 For everyone joining right now, welcome, thanks for being on time, even early. Please sit tight. We're going to wait a couple minutes for people who are in the lobby, virtual lobby, to be admitted into the webinar. An important guest has just arrived. Excellent. I'm assuming the important guest you're mentioning is Minister Tang. Welcome. We are waiting currently just for a couple minutes to give people a chance to go from the lobby and enter the webinar formally. Max, I'm going to go ahead and make Minister Tang a presenter. Thank you. As a note for those of you. Hello. Hello and welcome, Mr. Tang. Thank you for being here. We are waiting currently now for people to come into the lobby and then get admitted into the webinar. We can just be patient for one or two more minutes and then we can start our program. Please note that if you require closed captioning, it's possible that Microsoft Teams, as the way you are joining this particular webinar, may not necessarily provide closed captioning. So it's possible that the Microsoft Teams client application will be able to do that for you if you need that. This webinar, by the way, for all of you here is being recorded and admitting people from the lobby is a bit of a labor intensive job. So thank you to our assistants who are doing that work. Okay. Greetings, Minister Tang. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. How are you doing? Excellent. Excellent. Is everything good on the tech side of things? Can you hear me okay? Yes, loud and clear. How about you, Wei Ting? Are you okay? Yep, still good. Okay. Hopefully I'm no longer sharing my desktop. No, you're sharing your bookshelves. All right. That's appropriate. I think you're probably good to go. I'll keep letting people in as they arrive, but I think you're all set. Okay. All right. Thank you, Jared. And hello and welcome everyone to today's online event hosted here at Ohio State University. My name is Max Woodworth, and I'm Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State. And I serve as the head researcher and organizer in partnership with Rick Livingston of the OSU Humanities Institute for the series of events tonight under the title of Asian Futures. Asian Futures is a program supported by the Ohio State Global Arts and Humanities Discovery theme, and it funds public lectures, workshops, community events, reading groups, and curricular research into Asian studies here at Ohio State through 2022. The overarching purpose of Asian Futures is to draw greater attention to Asian studies on campus and to use our resources at OSU to bring greater awareness of the transformations afoot across Asia to broader audiences here in Ohio. With that in mind, I'm delighted to be able to welcome today as our distinguished guests, Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tang, who joins us online from Taipei, where it is now early in the morning on Tuesday. Minister Tang has a fascinating and decidedly unorthodox professional trajectory that includes her dropping out of school, cutting her teeth in the high pressure world of Silicon Valley, and then as a so-called hacktivist pushing the Taiwanese government to embrace reforms of radical data transparency. Since 2016, she has been active first advising the government on digital affairs and has now risen to the formal role of minister without portfolio. Thank you, Minister Tang, for taking the time from your busy schedule to be with us today. Good local time and good local time from the future, like literally Tuesday. Yes. Yeah, very, very sci-fi. I also want to welcome as well here, Wei Ting Yan, assistant professor of government at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She joins us from Savannah, Georgia for some reason. Dr. Yan is a specialist in political economy and politics in Taiwan, and East Asia, and has written recently about Taiwan's COVID-19 management. Dr. Yan is also an Ohio State alumnus, so welcome back virtually to campus, Wei Ting. The theme for today's discussion is digital democracy and COVID-19 in Taiwan. Our time is short, so we have only an hour before the minister must go on with her busy day. So I will be very brief here with my introductory comments so we can move to the discussion and Q&A quickly. As many of you likely know, Taiwan has seen remarkable success in its fight against COVID-19. For us here in the United States, the numbers that Taiwan has recorded are really quite outstanding. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Taiwan has had fewer than 17,000 cases and as of today, 848 deaths. Moreover, roughly 90% of the cases and deaths recorded occurred in May and June this year before being aggressively contained and returning to trend, which is to say case numbers in the single digits with occasional peaks over that. There is an important story to tell where Taiwan's COVID-19 response is concerned, and shortly we will ask Minister Tang about this experience and the current outlook. But Dr. Yan and I are also curious to inquire as well about Taiwan's recent innovations in what has come to be called digital democracy. Though there are several definitions for this term, we might think of digital democracy broadly as the use of information and communications technology for the purposes of enhancing political democracy and or the participation of citizens in democratic communication. We bring up digital democracy here for two reasons. First, Minister Tang has been active for many years in efforts to use digital tools for policymaking and cross-agency coordination in her work inside government and has, as mentioned, been a proponent and designer of open-source software and of radical transparency. Second, digital tools have been central to the COVID-19 response in Taiwan. So we are eager here to learn about this intersection of these themes and our questions are directed in that way. So our format today is designed to be informal and conversational. Dr. Yan and I have prepared questions that we will ask the minister and we will make sure to reserve 20 minutes or so before the end of the hour for public questions. For those of you who have questions, please make sure to send them through the chat function and we will be