 We're going to get started shortly. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to our event with the digital minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tain. My name is William Wu, and I'm the president of Harvard Taiwanese Cultural Society. Our organization has a dual mandate. The first is to provide a fun and inclusive space for students interested in our cultural heritage. The second is to spotlight Taiwan to the international community through impact-driven events like our keynote speaker series tonight. It is my pleasure to invite incredible global leaders like Audrey to be with us. To our viewers online, we're all very grateful that you are here with us, and tonight's session will be moderated by yours truly. The format will be interactive. We'll be first sampling questions from the Slido platform that's provided in the Google Meet chat, and we'll select a few people in the end for our live Q&A session. While Audrey needs no introduction, I think it will be nice to provide a quick overview of her incredible journey. As Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey is in charge of the Taiwan National Development Council's Open Data Committee, the 12 years education curriculum committee, and a community platform such as GovZero and VTaiwan. So without further ado, let us begin. So Audrey, I think it would be nice if we kick off this moderated discussion with your background and how you form your personal identity. I know a lot of people often give you a lot of titles. You know, the digital minister of Taiwan, the first non-Bairi executive Yuan member in our country, the profoundly gifted genius who worked as a consultant with Apple in the past. You know, with these titles and recognitions, I'm sure you might be overwhelmed sometimes. So if you are given a chance, how would you describe yourself? Who and what inspires you to become the new today? So good luck at time, everyone. I hope the sound and video is getting through, and feel free to scan the character, click the Slido link. Now, it's not entirely democratic because you uploaded the question with one vote, bypassing the question with two votes, but we'll let people vote more on Slido while we are tackling the first question. Now, I would describe myself, I guess, as Taiwan's digital minister, currently in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement. My main inspirations is the internet itself. In particular, when I dropped out of junior high school when I was 14 years old, I told my teachers that, you know, this new thing called the World Web, and my textbooks were out of date. I wanted to do research 16 hours a day instead of just eight hours a day after school and so on. And my teachers all agree with it. Actually, my principal helped me convincing my parents. And ever after that, I'm self-educated on the internet without the generosity of the open innovation community, of the internet society, of the free and open-source communities that I would not be able to learn with this community. And frankly speaking, very altruistic people. So I see myself as a kind of tentacle, I guess, from this tribe of digital democracy and into the Taiwanese government at the moment, but I'm also on the board of like seven other international social innovation organizations to get through this idea of the technology should adapt to the people instead of asking people accepting to the technology. So if just use one word, I guess I would call myself a pluralist. I see. Well, it's really, really exciting to have you here tonight with us. And I guess we'll kick off with the first question. How did your identity and background influence the way you navigate the world? And what was the process of self-realization like for you when you are searching for both identity and strength? Yeah, so I see my identity as something of a kind of meta identity. That is to say, I don't describe myself as I am something or something. You may have noticed that I emphasized that I had this experience and I'm in charge of this or I work with these people, but I don't say I am a something. And even finally, I chose a pluralist. Still, that now encompasses many possibilities. And this is intentional. So instead of saying, for example, that I was a boy and I became a woman and now I'm non-binary, I don't say that. I said instead that I'm born with a kind of low level of testosterone. So and then I had a puberty experience when I was like 14-ish and I had another puberty experience when I was 24-ish and so on and so forth. So I would say that I see myself not as a single label or not even a cluster of labels, but rather a continuation of experiences. So I think this defined my politics, which is taking all the sides. Whenever I hear a story from someone that I could not relate to, I could not empathize with, it's always my fault. It's never their fault. And I would then commit to spend more time with them or at least understand things better from their perspective and most myself in the culture and so on in a kind of transcultural way so that I can see my existing cultural experiences from the light of this new experience from them. But instead of saying, making a judgment saying from my point of view or from my position, I would strive to take all the positions. I see. Well, I think it's really, really interesting how you describe yourself as a compilation of experiences and that you're open to other perspectives. And I think with that as a leeway, it might be great for you to speak on your experience as a transgender person holding office as well as how that identity kind of influenced the way you navigate a computer community. Yeah. So actually, when I came out of the classes that you speak, I wrote a blog post to the computer science community because it was very much in the programming language research community at its time. The title of the blog post was runtime typecasting. Now, this is very much an in-joke. This is basically saying the value of ourselves should be the value that we hold instead of the labels that we cast or we put on