 I'm very happy that you find your time for myself, and obviously I'll have questions that are repetitive in a way to you, I mean you must have had answered them many times. Sure, but we can try a different angle every time. But maybe we can try an angle. Both my parents are journalists, so I'm very used to this. Oh, who are you? Okay, now I think journalists make great parents, yeah. Yeah? Okay, I'll tell it to my two small kids. Okay. Okay, so this is my phone. Sure. I'm going to record the interview. Yeah, I mean, there's a table here, so if we... I can just left. Okay, perfect. So first question, Minister, it's obvious what I understood from reading about you and about Taiwan. You are one of the architects of the Taiwanese successful response to COVID-19. One of the many, but yes. So, yes. So the question is, how exactly, what was your specific role in the taming of pandemic? Yeah. Our idea is that if three-quarters of the population wear masks, then the R0 value will be under one, which means that the virus will not spread. So very, very early on, our goal is just to get three-quarters of people start wearing masks. I understand that this is also the Czech playbook, right? And so my work is three-fold. It's called Fast, Fair and Fun. The fast part is to make sure that anyone, for any reason, if they don't want to wear a mask, if they doubt if the mask is useful and so on, or if they do not connect mask use to hand sanitation, we make sure that there's a toll-free number 1922 where they can call and get a very convincing argument on, you know, dispelling their anxiety and fears and myths and so on. But if they call saying, you know, I'm a boy, I don't want to go to school because you're rationing masks or I get a pink medical mask, and then the very next day on the daily press conference, the medical officers, including our ministry, Chen Shizhong, start wearing pink medical mask so that boy become the most hip boy in his class. So he will be able and willing to wear the mask. And so in each ministry of a team of participation officers that work with hashtags, so whenever there's a trending hashtag that seem to discourage mask use and so on, we engage them with humor, make very funny dog pictures, and that's the fun part in fast, fair and fun. For example, there was a physical distancing rule where the dogs, that is the spokes dog, and for this I have to use my slides here. The spokes dog here is called Zhongchai, and it is the dog that lives with the ministry of health and welfare's participation officer. And so when we explain... It's a real dog. No, it's a real dog, it's a Shiba Inu. And so whenever there's a new idea like physical distance, we just say, if you're outdoor, you have to keep two dogs away. Indoor, keep three dogs away. Or you wear a mask, but why do you wear a mask? You wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands. Maybe I understood you badly, but why did you choose this dog, particularly this one? Is it popular race among... This is the internet meme. There was a meme called Doga. The Doga meme is a Shiba Inu. It's this kind of dog smiling very innocently, and you can add random words to it. It's a very popular internet meme. And the participation in the world. If you search for DOGE Doga, you will see, and actually just to prove my point, I guess, we'll do the search right here. And then you will see that there's a Wikipedia article. Yeah. Okay, because I'm just asking, because we have puddles, I think, in the Czech Republic would be puddles, you know? Maybe it's like a trending topic. Sure, sure. Sure, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, it could be... So they look sufficiently similar. And it's a real dog that lives with the participation officer. And so we just translate all these memes into very easy, easy to share, easy to understand. And this is called a humor over rumor. And this is the fun part. One more question for the fun part. When you say you can use hashtags in order to activate the population by the mask. Can you give me an example of a popular fun hashtag that worked well in reality? Sure, of course. So in Taiwan, there's many actually. There was a hashtag on Twitter that called this attack come from Taiwan. So let me just wait for this not very quick internet connection. And it's not even grammatically correct. But anyway, so there was this idea of this attack come from Taiwan. And it's actually a popular crowdsourcing campaign. So actually they use the right English form comes from Taiwan. So I guess I should adjust the form as well. Right. So this is a very popular hashtag. This raised a very large amount of NT dollars. And the basic idea is that at one time Dr. Ted Cruz from WHO said that there was attacks against him. And this attack comes from Taiwan. So that was his words. And at that time WHO was not recommending mask use. Now they are. They are issuing the mask challenge and so on. But this was long ago. This was back in April. And so we at that time start donating masks to the international humanitarian aid. And so people sarcastically describe this mask donation as this attack comes from Taiwan because we attack other humanitarian organizations with masks. It was popular. What was the traffic? It was trending. It was like the top trending hashtag in Taiwan at that time. Millions of hundreds of thousands. Certainly millions. And then it resulted in this huge crowdsourcing and crowdfunding campaign that eventually turned into a nearer times advertisement. So they bought an advertisement, said who can help. Taiwan can help. And then get our vice president to record a crash course on epidemiology because he's also our top epidemiologist. And so this not only became a nearer times advertisement. It actually became a whole website that shows how people are contributing. For example, more than 700,000 citizens donated more than 6 million masks. It's in addition to our foreign service donations. In addition to it. There's people in their ration quota, if they have something like a storage at home that they already have some masks, they can say, okay, I will forfeit this rationing. Like nowadays, every two weeks, it's nine for adults and 10 for children. They can say, okay, I go to an app. I forfeit my collection rights. I will want to go to Czech Republic or any other humanitarian aid. Electronically, so you don't have to go physically. No, no, no, it's on an app. So if you type my name, you will see that Tangfeng, my name, have dedicated 36 masks. But that's not true because I only did six. The other are Tangfeng Ping, Tangfeng Ming and Tangfeng Xian. That is to say people who share my name, they together dedicated. And this went viral. Like many people click share. And that's why this number still keeps