curating those questions as they come in. So perhaps first I will yield to Dr. Yan to begin and then I will take turns asking as well and we'll just have to speak conversation. And once again, thank you, Dr. Minister Tang, for joining us. It's a real pleasure. Okay, so I guess we will start with a question about Taiwan's handling of COVID. So Taiwan has been viewed as a very successful case in handling the COVID crisis. And we know one reason behind the success is the usage of digital technology. For example, Taiwan used the QR code system for contact tracing process. When talking about digital tools or digital governance, people may immediately think of privacy violation or digital surveillance. And so in the U.S. there is this argument saying that the public here is more protective of their privacy and does not trust the government to collect personal information. So a high level of digital governance can only work in Asia where people may have different expectations of privacy protection. So we're curious what your thoughts on the statement and do you think there are some prerequisite or even civic virtue needed for digital governance or digital democracy to work? Certainly. And I'd like to share first application from last February that does not involve any privacy tradeoffs. And like the QR code contact tracing, which I'll get to, it's created not by the government, but rather by the social sector. So the prerequisite is a strongly empowered social sector. In the U.S. I believe it's called a civic technology community or the voluntary sector, the charitable sector, the third sector or whatever in Taiwan we call it a social sector. So there is a social sector community called G0V or GOV0 that look at all the digital services that the government does, which is something GOVTW, and make forks, that is to say open source alternatives at G0V, the TW. So just changing O2O0 in your browser bar gets you into this kind of shadow government that tens of thousands of people, unless like China or Telegram or IRC are contributing at any given time. So last February, for example, even before we instituted a mask rationing scheme, people in GOV0 made this map that lets you track your neighborhood's availability of medical grade masks. Now, you see here that, for example, on this particular pharmacy, there's 58 adult masks and there's close to 200 children's masks. And if it runs out of masks, well, it goes red and then finally gray so that people queuing in line can actually reverse audit the system so that they'd see the person queuing before them bought a few masks and after 30 seconds the phone refreshes, right? So on their chatbot or map or whatever, they see that the inventory actually depletes in real time. So this first, of course, quells the fear and certainly endowed because you just go to the farms that still have some masks left. And second, it reveals the bias and distribution issues. For example, we initially saw the population centers overlay exactly with the pharmacies, but not everyone own a helicopter, as the OpenStreetMed community pointed out. So when MP Gao Hong and interpolated our Minister of Health, Chen Xuzhong, about this unfair distribution of urban and rural areas based on this real-time data published every 30 seconds, we changed the distribution overnight and Mr. Chen's Simplice Legislator teach us. So it brings a previously oppositional policy or political relationship through open data in real time into a co-creative relationship. So there really is nothing privacy related in this co-creation. I point this out because it's the same bunch of people in GovZero. This May, when we had our first and real wave, which has passed so far in the past couple of months, we're essentially back to local zero cases. But during the height of that, during May, it took GovZero only a couple of days to roll out this very innovative app-free contact tracing method. And again, with no privacy violation by the state because it's created by the people, right? So basically the volunteers posted this QR code and in your phone's lock screen without downloading any new app, you can point your camera to the QR code. And it pops out a composition screen of a short message to 192 to the well-trusted toll-free number for counter-epidemic work. And you press that and that's it. So like literally just, this doesn't require a tap. So a single tap and about three seconds. And then you finish a check-in. And this has no privacy violations precisely because the five telecom carriers who receive this SMS isn't going to transmit it anywhere. So and they already know your phone number anyway. And the 15 digits is only known to the venue owner and the QR code maker and not known by the telecom carrier. So through a design called multi-party security, no single piece of puzzle will review your whereabouts. So this is not a compromise. Rather, this is a social innovation from the social sector. And through this idea of reverse procurement, we just make sure that we secure the resource to make that happen. But it's actually created by very privacy-minded social sector in the first place as a viable fork of the government's services, which at a time was still based on pen and paper registration. And it doesn't replace pen and paper. You can still use pen and paper if you want to. Okay, thank you. That's a very good answer. I think we'll come back to some of the trust and digital democracy question later. But I think following the previous question, another thing that happened during the pandemic we know is that we observe not just a pandemic. We also observe an infodemic with loads of misinformation circulating both online and offline. And so when tackling misinformation, I know you have mentioned in a lot of interviews that Taiwan uses this humor for rumor approach to fight against information during COVID-19. However, my observation is that during the latest COVID-19 wave in Taiwan back in May 2021, at the time, amid a very high uncertainty and panics among the citizens, the humor for rumor approach seemed ineffective at that time. And the result was that many issues such as vaccines were politicized and people started to disrupt the government. And so we're interested