 Hello everyone, this is Audrey Tao from Taiwan. I'm very happy to be here virtually to share with you some stories about Taiwan's digital democracy in the past few years. A year ago, we elected Dr. Tsai Ing-wen as our president. I'm very happy because I voted for her. I voted for her because I live with seven cats and two dogs and she's a fellow animal lover with similar values such as marriage equality, cultural diversity, Aboriginal rights, and of course animal welfare. And this is our first family. She's been tackling a lot of reforms needed such as the pension reform and the judicial reform in Taiwan through collaboration with civil society. And this is unique because Taiwan's cabinet is an independent cabinet. Not only is the previous and the current premier all independent, there's more independent cabinet members than members of any party in the cabinet. And we are the first place in the global open data index for two years running now. All the systems built under 1 million euros need to be released as open data. So the transition of power from the previous cabinet to the current one is pretty transparent. Each ministry has uploaded a checkpoint document for everybody to download along with the data that backs the policy. This underscores Dr. Tsai Ing-wen's inauguration speech. She said before democracy was a showdown between two opposing values, but now democracy needs to be a conversation between many diverse values. We first got a taste of this new kind of democracy. Back in 2014, when the students occupied the parliament for 22 days during the sunflower movement, the idea was that they can deliberate using information technologies in a way that the MPs refuse to deliberate about a trade service agreement. Hundreds of GOV-0 activists built a system that supports this kind of deliberation, broadcasting the demonstration to half a million people on the street and millions of people online. So why are there so many civil hackers in Taiwan volunteering to work on democracy? I think it's because our generation, M36 now, is the first one to taste free speech. Free speech was banned for 40 years under the martial law. So the year 1988 brought freedom of the press and personal computers. The year 1996 brought the first presidential election and the World Wide Web. Internet and democracy evolved together, spread together and integrated with each other. So when we write free software, we always think freedom. That is to say the freedom to use, to reuse, to distribute and to fork. And this is the idea that underscores the post-occupied politics. There's many mayors that was elected, much to their surprise, following the occupy. There were occupied supporters or occupiers themselves. And there was a new premier who reached out to civic hacker to reinvent policy-making back in end of 2014. For example, one of the tasks was a virtual epidemic that paralyzed many governments across the globe. It's so-called Uba. Uba is not just one company, it's a spreading meme, a virus of the mind known as sharing economy. But the idea is that algorithms can dispatch better than regulations for traffic and transport. And governments initially couldn't do much about it. The Paris City, for example, shut down its office at the time, but the app just keeps running. So in 2014, Taipei City's taxi drivers surrounded the Ministry of Transport also in protest. But memes are like biological virus. It lives in a different category. How do we negotiate with such an idea of the mind? So at a time, Jacqueline Tsai, the minister in charge of cyberspace affairs, wanted a discussion that involves all stakeholders because we believe that deliberation, thinking deeply about something together, is an effective vaccine against such a virus of the mind. When everyone consider each other's position and form a consensus, we become immune to divisive PR campaigns in the future. So for the fact for collecting the experiences, we use the internet and ask everybody to contribute data and experiences correlated to the private car sharing economy, quote-unquote. And we also use artificial intelligence to tally people's reactions to such facts. The idea is that we can then meet face to face. After the divergent face, we meet and converge those feelings into ideas. And the best ideas are the ideas that takes care of the most people's feelings. And finally, we can ratify the decision on things that we can all agree on and can live with. Before, the decision-making process was not transparent, and so we didn't get access to the same facts and experiences as the policymakers do, as people's on the street. Without considering relevant facts and everyone's feelings, ideas grow to be ideologies, virus of the mind that blind people to new facts and to each other's feelings. So always our first step is open data, but it is bidirectional. It is not just the government publishing data, but asking all the stakeholders to publish the studies, analysis, meeting records and everything so everyone can be on the same page. And then, based on the interactive survey technology, we present participants in groups and show yes or no statements contributed by each other. And we say, if your feelings manage to radiate and resonate with the most kind of people across all the different kind of sites, then we agree to use those feelings as the basis for our policy-making and our negotiation. So when all the stakeholders are in the same place in the same time, virtually, we collected everybody's feelings and included the most inclusive statements that shows up as majority opinions and use those to run a live consultation with thousands of people watching and with all the representatives agreeing on a new set of regulations. And so that was after this kind of deliberation that we ratified last year, a new kind of regulation that everybody can agree on. So taxis no longer need to be painted yellow, and app-based taxis are free to operate, but they need to display current driver identification, estimated fare, customer rating, insurance, and all sorts of different regulations that people come to expect. And so this is how we built an internal start-up called a public digital innovation space after I become the digital minister. Because you see, this kind of deliberation was very costly to run, and our task is to figure out the technologies, the workflows, and the regulations that are needed so that this is an everyday process to all policy-making, not just controversial ones. And I run this with this ask.pdc.tw system where everybody can ask me questions, and in fact I don't give exclusive interviews at all. All the journalists ask me questions publicly and thousands of people receive my answers at the same time. And the same radical transparency principle also applies for lobbying. So lobbying is not a bad thing, but I often just point at a camera saying that this camera represents the stakeholders that are not in the room for today's lobbying. So when, for example, Uber's David Plouffe visited Taiwan, I ensure that everything is on the record and a full transcript is published immediately after the meeting so people can all see what's going on. So this kind of interactive roadmap for everybody, for all the stakeholders to go through is only possible with information technologies, but information technologies must not dictate the kind of people who can participate. We use the idea of assistive civic technology. That is to say bringing technologies to people instead of asking everybody to come on some websites. So we use free software exclusively in our PDIS internal workplace. As you can see, this is a Trello-like Kanban board, but it is free software. And with the same spirit, we also build a platform called join.gov.tw that let people petition for the issues they think are important and with 5,000 counter signatures, we agree to consider it properly and all the regulations are announced 60 days in advance. This platform for people to chime in and all the important projects undertaken by the administration is also published with its estimated timeframe and all the contract that it has signed as a result of this plan and so on for everybody to supervise and comment on. We have participation offices in every single ministry who takes care of people's petitions and so on and engage with people face to face, again recorded and transcribed using VR technologies to discuss possible solutions to the issues raised by the civil society in a transparent manner. The idea of thinking of democracy is a game with a purpose with voting that everybody can do as its entry value such as clicking like on social media. And open data takes it a level further when all the budgets lost statistics have their place on the web we can share the links together to get a bigger picture. And forums such as join.gov.tw is very useful when questions are answered sometimes by ministers in a timely fashion. It brings the gap between public servants and the civil society and then we can have meaningful consultations and then we can have deliberations. Each step may involve less people than before but every place in the ladder has somebody else down the ladder to explain to and somebody up the ladder to listen to and so everybody can learn together when new technology arrives such as autonomous cars and sharing economy so that we can all agree on what actually it is and what we demand of the technology instead of what the technology demand of us. And many seemingly inescapable singularities or controversial topics can actually be resolved by introducing a new T dimension where people meet at the origin, listen to each other, meet and listen again and again. Through deliberation we can build together not singularity, but a plurality among the multitude of people and animals and plants and rivers and even more importantly among our own past and future imagination of ourselves. And so I'd like to conclude my talk with another quote from President Tsai Ing-wen. She said we need to build a united democracy that is not hijacked by ideology to build a efficient democracy that responds to the society and to the economy and to build a pragmatic democracy that let people take care of each other and this is our experiment in reinventing democracy. We do so just by listening. And so let's all keep listening to each other and thank you for listening.