increasing. And we update it every day. And you can see it in this not at all government website. This is the crowdfunded website. Taiwan can help others. And this all started from the hashtag this attack comes from Taiwan. You also had, what I understood, a positive experience with this mask map. What was the story with the mask? That's the fair part. So in Taiwan, the government services end in the website.gov.tw. So something.gov.tw. For example, our e-participation website is joined.gov.tw, where you can start petitions and visualize budget and so on. But there's a community code of zero that turns every website that they don't like into an alternate version forking the government. So fork the government into g0v. So for each government service, you can change a O to a zero. And chances are you'll get into this shadow government, gov.zero, that is open source. That does the same thing, but in a more fun way. And so in this sense, the demonstration is not about protesting. This is about demo, like showing the government how better could public services be delivered. And so on the gov.zero channel, there was a person of the name Howard Wu Zhangwei who demoed this map that says essentially nobody know where the stores that still have masks or the store that run of masks. Instead of people just sharing on social media which is impossible to track, he offered this map that people can easily mark the numbers. And so that if it's green, it means you still have plenty of it. To everyone. For free. For everyone. And paying the Google API usage fee by himself. And so after... It must be a little money. Yes. So he owed Google 20K US dollars in just a couple days. Wow. Yeah. Okay. And we asked Google to use their CSR budget and they waived their usage fee. In exchange, I personally made a website called mask.pedas. That is the main go-to website. If you ask, for example, Apple's Siri, where can you find masks in Taiwan? It goes to this website that I wrote. It's of mask.pedas. I don't see it. Mask.pedas, P-D-I-S. Public Digital Innovation Space. That's my office. So it's a government website. But all it does is it links to more than 140 different applications that visualize the mask availability. And we'll just use the first one. And this one, for example, shows that around us now, the red ones are out of masks. The green ones do have masks. And you can do navigation. And this is their opening schedule and things like that. And so because this is equally provided for everyone, even people with like seeing difficulties and so on, they can use voice assistant, as I mentioned. They can use a chatbot and so on. So everybody has the same inclusive access to where the masks are. And because this information is updated very quickly, I think starting from the early February, this updated every 30 seconds. And so when I'm queuing in line, I will be able then for the person before me to swipe their NHI card, National Health Insurance card, and get nine medical masks, I will just refresh this map and see this before my eyes that it turns to 49. And so this builds an assurance that this system is fair without people having to trust the government. This is participatory accountability. If rather this number stays the same or it actually goes up, I will call 1922 the toll-free line right there and say that something is wrong. So that when we're ramping up mass production, people don't have to trust the government. They can trust the numbers. There's collectively audits made accountable by everybody queuing in the pharmacies. And so this reached maybe 70% of people. But that's not still three quarters. And so then we start working with... So you're not still there at the three quarters? At the end of February. So at March, we started something new. We called e-mask. So instead of just queuing at the pharmacy, they can collect the pre-ordered mask in the convenience stores. Because people who couldn't go to the pharmacy, most of them have very long waking hours. So by the time they went back home, the pharmacies have all closed. So they have to work with the convenience stores. And so our premier smiles happily here. That's because in March, we work with convenience stores and you can pre-order on your mobile phone. And that pushed the number all the way to almost 90%. But we're not, you know, giving this satisfactory rest in our laurel yet. We say, oh, what about the other like 12%? Turns out some of them don't have a mobile phone. Maybe very elderly people. And maybe they do not have the time to go to the queue or maybe they're more fragile. And so we started working with convenience stores. So they can just take your NHI card and staff these people can help them to use the kiosk to pre-order. But they can't choose which convenience store to collect. Then they have to collect on the same store the next week. And then after that rose out, we're now at 95%. So almost everybody have access to medical masks now. And the other 5%, maybe they have plenty of masks already at home so they can donate to international humanitarian aid. So that's the fourth system that we made. Okay, one question that comes to the fast is that how did you ensure the production capability of Taiwan so to say to have enough masks physically? You started in January or when did you start? Yeah, we started in January to procure the necessary equipment because Taiwan used to produce a lot of masks. So the know-how is still there. All we need is a way for the precision machinery, smart machinery people to assemble into production lines. And so that's exactly what I did. So I think early January they decided that we need to make the masks. At that time it's less than 2 million masks a day. But around April when we're starting to roll it out in convenience stores, the peak was 20 million masks a day. That is to say almost one day per person per mask. But we also discovered with, for example, using a traditional rice cooker, you can reuse the mask for three times or five times by disinfecting the mask, killing the virus, but not disrupting the material. And that enables each mask to have like three or five times of lifespan. And so that's when we start to have sufficient mask supply. That's around early April or late March. Okay. In the case of the Czech Republic, we had some problems with, I'd say, coordination of the decision line. So we say there was the government, there was epidemiologists, you know, there was this board of scientists. I see that. And they tend to disagree or publicly argue with each other. So my question is, how did you make sure that this line works well? With the political decision maker. So is this in charge actually to change the pandemic in Taiwan? Is it your prime minister? Is it the chief epidemiologist? Right, the