in your opinion, what are the other ways we can use to strengthen the fight against misinformation? Definitely. And it's a really, really good question. So I would still say that if we don't have the very cute Spokes dog to be with us this May and June, then it will actually be much worse. And just for the record here is the cute Spokes dog. Or Zongchai, right? So Zongchai reminds you to, for example, keep three cute dogs distance from one another indoors and two outdoors. Or Zongchai reminds you to wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands, so on and so forth. So of course, Zongchai is very effective and mimetic so that people willingly share this public service announcement information and remix it to their heart's desire. And it's true that we had a vaccine appointment system that initially were not that effective in getting the people above 65 years old vaccinated, which is the highest priority group. And simply because the memes and so on doesn't actually translate into a accessible digital service, the way that SMS contact tracing or the mask rationing is accessible for the elderly people. So for the elderly people, we didn't ask them to register for a vaccine appointments on the internet except the type of municipality. I believe all other municipalities simply used the district chief, the Li Zhang system, as well as the local health offices and so on. And the theory is that people above 65 are retired, so they have more time on their hands. So it's easier instead of asking them to call to register for vaccines simply appoint people in a single district going into a single place at some given time so that they may be vaccinated and mask. However, it is true that the primary communication channel to these elderly people were not over the internet and decidedly not mimetic. So there's a lot of rumors that was circulating online about the fairness and timeliness of vaccine availability. So I believe we overcame that through a two-pronged approach. First, when people below 64 years old do actually have a fair access to a vaccine appointment system, that put an end to the kind of panic on the local and national and district level on the unpredictability of vaccine arrival and so on. So that would pretty good deal with it too. It's similar to how the mask rationing map put predictability to the mask rationing which was also initially quite panic inducing and quite scarce as it were last February. So we overcame that in about the most time. And second, and I must also thank the US and Japan for donating the vaccines in time. So when the people felt the scarcity was at its peak at its maximum, the US donated Moderna and Japan donated AstraZeneca so that people preferring those two different doses. Because one of the roots of the panic was that there were people who prefer Moderna far over AstraZeneca and there's people who prefer the BNT Pfizer far over the Medigen, for example, our homebrew and so on. But when we made sure that there's plenty of supply now of all the four different brands despite their social preferences and making the social preferences public by making the vaccine appointment system open data. So in real time, everyone can see the real time preference of the four different levels of the vaccines in each and every municipality or city in the age group of five. So what does social preference as a transparent social object put an end to the speculation? This is all extremely detailed and it's incredibly interesting to follow because as we as we try to grapple with COVID-19 in the United States, the communications, I think it's fair to say the communications around vaccines around masks has been maybe could be described as somewhat muddled and certainly hasn't been driven with the same kind of digital literacy that you seem to be comfortable promoting in Taiwan. So I was curious too, just in response to this, as you're talking about developing open source tools and using civic tech to develop these tools, the implication there is two things. One is the extremely high degree of engagement in the population that appears to be something that you've seen. And then, and second, not just engagement in an analog space, but literacy in the digital space so that people are comfortable in navigating and not just navigating and that's one thing, but to develop and to be able to code and to produce these things from scratch. So I'm curious how you how you work with civic tech groups to to foster this kind of activity to produce actionable, usable tools. So that's really two questions, right? One is about the co-creation and another is about the literacy and I will call it competence in basic education and lifelong education if I get you correctly. So, yeah, these are all very deep questions worthy of three hour seminars, but I will be brief. So in short, the idea here is very simple is to trust our citizens in Taiwan, the Internet and democracy began its roots, both in the late 80s, right? 87, when we lifted out of the martial law, that was the beginning of the BitNet and the local BBS culture. At the time, there's still no free elections. For example, our direct presidential election would come in only 96. So during the decades since 87 to 96, the social sector gained a lot of legitimacy by providing for services through local co-ops, charities and things like that, Not just part of democratization process, but also part of our environmental protection, part of our disaster recovery around the turn of century. We had a really large earthquake that mobilized pretty much all the social sector, all the faith. And to this day, if you have a earthquake in, for example, eastern Taiwan, if the local social sector publish a number and the local municipality publish a number, people are going to trust the social sector number. So they liked Xi's number. So basically, people had made a high legitimacy apparatus on top of which that would bring the technology as a digital kind of assistive tool. But when we, for example, occupy the parliament in 2014, March, totally nonviolent in a deliberative way, half a million people on the street, the real organizers are the 20 or so NGOs, civil society organizations around the parliament. The parliament that took the agenda of the trade deal with staging and deliberated aspect by aspect. And again, this is something that started and defined by the social sector. So a history of the social sector setting the political and social agenda, I believe, is the infrastructure and digital is just a way to amplify their connectivity. But the US also had a really strong, you know, civil liberties unions and cooperatives movement. So credit unions, for example, is an idea we took from the US and applied to Taiwan. So you probably know what I'm talking about. