum in real time, working with mainstream media people actually did that and things like that. So even if you are under 18 in Taiwan, you're strongly encouraged by your civics class teacher and really any teacher, that you can make a real difference. For example, in our national petition platform, more than one quarter of the successful petitions were raised by people under 18, like banning plastic straws from our national identity drink, the bubble tea that was raised by 17 years, those and so on. So with some real cases, people understand they can make things happen even before they turn 18. Oh, yeah. There's a question from Min. Who is the primary contact person in Taiwan if the internet connection gets worse or interrupted? Well, that would be TWNIC, I believe, telecom level. But for example, when the Yangming Mountain, that's a mountain near Taipei City, there was a place being purposed into a managed isolation center. And I got an email saying, Minister, your problem is problem is human right. I'm being quarantined. I just went back home in Taiwan for 14 days. But on that side of Yangming Mountain, we don't get signal from any of the five telecoms. I'm suffering from lack of human right. I'm being abused by human right. And so after two weeks, we set up a new telecom tower near the Yangming Mountain to provide streaming service. And of course, by that time, that person is already out of quarantine. But he made a point of driving back, measuring the speed and posting on social media. So that's the level of our commitments. Very good. There's a question from Juliana Proserpio. I think she is now in Australia or in Brazil. I know her from Brazil. Audrey, could you share a bit about the organizational design of your ministry? Also, how do you deploy the policy turned into use technology and then be embraced by the citizens? Yeah, well, you can check out my website at digitalminister.tw, which explains some of it. But the main idea, very simple, is that my office has one secondment at most from each other ministries. So I've got like 12 different secondment from 12 different ministries. So the idea is that there's no rank. Maybe one secondment was a section chief. Another was a deputy director. So if they come from the same ministry, only the more higher rank will have decisional power, of course, but because they belong to very different ministries. So that means that they have equal contribution to this horizontal leadership team. And the other half of my office came, I think the initial co-founder came from the CID, the Copenhagen Interaction Design. Another came from Policy Lab and previously RCA Service Design, our current design lead from IDEO and so on. So it's these sick continents from the areas that doesn't have a corresponding ministry. We don't have a ministry for design. So we need contributors from these expertise areas. But each new hire must offer a new perspective, a new discipline, and also they need to contribute as well as they take into their previous communities. And so by maximizing diversity, we make sure that whatever we design is Pareto improvement. That is to say it leaves no one behind. It's safer and also sweet for everyone involved. Yeah. There's a lot of questions here, but I just picked some of the, there's one relating to what you're just saying that Min is also asking, or saying the most European ministries are spending most of the time for paperwork. How many hours do you do daily in paperwork? I don't do paper. So I'm Taiwan's first telecommuting minister. So I had three working conditions entering the cabinet. First, wherever I'm working, I'm working. I'm telecommuting. Second, I don't give orders to other ministries and I don't take orders from other ministries either. So I'm a minister at large. And finally, it's by the idea is radical transparency. That is to say, if I work with these ministries on this particular project, the entire process is accountable because you can look it up on our transcript platform to date. There's more than 6,500 people in more than 300,000 speeches and you can see each and every one of these utterances. So it is not paperwork because as we're having this conversation, for example, some assistive intelligence majors transcribe this meeting and then we can publish it and under the creative commons. And the great thing about this is that people can just take it and make decisions by themselves. They don't have to get my approval. So because I don't do approvals, I don't do paperwork either. Yeah. We have just two minutes to go and there are several questions all around the question or the issue of trust. And here's one. Why do you think the people of Taiwan trust the government so much and why is it that the people of Taiwan are so open to innovation? What to give no trust is to get no trust. So for example, when we introduce this digital counter epidemic efforts, well, we may have approval rates of 91%, for example. But we thank those 9% because these are the people who will call 1922, who will write blog articles and so on, which will result in the public hearings in the parliament because we've never declared a state of emergency. Each and everything we do must be answerable to the members of the parliament. And so after we, for example, detailed this entire way of how our digital counter pandemic efforts work, we look back into the poll numbers and then 94% of people trust that 3% more. And with them, we thank the 6%. And whenever they raise new issues and so on, we just make sure that we respond on the next day's 2pm press conference. And so this basically means that if the government maximally trusts the citizens, some citizens may trust back. And that's what guided the innovations into truly social innovations because none of the ideas that I just share with you is my idea. All of it came from the social sector, from the civil society. Yeah. Thank you very much. Even if it's just 10 o'clock, one, I have to ask one last question, which is regarding the education system. I was so impressed to hear that you kind of redesigned, are you well involved also in the redesign of the education system in Taiwan? I think it was two years ago already. What you see is the most important thing to change in education, as your last statement here today. Certainly. So I believe just as when I said whenever we think that the singularity may be near whenever we hear that, we must always remember the plurality is here. So the role of we policymakers and teachers in general is not to give perfect answers. It's not to give so-called perfect correct answers, but rather to be good enough ancestors. Good enough ancestors should means that we tell the people what we have, but if our next generations have a better idea, then we always let them guide us and we just provide a resource to their new directions. Thank you very much. And thank you very much, Audrey, for being our opening keynote speaker here today and sharing your ideas and visions to the whole global design thinking community. We are very happy that you are here. Thanks a lot and greetings to Taiwan. Thank you. Live long and prosper. Bye. Bye-bye.