chief epidemiologist. But when our chief epidemiologist, literally the author of the textbook on epidemiology in colleges, wants to convince the vice president, he only has to look into the mirror because he is the vice president. That makes it easy. It makes it very easy. And so Minister Chen Shizhong basically implements the scientific advices that our vice president gives. And at that time Vice Premier Chen Ximai also makes sure that all the ministries works in coordination with the health ministry. So Qi Maichen, Chen Ximai, our vice premier at the time, Chen Shizhong, our health minister and the commander of the CCC and Chen Jianren is called the three Chen. And the three Chen forms this team and they are all trained in public health and epidemiology. Vice Premier Chen Ximai was a student of Chen Jianren. And so they don't have a problem talking to scientists because they just look into a mirror. So there was not a problem in Taiwan where people were contesting the decision because it was more political than scientific or vice versa. Not at all. They are also seasoned politicians. So they also talk politicians' language. But they are also trained as doctors or public health experts. So they also talk the scientific knowledge language. And I think part of the political training is that they do not say that they know everything. Because they have to they are around actually VP Chen Jianren was around actually in charge of the health bureau when SARS 1.0 came to Taiwan in 2003. So it's a very positive experience of SARS 1.0. But all of them keep saying SARS 2.0 that is the novel coronavirus. It's novel. Means that we don't know about it. We're still learning about it. So we are humble and if anybody think that they know something about SARS 2.0 that's different from SARS 1.0 please call 1922. And we can learn about this together. And this is very important. Is it very popular? It's very popular. Many people call it the immediate pickup rate is more than 90%. And whenever there is a kind of public focus on a certain issue it could go up to like a million or so-called a day at its peak. Okay. Now for all those apps and internet sites and sort of open source platforms you have to have the trust of the people. So how do you explain the fact that the people trust the government so much that they are ready to you know give you the private data that you can go into quarantine and be watched via your telephone because I cannot imagine that in my country it would go down with the people quite easily the fact that it won't be watched via your telephone during yoga. Yeah. It's not just telephone. 1922 is a set of technologies. The telephone may take tens of thousands or close to hundreds of thousands calls a day and each call on average I think is 6 minutes. But there are also people who do not prefer calling a phone. So there's also chatbots and there are also chatbots with like 2 million subscribers. It's called Ji Guan Jia developed with HTC which is a Taiwanese technology company. When I say 1922 this is not just one telephone line. It's also chatbot. It's also this online Q&A system and so on and all together it receives more than a million or so traffic per day. It's not just the telephone line alone. But I think the point here is that the government need to trust the citizens not the citizen trusting the government. In Taiwan we trust the citizens in the sense that we use the social innovation that is to say the traditional rest cooker thing that's not invented by people in the government. That's by Professor Lai Chunyu and we initially was skeptical about that idea. But then we do the confirmation and when the confirmation worked then in the daily CCC press conference they invited Lai Chunyu to explain his method and then just amplify this idea and I think Minister Chen tried to cook the mask himself in the live stream and then for example the pink as I mentioned. So it's all about people's idea being amplified through the platform of the CCC. Not the CCC knowing the best and forcing the people to do things. CCC the central epidemic command center. So when we compare it with other nearby jurisdictions for example there was a time where there was a locally confirmed case that initially the contact tracing didn't quite work. The contact interview, the medical officers, the person keep saying that they live alone in a house, doesn't come and visit friends and so on. They have a very simple life. But then the next day the medical officer finally got through and then she said that she actually works in an intimate drinking bar as a professional wager. She does not want to compromise the identity of her clients so that's why the contact tracing didn't quite work the very first day. Now in many other jurisdictions it's very difficult to get people who work in dancing clubs intimate drinking bars and other places for more intimate contact to work with the CCC. But Commander Chen Shizhong did not impose saying that we're putting people in jail or that we're imposing a heavy fine for violating and things like that. He said everybody understand the idea of physical distancing and leaving your accurate contact numbers when you're entering a densely packed as dancing clubs and intimate drinking bars are. So he challenged them to think of ways to keep physical distancing and also keep this real contact system and he said that before you can do that, of course we discourage people from visiting such places. So notably he doesn't cast them as kind of outsiders of the measures and after a couple months I think just a month or so some drinking bars start to offer drinking ways to like a plastic shield so you can still drink it's transparent but you can't kiss I guess and then they also use this kind of scratch paper so that if you enter such places you have to leave your contact number where they do an SMS for you to check or maybe email and things like that but without requiring you to fill your real name and then after a few weeks after the period ends they just shred this paper so that the person who will visit can still keep their privacy and so after they impose those two kind of self-regulation measures they reopen they are still part of our team and so I think this maximally inclusive way is a sign of trusting the citizen and trusting the people so people can innovate and to reduce their R-value together as a team so as a state you didn't have to put substantial effort and substantial energy into convincing the population to transfer you their data and privacy because first we never did a lockdown and we never collect information that we did not previously collect before the pandemic so these are the two things because people if you collect new data then people of course are wary of