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that we emphasize in our educational curriculum, a idea of competence, which is making contributions in real time, instead of just literacy, which is consuming information in real time. So, for example, all the, pretty much all the primary schools in Taiwan have this thing called Airbox. And the Airbox is something that measures PM 2.5 levels in your vicinity. It contributes, of course, to climate science. It is part of a distributed ledger maintained by our National Academy, the Zhong Yan Yuan, that's made sure that when people, for example, want to jog outside, they can check their nearby schools and balconies real time PM 2.5. But before deciding whether to go out or wear a mask or something, well, you wear a mask anyway. But at the point here is that the kids, they learn that data stewardship, data bias, things that cannot be taught easily, can be learned easily when you make real time contributions to the society. And when they enter middle school, for example, in addition to the Airbox work, they are now working on media competency project that, for example, fact checks are three presidential candidates debate in real time. But it's not just an exercise. If they find something that is out of, you know, the recorded fact, it actually gets amplified by the public TV network and so on during the debate in real time captions. So they also contribute to the democratic process as part of their learning in a kind of capstone project and they can also start petitions. Actually, more than a quarter of our nationwide petitions were started by people lower than 18 years old that is just not having the right to vote yet. So they can say, for example, ban plastic straws from our takeout of our bubble seats and so on. And that actually resulted in policy change. And when we asked the person who started a young lady just turned 17 when she raised this petition, why are you starting this movement? And she's like, this is our civics class assignment. So obviously competency education is already part of basic education. Great. And it's funny you mentioned the air box because we have someone here in the in joining us today in the webinar. Jian Xu-shan, who has a who has a project and actually I work with him on this air box project in Taiwan. So I know that one of the things that's curious about the air boxes in Taiwan is that actually the air quality is quite good. Yes, definitely. But it's better than when it started. So the fact that people mobilized parades demonstration is one based on air box data actually resulted in policy change that results in better air quality. So it's all very impactful. I think they move to water boxes now. I'm curious to because one of the things that the second question I'd like to ask you, I'd like to ask you so many questions and we have so little time but I given your your your history and working with digital tools you worked with the the it's called the tool that's developed by a group in Seattle, but you've applied them on the ground in Taiwan and I wondering if you could for our audience here if you could explain a little bit how that works and where it was applied and how it demonstrates and was an example of digital democracy and action and then maybe if you could mention some limitations as well of it. Certainly. So here is Polish and in all its glory in 2015 when we first apply it. So it's a real conversation you see that you're represented by a circle a blue skirt circle your avatar and near you are the people who feel similar to you your social media friends and families around one particular subject in 2015 that was about over X. There are a lot of tensions at the time inside one because you were ex at the time said it's a right sharing tool, but the taxi fleets doesn't think that this way. There's some people who say it's sharing economy but some people say it's a really good economy. Some people say it would be better for labor conditions. Some people said it will be worse. It's all very controversial. So in 2015 we adopted AI power conversation by AI. We mean assistive intelligence that is aligned with the pro social part of the social media instead of anti social part of social media and it also qualified as a digital public infrastructure because nowadays polis is polis.gov.tw. We run our own instance here so that all the government officials can start a Polish conversation as easy. They can start a survey or poll or something because in the sense it's really like a survey but a we key survey where the survey questions are written by the participants themselves. Instead of focusing only on solutions at the very beginning. We've just focused on sharing the fox and let people know that the If you click agree, you move further to this person. If you disagree, you move away from that person, but there's no reply button. So there's no room for trial to grow. Rather, the reply button is at the bottom where you can't reply directly to any sentiment, but you can propose your own sentiments to gain acceptance across the aisle, across the different groups. And the numbers here are representative, of course, of people who agree with each other, but the area here measures plurality. That is to say, if you get 2,000 people here voting exactly the same way, it doesn't increase the area of any particular group. We really only hold ourselves to account on the multi-stakeholder meeting live streamed after the poll is faced, only on the things that most people agree on, on the consensus statements. So people learn very quickly to not compete or waste too much calories on the ideological device of statements, whether it's gig or sharing economy, but rather on the things that people do agree most of the time with most of their neighbors on the most of the topic. So this, for example, would entail empowering local temples and churches, the social sector, to run their own fleets similar to Uber enjoying search pricing, for example, about registration, about insurance, about not undercutting existing taximeters, and so on and so forth. So those consensus statements were then held as agenda for this inter-agency meeting with taxi and to Uber and some representatives and basically say, this is the will of the people. So let's implement the will of the people together. So this is a way to very quickly form shared goals to collectively define measures of the progress to find what's key in the KPI in a way that's very reliable. And so after quickly forming shared goals, the innovation that they live on those goals can be delivered quickly by the stakeholders. So for quite some time now, Uber is now a legal company register in Taiwan, the Q-taxi, the local temples and churches are empowering in a similar way, everybody wins. And so this is what is possible with digital democracy is to listen to each other at scale instead of just a few elites speaking to the public via broadcasting at scale. And so the agenda setting is Polish strengths. Of course, there is limitations. It's not that easily to be applied to things that are overly abstract. So we had to translate each conversation into something to use a Kesson's term, something of overlapping consensus, meaning instead of deliberating about sharing economy in general, we just talk about one specific case, someone driving to work, pick up a stranger they met on the app and charging them for it and do the same regularly when they drive back home from work. And in this very specific example, people have similar situations and experiences before so they can relate to it. And this relatedness is what allows the resonance to develop. Great. It's a really fascinating development that seems to be employed. I wanna leave some for waiting, waiting if you wanna ask a question at this point. Yes, I mean, like you, I have like so many questions I can ask, but I think we only have eight minutes till 7 o'clock. We'll open the floor. Yes. So I guess I will ask some more broad questions about the potential, the future of digital democracy because at this point, what I've heard is that the reason why COVID works or even how digital democracy works relies on two things. One is a very empowered civil society almost like a tax-heavy civil society. And the second thing is trust, mutual trust, trusting the people, trusting the trust between the government and the people and then trust between the people. And so in a lot of democracy, especially Western democracy, what we know, it's a more and more polarized society. And then misinformation kind of make it even worse. So trust actually has become a very rare commodity in today's public life. And so when you're talking on thinking is in a world with trust, lack of trust and filled with more misinformation, how do we envision the future of digital democracy? And or in places when it's already polarized, what's your view of developing more function in digital democracy? Yeah, but the lack of trust is really a symptom and the root cause is the lack of investment to the public squares, the trust infrastructures, both digitally and of course in the face to face setting. In many areas in Taiwan certainly, but also in the US, the public parks, the campuses, the town halls and so on were probably built in a single generation when people decided that having some baseball fields in the community is very important. And say if people don't make that decision, there may be a lack of community interaction. There will be no such space between work and the family. And people will observe that they'd grow more distance with their neighbors, but instead of overly analyzing that, maybe we should just do more parks. In Taiwan since 2016, we've classified the digital public infrastructure as infrastructure. That is to say previously the special budget which could only be used for tangible, concrete constructions like literally made out of concrete may now be also invested in the digital equivalent of the public square because we realize if we don't invest in the pro-social, social spaces online, our citizens will be forced to take the democratic conversations to some place that decidedly undemocratic, namely to Facebook, which would be like holding a town hall in a smoke field room with addictive drinks and private bouncers, very loud music. You have to shout to get heard selling a lot of advertisement and things like that, right? And it's the same sort of people. And I don't have anything against the entertainment sector. The night clubs in Taiwan are now open, but we're not designating these places as spaces for democracy. And we need to do the same around the world to invest appropriately in the equivalent of the Polish infrastructure in our joint platform, the epitition that I briefly alluded to and many other ways to foster the idea of co-creation online in a space that's more naturally to resonate rather than to divide. Great, if I could, I was curious and something along similar lines is that much of the discussion, so Waitin mentioned the polarization and of course in the United States and in many other countries, there's a lot of controversy around Facebook and other social media platforms and a lot of questions around control over algorithms and such. So I'm curious where you stand on issues of sort of open, you've described yourself as a kind of radical transparency advocate. And so I'm curious where you sort of stand on the issue of algorithmic justice and other issues around digital equality and equity in democracy in the digital space. And especially in the context of today where there seems to be a lot of instrumentalization of digital tools for very non-democratic means. And definitely non-democratic ends. Yeah, definitely. There's another GovZero project, the Covax project that detects disinformation and scams and spams and whatever. When you forward a message from into encrypted