where the data will go but if you repurpose the data that you're collecting anyway before the pandemic and just use it in a creative way in an innovative way to counter the pandemic then it's easier for people to understand the privacy repercussions okay now being here we were told and it's a fact that Taiwan is an internet tiger at least among Asian states you are part of this revolution as a digital minister can you tell me a story how did it happen that Taiwan is indeed ICT tiger or a state that very much focuses on economy focuses on ICT mm-hmm yeah well in my youth like when I was 12 years old there was the time of modems and ISDN and things like that and I started learning about this idea of the under resourced areas that is to say the telecom company could never earn a profit in such so rural places if they set up even like public call booths there and then after that of course the ISDN lines and modems lines there and I started learning that no matter where those low resource places are there's guaranteed connectivity and the guaranteed connectivity eventually evolved into this idea of the internet as a human right that is to say anywhere in Taiwan if you cannot connect to the internet it is the state's fault and in the president's campaign the first term campaign four years ago she campaigned for broadband as a human right which is upping the stake right anywhere in Taiwan for just 15 euros a month you can get unlimited data connection for less than you know 15 euros is around I think 10 megabits per second and it's both ways so if you don't have 10 megabits per second for unlimited data for 15 euros a month it's my fault personally and so because of this even on the top of Taiwan the Jade Mountain or Saviya or Bendu Gunon we have 20 national languages right in these very high mountain like almost 4,000 meters you still have very good broadband connection and this is not because it makes business sense it doesn't make a business sense there but because when we're auctioning the spectrum for example for 5G spectrum we use the extra auction money to then tell the telecom to fund them to work in the least connected places the places that have least internet utilization so I think broadband is a human right we're now achieving data size and that is also what enabled people to be able to participate for example the mask map wouldn't work if they don't have internet connections yeah if people have to pay extra surcharge for each megabyte downloaded or uploaded they would not use so many digital democracy tools but because it costs nothing extra no marginal cost so people use video conferencing and so on for health for education for all sort of purposes and I think that more than anything any single industry is a sign of Taiwan's broadband as human right approach on this I don't know tigerness but anyway that's what we believe in okay does it pay off so to say is it the most important part of your economy now is it so? yeah I would say that our economy is and I usually use the term DIGI because that's our national digitization strategy and it's called DIGI because it's for digitization that's broadband as a human right innovation that is to say new things that potentially breaks the law or existing regulations and we give them a sandbox that is to say have a year or so so that we can co-domesticate these are self-driving vehicles and people say that this one eye is scary this is in my office by the way this is literally my office yes my office looks like this it's in the social innovation lab these are done public art is done by people with Down syndrome with legitimate differences and they see the world like Van Gogh so when they draw the world they see everybody become very creative entering this space and someone I think by the name of the next visit to the space and got so creative that his small cabinets start climbing we didn't know that these cubes are climbable they're the first people to start climbing on and I'm happy that it holds otherwise it would be a diplomatic incident but anyway right so we focus on the SDGs any of the people working on the SDGs for example this is about smart urban transportation that's the SDG 11 right a sustainable urban fabric and even though it's technically not legal at the time we give them a place to experiment anyway and then people say oh the one eye like a cyclope too scary so it need to be two eyes and so on and so forth and so the things that we learned after the sandbox fierce now translates into the self-driving bus actually currently now running every midnight in the Xinyi part of the Taipei city and so that's the innovation part is the sandbox and then the governance part the governance part is participatory governance people all around Taiwan even if they cannot travel to Taipei easily I go to them so that in their town halls in the most rural indigenous remote regions sometimes with the cultural translator of the indigenous people is connected back to the social innovation lab with the 12 different ministries and that tour around Taiwan listening to the people and the people who are empowered they don't have to condense their case into like one white A4 page but rather just speak their mind and then get listened to by the 12 different ministries so that we can make sure that the governance empower the people who are closest to the pain so that's the governance part and finally the inclusion part the inclusion part as I mentioned we specifically look for people who are disenfranchised that is to say they do not have voting power like for example people who are 15 years old or even 14 years old it would be like 5 more years before they can participate fully in the public decision but in the internet participation culture you only have to have an email that can reach you we don't care about your age that's why I dropped out of junior high school when I was 15 years old because I discovered that internet governance doesn't care that I'm just 15 years old we include the people not only through this reverse mentorship where we ask very young people to be mentors of our cabinet members but we also enable them to start for example e-petitions and there was a 16 year old girl Wang Xuanru that petitioned for banning of plastic straws first for like what's the national identity drink bubble tea for the bubble teas for the indoor use and then eventually for takeouts and she successfully gathered more than 5,000 signatures and so we sat down and with the people who make such single use utensils and eventually all the like this is I think literally from a straw from agriculture products that are at least carbon neutral I think this may be carbon actually negative and so the plastic use in such straws that could cause marine debris and things