channels like reporting a spam, it posts the most viral disinformation at any given time so that the journalists at the time fact-check center and many other in the international fact-checking network can focus their energy on the things that are actually trending. And I believe that a social sector should hold the private sector and the public sector to account. That is to say it's not the state fact-checking the companies and not the other way around, but rather a community's voluntary community, the social sector doing this gatekeeping work. The GovZero people have also literally went into our national auditing office at a control unit and brought out paper copies of the campaign donations and finances and to post them as structural data asking people to collaboratively OCR to Otaku character recognize the printed filings. And it's directly prompted the legislature to enact a law of basically transparency around campaign donations starting 2018. All the campaign donation expense are to be published in open data to enable investigative journalism of this kind that they can distill the campaign donors roster and so on starting 2018 without resorting to crowdsourcing. So it's like the macerationing map adopted by the National Health Insurance Administration to ensure the numbers are timely and correct. And when people analyze that, people discover that the social media campaigns are not, were not disclosed here. It was not filed as campaign donations. The campaign can be only funded by domestic sources but at the time in 2018, the funding came from the extra jurisdictional sources, right? So basically there's a gaping loophole that's revealed by the social sector of zeros opening up of the campaign donation roster. So they then went and applied the same pressure to Facebook saying, I don't care about the norms around the world by in Taiwan, we just occupy the national office to ask for the radical transparency of the political and the social campaigns data, right? So you need to adhere to the norm and have it that is set by the social sector which were recently amplified by the state. So according to a internal Facebook example here with a blower, Taiwan was one of the only jurisdictions back in 2019 that Facebook took seriously and invested in civic integrity and also disclosed in real time as open data the advertisement from the foreign sponsor sources banning them and then disclosing also from domestic sources so that the dark patterns can be reviewed by the zero investigative journalists in real time. So this is really detailed but the point here is that we see ourselves in the state as just a amplifier of the norms in the social sector it's just like a trade negotiation without passing any laws to ban Facebook or anything, we can tremendous negotiating leverage because Facebook knows if they do not conform the way our national audit office conformed then there will be social sanction and there are actually viable alternative to Facebook like PTT or Decard or whatever. So that's the threat of social sanction is real and which is why they also conform to our local norm. Fascinating, great, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for those incredibly detailed answers and sharing those slides, it's really helpful. Sure. I'd like to open it up for questions from the audience. I'm looking here, I'm assuming that people are able to submit questions in the chat. I don't know if- Or raise their hands. Yeah, or raise their hands, that would be great. Let's see here, trying to find out your participants. I don't see hands raising. Jared or Sujan, can either of you confirm to us that people are able to submit questions? They should be, this is Sujan, they should be able to submit questions via chat. The settings haven't changed, maybe they're just taking about a good question to ask. Yeah, yeah, people are welcome to submit one and here we go, let's see here. Hi Jared. I just have a really quick question, hoping you can hear me okay, whoops, hoping you can hear me okay. So the question in some sense is a follow up on the question that Wai Ting asked earlier, which is there's so much that I listen to you talk Minister Tang and I think this sounds like Utopia. This is the techno Utopia I've been dreaming about and reading about in my science fiction novels, but then I think about the world that I live in and the many unique challenges to, for one thing, a population that is, as was suggested earlier, deeply distrustful of each other at this moment, but also the challenge in this comes up in a lot of speculative fiction that I read that deals with questions of digital democracies, which is how do we handle the fundamental challenge of addressing micro democracies or the kind of unique, often very localized communities that have their own need, geographic, cultural ethnic and so on, that will not be reflected in a simple majority vote, for example. Yeah, which is why we don't use majority. Right, we cross to us for innovations, but we do not actually vote down any particular idea, right? On the Polish screen that I just shared, but the minority groups, if they're diverse from every other group's views, that views gets not only preserved, but potentially amplified because people have to talk across aisles in order to have their feelings to resonate and be accounted for. So I think it's all in the design of the system. If the bit rate is small, if each person only have three bits of information uploaded every four years called voting, by the way, then of course we need to compress our social preferences into an impossibly flat degree, and that allows the kind of dynamic of the majority outvoting the minority. But if there are a huge number of people setting their own agenda as we see in Polish, the bit rate is much, much higher and coupled with the real-time live streamed stakeholder consultations, it easily made sure that people feel it's symmetric, right? As much as they receive from the deliberative space, they can also contribute an equal amount, the uplink and the downlink are symmetrical. And this feeling of symmetry, I believe, helps people to feel empowered so that they in any locality cannot just remix the innovations like the contact tracing, they can adopt their own QR code scanner, they can also stamp their way into the venues, they're not bound by the centrally dictated rules, and that's because the Civic Tech are open source. I made a point of displaying their free software licenses, such as like my eyeglass, they're purely assistive technology. If I don't like my eyeglass, I can adjust it however I want without paying a huge amount of license fees and of course it doesn't pop out advertisement every 20 seconds or something. It's entirely aligned to my best interests. It's wonderful, thank you so much. Great, we have, let's see. So we have some questions coming in here, hold one second here. I'm happy to read if that's easier for you, Max. Sure, if you don't mind, yeah. No, no, not at all. So the first question asked, so during the 2021 outbreaks in Taiwan, several public agencies needed to work from home. During that time, we also observed that digital governance for the public sector was not as well-developed as we had hoped. For example, most agencies still relied on hard, a hard copy, yeah, and refused to use digital documents. Based on your experience, how can we push the public sector in Taiwan to do the kind of digital reforms needed for the next crisis? Definitely. So we did not have to work for home for long, right? I'm a teleworking minister, by the way. So starting in 2016, I only entered the cabinet office every Monday and Thursday, I believe. And the other days, I'm just touring around Taiwan on Taiwan high speed rails and so on. And so it all depends on whether the minister in your ministry or if you're in a local municipality, say the section chief or your vice mayor or mayor, prefer to see people in the same room or whether they prefer to work on a shared workspace digitally. This is really of habits. There's many people in Taiwan on the entry level in the public sector that works exclusively online. But when their superiors want to see the hard copies, they have to finally still print out those whatever business intelligence tools that they're using and distill it to something that can be contained by paper. So it's a culture of paper, it is true. So there's two things that we can do to address this. One is they're simply put to get them more positive experiences. If they can't switch out of pencil, then at least use a stylus, right? I use stylus exclusively. And so the senior officials that I work with, when you get them the stylus, they are then more happy to work on a tablet or something because they preserve their kind of thinking out loud habits while digitally annotating the documents. So bring technologies to where the people are instead of asking people to adapt to keyboards or mouse, which is really unfamiliar to the senior policy maker. The same goes for video conferencing. If you made sure that a video conference for them is just sitting in this chair and start talking, most people are actually feeling it's more intimate than having to wear a mask in the same room. But if you ask them to set up their own teams conversation and so on, well, that's a tall ask. So again, bring the technology via assistance to the offices. So in Taiwan, we're very maybe uniquely fortunate in the world that we don't have to digitally transform in the past couple years. We, our schools are in the same room, right? But some teachers are embracing the digital curriculum and so on for the particularly co-creative classes where people coat together, design together and things like that. Then they prefer a digital workspace over a analog whiteboard because it enables more input from the children. A tool called Slido is very popular because it enables children to not be captured by the Instagram and equivalents on their phone. They can still post comment and like each other. But on the way that's pro-social that is actually projecting to the teacher and the students can set agenda for the teachers, but it's not from their home. They are still in the same classroom. For, of course, we've had no COVID for the majority of last year and only for a few months this year so that we still use face-to-face setting we just use digital to amplify that. This is maybe peculiar to Taiwan but that's the state we're in. That's terrific and actually just makes me really think about how unique it is to have a democracy that's kind of evolving and growing up with the digital revolution. And that kind of brings to that. I think the other question that came up on the chat which touches on some issues that were related earlier related to the question of the public trust but particularly in relationship to an issue that is very fraught in a lot of Western countries right now which is the question about private data, this obsession or fetishization of the invasion through the use of data and digital democratic tools for those that have that potential to be seen as an invasion of privacy. Obviously that's not a significant crisis in Taiwan but the questioner asks, how do you think a government might restore public trust with the help of a technology that many people view with certain skepticism around these issues? As I mentioned, if this eyeglass pops out advertisement or government propaganda every 20 minutes when it breaks, I have to pay millions of dollars to reverse engineer a schema to fix it instead of sending it to a repair person down the street. Then of course I wouldn't trust this glass, right? And I think that is really the point here in that if the government develops government technology that did not exist before the pandemic, of course it will be met with a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt for the cybersecurity and privacy perimeters were simply unknown to the people because it didn't exist before the pandemic. And again, Taiwan is somewhat unique because we've never entered a state of emergency. All our intervention or measures must be pre-approved by the parliament and both the budget and the law required to enable it. So it means we are stuck with the already trusted building components like Legos which is why we use some decidedly low tech but appropriate tech components like printed QR code, like manually tweeting the 15 digits to 192 to via SMS which