like that is actually banned thanks to the 16 years old who brainstormed with people who make such single use utensils and that doubtless made them more better participants in the future when they actually become adults so empowering the very young that is also part of our inclusion plan One platform that is also based on this crowd sourcing which is this V-tivano pool platform Yes it aims to tame the disinformation of the internet and the polarization in the society it sparks a lot of interest in Europe so can you give me or can you explain me how does it work exactly and give me an example whether you have already used it in your governmental work? Of course so V-Taiwan is in the social sector is a Gov Zero project so I used to help run V-Taiwan but once I become digital minister the V-Taiwan's governance is now firmly in the hands of the social sector so I can describe to you how it works now and how it used to work when I was like strictly speaking social sector but nowadays like today V-Taiwan is talking about open parliament like how to make the parliament more open and then the work So open means accessible to public or open? Great, great question So yes, so here there is the hack folder that is to say the materials that answers the frequently asked questions and it says very simply that there are I should have turned on the machine translation but I'll translate for you anyway So this says that the legislature needs to make sure that citizens can use all the information that is maximally accessible to legislators all the citizens need to have other than national secrets and things like that whatever the legislator see we should make digital tools to make sure that the citizens sees the same information so that's the first topic and also this is not just about information it should use structured data so people who want to make analysis and so on can very easily make machine-to-machine connections and analyze how the legislators perform and also people who are alternately able to have physical or mental conditions and so on need to also have their voices heard not through representatives but through accessible digital technologies so that they can also attend public hearings and things like that that's the third topic and the fourth one is that whenever there is paper copies being paced around by a legislature for both environmental and social reasons we should digitize them and make it an online collaborative document so that we can as citizens see how the legislators are forming their drafts on a real-time system instead of just by paper copies that is passed around and finally we need to work with the educational system so that people as young as you know primary graders can tour the parliament openly and even participate in like mock sessions and so on so that people understand how parliament works as early as they are seven years old and so on so these currently at this very day is the topics that the V-Taiwan is having a discussion with so that's today's V-Taiwan when I participate it was in 15 in 16 okay and so if you say today's participation etc so to say people can read it but they can only they can write comment but they cannot like or dislike the other's comment they could, they could of course upvote and downvote other people's comments and this is based on this artificial intelligence system called POLIS and for POLIS for example V-Taiwan use POLIS in pretty much everything but let's take an example of the e-scooters I think that's the case that e-scooters yes e-scooters I don't know if... like the e-scooters in cities? yeah I don't know if that's a problem in Czech Republic no not so because it's because it's colder in state so it's cars yeah right so people do not actually want segues on the street not many during summer maybe but it's either cars or bicycles okay so what about uber do you have a uber problem? okay maybe we use uber right so this is the conversation that we had about uber it's a real conversation in 2015 and everybody can just see themselves as an avatar among the people, friends and families that you already know on social media and they believe very different things about uber but they're not nameless trolls or enemies they're your friends and families and so v-taiwan basically start collecting the facts about uber and then ask people to share their feelings for three or four weeks and then we meet face to face on a live stream conversation to ideate the best idea who is who? like anyone who proposes something that is resonating with people so anyone to answer your question precisely anyone with an email address so any email address log in and share their feelings for other people to out-vote or down-vote and the people whose ideas resonates with people across the different groups are then invited to brainstorm how to solve the uber problem together how do you guess or how do you see what's resonating so to say most of the weeks or yeah so it's like for example if you go to the initial uber conversation you can see a fellow citizen says I think passenger liability insurance is the most important thing now if you agree you will move here your avatar will move here because this is a proposal by yours truly that's me so you will move closer to me but if you disagree you will move farther away from me and once you click agree or disagree the next statement will come until of course you feel that you also have something to contribute and so you offer your idea for other people to vote on the idea of this is that the area here measures the plurality it does not measure the head count so even if you get 2000 people here voting exactly the same you just see extra zero here but the area will not change and then you have to convince everyone across all the groups in order for your idea to be set as agenda and for you to get an invitation letter to the live streamed conversation and so every time we see this picture we say people agree to disagree on a few ideological statements but actually most people agree with most other people on most of the things, most of the time and so we just then take this as our agenda and then start ideate and we say registration insurance, safety and so on are important and then the people commits to the consensus because if they don't agree with the people's consensus they actually have to say why everybody agrees and then that becomes our multi-purpose taxi regulation and Uber threatened to quit I guess for a while they did quit for a couple months but then they went back and nowadays they are registered as a legal taxi fleet, a queue taxi but the search pricing or the dynamic pricing and not having to paint the car as yellow or things like that these we learn from Uber so other tax authorities can also do the same