is two G less I check, not five G and the national health insurance card which is the IC card that was issued dates back to 2003, right? So, but these were very familiar components. These were components already well understood by the cybersecurity white hat community as well as the privacy-minded people and the way they're put together are not designed by the government. As I mentioned, it's demanded by the social sector by the very people who are the most privacy aware and even demanding at times basically saying the government should abolish whatever centralized collection and must adopt the latest in privacy enhancing technology. I mentioned multi-party security but they're also demanding federated learning split learning or differential privacy homomorphic encryption as on the latest in the privacy enhancing technology. So us in the government by simply adopting the demand of the social sector gained legitimacy not because we're particularly legitimate but because they are legitimate and we can't feed them we must join them. It is a digital utopia. I'm sorry, I gotta go pack. You're welcome to Taiwan. We issued the GOAT card so you can't get to presidency immediately even before entering Taiwan. There's one new question just came through which is thank you for sharing. Is digital democracy a unique implementation? Are there other locations that you're aware of that have had success with similar models? That's a great question. Yeah, we actually learn most of the systems that we develop are not actually initially started in Taiwan and the moderator already mentioned that Polis started as a Seattle sign and the distribution that I showed you of the divisive and consensual statements that particular screenshot was from Bowling Green, Kentucky. There's actually quite some success in applying Polis-like conversations in a smaller scale within one district or one municipality because people trust each other more and it's easier to have a physical town hall in addition of this digital equivalent of the town hall. The petition platform that I alluded to are a direct adaptation from Bethlehem from Iceland. Iceland is also very well-developed in their ideas of digital democracy. The participatory budgeting part came from Desidema and Consul from Barcelona and Madrid respectively. I can go on, but the point here is that it really is a planetary community of digital democracy and what we are doing essentially is just providing one of the labs, if you will, to try out the latest innovation but we don't come up with all the innovations. The presidential hackathon was from the German Prototype Fund. The way we vote in presidential hacks on the quadratic voting was from Ethereum. Okay, not really a country, but semi-sovereign and so on. So we get the best and better practice from all over the world. If I may, we have the question from Christen, the question here is, how can digital democracy cope with the challenge when a dictatorship also uses digital solutions to control people? Yeah, well, first it's to make sure that we control the terms on all the terms, democratic terms, right? We, for example, the idea of transparency, all the civic tech innovations are based on the idea of the control yuan, with the people, not just for the people, right? Holding the government and the businesses to account. So this control is citizen control and transparency means making the state and the multinationals transparent to the citizens as opposed to in a digital dictatorship, transparency would mean state control, right? Making the citizen transparent to the state. And I mentioned credit unions. In Taiwan, if somebody has a lot of social credit, it means that they enjoy a high degree of trust locally. They can lend a lot from their local co-ops and credit unions, but in digital dictatorships, somebody with a lot of social credit simply means they have a high score in their provincial database, right? So again, the same word means radically different things. So I believe the idea of digital democracy is to disassociate the terms that we usually associate with centralized control and to move from thinking impurely the centralized control terms. When we think of AI, for example, I always assistive intelligence instead of artificial or authoritarian intelligence. And in fact, that is also why I wrote my job description in the form of a prayer to kind of reimagine the possibility. So that the centralized authoritarian community do not monopolize the use of the terms promoted by Silicon Valley and that we can't think of in a much more pro-social. It's very short, so I might as well recite it. It's my job description, the girls like this. Well, 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, well, let's always remember the plurality is here. So the Taiwan model, a part of a pluralistic democracy, inspire, I believe, the world that dictatorship, lockdown, top-down takedowns is not the only model to counter the pandemic and the infodemic. We can encourage plurality and democratic spirit while doing exceedingly well encountering both the pandemic and the infodemic. Well, thank you. That was kind of a tour de force ending. I really appreciate that last bit there. I think it's very inspiring what you've provided for us today. It's really, it's wonderful to hear these detailed answers and really appreciate you taking the time. Waiting, did you have any final comment? No, I think it's great. I'm amazed by all the answers you have. I have way more questions, but I think so far it's been really good. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation. Yeah, thank you so much, Minister Tang. We know that you have a busy day ahead of you and we really appreciate you taking the time and agreeing to this conversation. And we hope that we can have one again soon and maybe we'll all meet in Taiwan soon. I hope so. Yeah, definitely. Go get a gold card and we can meet in Taiwan, but till we meet Liflong and Prosper everyone. Indeed, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us. And please be on the lookout for further activities under the Asian futures at Ohio State. Be well, everyone. Take care. All right, thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.