now are now on the very same playing ground and that is what we call crowdsourcing the agenda and that worked very well with my other principle which is radical transparency so when people in the Uber company lobbied for the results of this conversation for example at the time Uber was employing David Pluth, a US I think he was an important assistant to the Obama administration and then he lobbied for Uber and going to my office actually my home office to basically speak for Uber but because I say everything that we say will be on the record like I say literally not everything you send my way will be made public this is not only public as a transcript it's actually if you search for David Pluth and my name you will actually see it in virtual reality so if you have a VR device you will actually like relive the conversation right there and so in this kind of environment all his arguments is based on the public good like carbon footprint reduction traffic jam reduction and things like that it's impossible for him to make arguments that are only good for him and me and bad for everybody else and so this is like a puzzle right people adding piece of the puzzle moving anything I think would be some other game Jenga I think that's the game right so it would not be a Jenga it would just be a puzzle that people keep adding on and then we finally set on something that is like a common value so that's how the Uber problem is resolved we resolve many other things but I think Uber resonates with your country more and the MPs members of parliament jealous actually jealous at the you know crap platforms or initiatives because basically it may be or to my eyes it's not with an asylum not at all not at all and we have a I don't know whether you have heard of the idea of the double diamond or design thinking right so it's a simple idea from the ideal the design of firm IDEO and they have this idea that most designers work in the era of having to listen to people of various positions before they define their work so they separate the idea of development and delivery on one side which is what MPs work on right they develop possible new regulations and budgets and so on and they charge the administration to deliver them right that's what they do but what we are working on the crowdsourced agenda is on the first diamond which is simply to map out people's feelings there is no right or wrong about feelings it's just to discover people's feelings and then define the common values how to take the top 5 or 10 consensus and make it into a coherent law that is still the MP's job what we are doing is basically this is a more scalable public hearing in traditional public hearing you can maybe listen to 100 people and not much more but here we are listening to hundreds of thousands of people are you doing it for real? of course of course and so for real policies for example how to open up the mountains how to open up the oceans and so on nowadays not only V-Taiwan because V-Taiwan is primarily now in the social sector now in the public sector we also use the tool used by the V-Taiwan namely Polis for example this is how to open up our ocean how to make sure that everybody have access of all the information related to ocean that around the Taiwan so you can see it at ocean.taiwan.gov.tw and then learn about our our like everywhere the islands and fishing and spores and things like that and so how to improve that that's one of the topics and then it's also about how to make sure that they're to people of all kinds how to educate and how to make sure that people understand the risks involved and so on and so in every conversation people just as I mentioned have maybe things that are divisive actually only one thing divisive in this particular conversation that says we do not need to restrict the species for amateur fishing we only need to limit it for professional fishing this is very contentious there's many other statements that are consensual and so we will just work on the consensual statements to make our ocean policy so actually right after our conversation currently this afternoon actually right now because it started at 2pm right now the people are having the live stream forum to talk about the consensus and that will then form our ocean policy okay would you recommend platforms like polis to other states if you say yes why we don't see them now in the western world you see it in the western world the alternative event in Denmark use polis a lot and then the picture that I just show you was actually from Bowling Green Kentucky and polis started from Seattle from a bunch of occupiers so it's not like it's invented in Taiwan we're just one of the earlier adopters I think the what's the word there's a bunch of people XR Extinction Rebellion the XR people also use the polis actually many other people too so if you search for polis in the Rome research I think that's the research knowledge base you will see all the users you worked in Seattle as well right in yourself in Seattle no in San Jose but it's close enough right so the research about polis is a international collaboration and I see that people are using polis or polis like tools more and more because it's open source you don't have to pay anyone to set it up I think Singapore also uses it for use policy consultation there's Canada also used it because the French translation is done by the Canadian government because they have that's the bilingual thing and then we work with the AIT the de facto U.S. Embassy also using polis to work on U.S. Taiwan relationships can I have one last question sure why not this is maybe a little bit personal but I'll ask anyways is that you were open with the First Transcendental Minister in Taiwan and I wanted to know whether it was in any way a controversial topic when you won the minister not at all how do you explain that broke tolerance of the public yeah I think there's two factors one is that Taiwan prides ourselves sees ourselves as the most open society it's not just us saying it it's according to the civic monitor we're the only Asian country with a completely open civil society and one of the only two if you count the Pacific that's us in New Zealand and so this is kind of a Taiwanese identity marriage equality, LGBT friendliness the Taipei LGBT pride actually the only pride that is physical this year and things like that these form part of our identity and so because of this people see me or see Dr. Tsai Ing-wen the first women Asian leader who is not part of a political family and things like that and it's part of our identity so that's the first thing and the second thing is that because I'm not just transgender I'm also transcultural I'm also transpartisan so my idea is very simple is to take all the sides so not only in the HR form when I become the additional minister I filed not applicable to the gender field not applicable on the party affiliation field yes so I'm transpartisan as well and transpartisan is also a new thing in Taiwan it's actually before 2014 there's not many politicians who will openly say I would never join any political parties and so I think this forms this more coherent intersectionality I think that's the word an intersectional brand about me that I would consistently take all the sides and in my mind it's not half of the population different from me everybody I can learn something from okay did you vote? if you are transpartisan did you vote? I vote sometimes I go to a voting booth and in my three votes for the local legislature and for president actually I vote for three different parties candidates and I vote for the public do people trust you? because I think in our culture it would be quite complicated to be everything and nothing at the same time well I'm not nothing I'm everything at the same time taking all the sides and I think this is I think part of Taiwanese identity is based on the idea that anyone can join if you believe in open innovation and it's not just about cultures that are inherent in Taiwan but new cultures new immigrants and things like that and nowadays we even have the scope card so that people from Czech Republic for example who go on a tour in Taiwan get a tourist visa if you want to stay suddenly you can convert to a three year stay without having to work for a Taiwanese employer so this also Taiwanese idea is very hip in Taiwan and we see some Czech people say they're also Taiwanese now we're very happy so the idea here is that Taiwan is transculturalism in itself and so we have to take all the sides because we keep getting new cultures infused into our polity and that is also part of Taiwanese identity okay so that's right because I just wanted to ask you why is it part of Taiwanese identity you say that openness and tolerance is so the next logical question would be why is it because of Taiwan is 20 national languages historically people of very different background very different ideologies I would say and geologically Taiwan is having earthquake all the time because we're caught between the Eurasian Plate and Philippine Sea Plate and they bump into each other all the time and we learn to be resilient not only in our buildings but also in our minds so that after each earthquake the Jade Mountain I just mentioned every year it's growing by 2.5 cm because of that okay thank you very much very interesting you're quite famous now right it's nice to know thank you I have a question about the 5G in Europe this is pictorial how pictorial is this here in Taiwan and is the Chinese technology a big danger for democracy and for it was a very hot topic in 2014 like 6 years ago we had a huge debate half a million people on the street tried to stop that yeah it's called the sunflower movement right in the sunflower movement there's like 20 different NGOs on each side of the parliament each corner talking about one aspect of the cross-strait trade agreement exactly as the conversation that Europe is having now and one side talked about whether for the 4G network that at the time we're building we have to allow PRC components into it because of the WTO rules or whatever because of this and the consensus on the street was that there's no market player in the PRC and we understand that the state there actually means party but it's the same thing in the PRC the party there can just swap leadership for so-called private companies at any given time and they have this tendency later on they call it 國進民退 the state moves forward and the private sector moves backwards that basically says there has to be party branches in each and every companies that are making significant contributions to geopolitical and of course 4G components is one such industry and so we say okay even if that we do cybersecurity verification or whatever every single update we have to do another system risk assessment of whether it has now been yielded de facto control to the dam at a time and the total cost of that evaluation will be very large so we might as well go without any PRC components in our 4G connection and so nowadays I think the US is calling it a clean path or something but we implemented that six years ago so I guess we're happy people are on board doing their system risk assessment but because there was no PRC component in any of our 4G infrastructure when we upgraded to 5G and my phone everything is 5G now we do not have to do this evaluation again because it's a path dependency it's easier if you reuse the same vendor the same 4G network for your 5G configuration so it's not a problem here and all the 5 Taiwanese telecoms are on the clean network list because we had that conversation six years ago so you're completely self-sufficient as type 1 when it comes to 5G you're not dependent on any PRC I think we even did a kind of back catalog of the communication infrastructure component from PRC in 2014 and by 2016 I think we also removed all of that it took a couple years time but we don't have any PRC component in our communication infrastructure for either 4G or 5G now Did you take part in the Sunflow movement by the way? Of course Yeah I'm one of the occupiers and I was in a parliament to bring them the Ethernet cable so that we can live stream outside of the parliament what's happening in the parliament so I don't have to go into the parliament anymore I can stay outside and watch TV but in more seriousness we provided communication capabilities, live streaming and so on to all the different sites and that's where this take all the sites part comes from so even for people who are for PRC components they also have their counter protest and we also enabled them to live stream their conversation and so on so basically we believe that a public discourse is better than rumor and with this sufficiently broadband connection people will eventually agree on common values rather than just you know shoving rumors to one another and so that began in 2014 and one of the 0 team that went to the sunflower Can you tell us how long did you stay maybe some details about this occupied period 22 days if I'm not mistaken yeah that's 22 days and every day there's you were there every day in the parliament after the live streaming sets up I actually spend most of my time around the parliament because at the time we have this simple idea of just let me get the presentation through so obviously not all of these people are around the parliament they are in the streets and we have this idea of broadband as human right so we need to provide internet connection actually for free in the immediate spaces so that they can hold for example the civil constitutional convention and things like that the sole topic of the occupied was there no topics or just this one the topic was on cross straight service and trade agreement so all sorts of services are topics and we even the GovZero Collective even delivered this tool called are you affected by CSSTA where you just have to type in your company name or your company registration number and shows exactly how this trade agreement affects you and this enabled this kind of matter effect conversation and we also make sure that people who this is the thing I talked about this is my tweet by the way if you go back and read my tweet you get all the first time experience instead of relying on my now aging memory right so this idea is that whatever the occupied parliament is having we work with stenographers core reporters to type what they are deliberating the occupiers were deliberating because the legitimate was that the MPs refused to do their work they were on strike so the people have to go to their office and do their work for them and so they actually talk line by line each of the CSSTA agreement lines and people on the street can just walk by and see a real-time transcript and broadcasting the live can not only to the streets and so on so I tweeted saying that I think only a neutral internet can connect people inside and outside of the occupied wall because people who are occupied inside is surrounded by police and we on the outside is counter surrounding the police so the police wouldn't take violent actions and so the basic idea of getting people inside and outside connected has been the main thing that we contributed to and it's also a kind of QR codes printer that you can just type in your name and it prints this journalist badge for you because there was a constitutional interpretation that in order to maintain the normal development and it's the indispensable mechanism the freedom of the press could be exercised by any ordinary citizen according to article 11 of the constitution and because many police doesn't know that constitutional interpretation so we just put a QR code and then the police can scan it and the journalism rights of ordinary citizens and so this has three simple steps upload your photo, print your citizen journalist badge and come to start cover for each deliberation among the street and we have a very complex arrangement of live video transcripts and things like that in all the occupied places so all of this is documented online and actually in my twitter but we participate the entire 22 days and it was a victory because half of the parliament agreed to all the four demands of the people who occupy four demands not one less and then it we evacuated in triumph basically and have you demand so the constitution is changed have you demanded the maintenance of the constitution has it been implemented yet? the demand is basically not to change the constitution per se but to have a constitutional forum for people to participate and to make direct democracy which is already a part of the constitution it was just not very exercised this conversation we actually had with Dr. Sanyasen and Chiang Kai-shek the last time Chiang Kai-shek was not that big on direct democracy but Sanyasen was and so we're basically not changing the constitution but making the direct democracy a part of the constitution that was frozen by Chiang Kai-shek more alive so that was the forum was about and the forum set up the joint platform the e-participation platform and the Taiwan and so on that's all the kind of direct result at the end of 2014 because of that national forum which is one of the demands of the occupiers so maybe our last question it relates to the current visit of the Czech president of the Senate Mr. Chiang who is here now the question is do you think that this visit that would be important for Taiwan will change anything for you specifically so to say do you expect more invitation from more European or European states for you to come over and talk to your interlocutors so what do you see as a result for you of this visit I think there's two direct results first of all I already wake up very early and talk to South and North American people over the video and I work until the evening to talk to European and African states I only have so many hours in a day so I expect invitations will increase but my capacity will not so that's the first answer but I think more seriously though I think it is a great way for people to see that you do not have to make a trade-off between human rights and democracy on one side and public health or public communication or whatever think that is important for the economy on the other side too often in other jurisdictions because Wuhan did a lockdown so people think that you have to do a trade-off you have to sacrifice human rights to save your economy or if you too much focus on the human rights and the economic cost but Taiwan proved that we can deepen the democracy by trusting the people while countering the coronavirus in a very participatory way and I think this message is I think both amplified by this visit because Czech Republic shares this value about not only mask use but also about citizen participation and liberal democracy so I think we can share and amplify this value and interview requests from like Sweden and so on to explain like how Taiwan and Czech Republic having come out in this sort of trusting on people's power to amplify the epidemiologist knowledge and so on so I think the Taiwan model is amplified and I sincerely hope that we can work with all the different countries so that people do not think that they have to make a trade-off dilemma to have to do lockdown for the pandemic have to do takedown for the infodamic and things like that we can keep the human right in democracy as values and then also advance them forward while countering the coronavirus I think this has been really I would say reaffirmed and strengthened by the Czech visit and if the diplomatic bubble can be set up I am more than willing to visit Czech myself in October or something You just said it October or is it planned? So the long story short I have this yearly vacation quota and I already told my staff to reserve a certain week in October so that I can travel but all of this was before the pandemic gets really bad so I am now with an entire week but nowhere to go and if there is somewhere for me to go that will make diplomatic sense and that will also enhance the message that we both want to amplify I am more than willing I did participate I think in the data city congress of Prague but it is of course by video conferencing as by telepresence but I really look forward to visiting person Thank you