those values. That is to say, instead of roles or types or classes or things like that at runtime, that is to say, after we're born, biology at compile time should not determine our destiny. And we can actually recast ourselves as long as the actual value that we hold stays true. Now, the computer science community took that, I guess, very easily, maybe because the metaphor was actually pretty understandable to the programming language nerds. But in the computing community, there's a lot of people who identify as non-binary or transgender or LGBTIQA plus, I mean, beginning with electorate. So I don't think I've faced any resistance or anything that may kind of cast me in a worse light when I kind of change my names and labels and nicknames and things like that. Now, in the public office, that's something else. I think in Taiwan, the career public service for the past 13, 14 years already kind of indoctrinated themselves on the idea of gender mainstreaming, which is very important. It started as a gender equality committee with more seats from the NGO side as compared to ministers and the formation of gender equality committee, which can mandate impact assessments on all the bills, drafts, as well as budgets, is that if there's more men in the cabinet, then there's equally proportionally more women in the gender equality committees, civil society side. So it's always a balance. So after more than a decade, all the career of civil service understand very deeply the ideas of intersectionality of gender mainstreaming, of safe space, and so on. And although it's not very visible from the outside, we actually have what we call the Zhongliuoxingbietong an important gender statistics database that we just connected to the Open Data Portal in the past couple of months that measures all levels of decision making and representation and so on. And all the bills, drafts, and budgets need to prove that it improves the gender mainstream work instead of going backwards. So I guess what I was quite blessed to serve six years ago in such a very inclusive environment, and there's already guidelines for, for example, my office in the social innovation lab, Ren-Ai Lu, San-Duan Zhou, Xiao-Hu Chen-Xin Xie and Zhong-Xin in that office according to the Ministry of the Interior's building guidelines, if you step into it, it used to be a force headquarters where if you take the wall down, which we did, it became a public park. When you step into it, into my office, you see the restrooms that are for women, for men, for gender-inclusive non-binary and also for accessible wheelchair-friendly on the ground floor and with kind of equal representation. This, I think, speaks to the spirit of pluralism, meaning that it's the technology that should cater to everyone's wish to have a safe space, not just to express themselves but also to interact with other people. So I'm happy to report that I've never faced discrimination. Quite the other way around, the guidelines and civil service people that I've met already understood those key concepts that would help you in the LGBTIQA Plus community. It was really, really great to hear. Actually, when I was having my gap year last year in Taiwan, I had a chance to visit a social innovation lab together with my father and I did realize that all the bathroom was gender-neutral, which I thought was very, very progressive and it's really nice to hear about the liberalization of gender politics in Taiwan. I think moving on to the next question, it seems like a lot of people are not too familiar with GovZero, Lin Shi Zhen Fu and V-Taiwan. So can you tell us about your role and the reasoning behind each of these platforms and what's the purpose behind them? Certainly. So almost exactly 10 years ago, GovZero was formed to fork the government. Now for people in computer science, to fork means to take something that's existing, not writing it off, but taking it to a different direction. And with the advent of decentralized version control and distributed ledgers, fork also has a progressive meaning, meaning that we fork to merge, or we call it a soft fork, right? It's backward compatible, meaning that we acknowledge and respect the histories and traditions, and we make a new version of the public service with the hope that the career public service will see the light and admit that it's actually a better idea and then merge it back into the government services. So that was the vision 10 years ago. And to that end, a bunch of my friends registered this domain name, G0V.TW. Now all the public service websites in Taiwan have seen something that Gov.TW. But the idea is that if you go to, for example, join the Gov.TW, which is our national participation portal, but you change it O to a zero, you get into the shadow document, join that G0V.TW. And Gov.0 began with budget that G0V.TW, which is a visualization of the national budget. And at the time the budget was in PDF thousands of pages long, very difficult to read and so on. And at the time, the cabinet even filmed, I think, its first YouTube public service announcement video saying that the budget is too difficult to read and they picture a lot of just citizens looking as numbers where it's flagged past their head and confused. And the voice over said, so don't even think about the budget, just implement the budget. Now that sounds downright authoritarian. And so it was very quickly flagged as spam. Anyway, so the netizen didn't like being treated as children. So the Fork budget G0V.TW not only provided a voting and downloading of each individual budget item, visualized using treatments, bubble maps and so on, but also includes a real-time feedback commentary and things like that for real-time discussions. And later on, Gov.0 would also convert the really aged real-time live streaming of the parliamentary proceedings on debating the budget and so on into something like the modern day Dan Moore, a real-time caption using your comments and so on. So it's all to lower the threshold of participating in politics and making sure that people who have something to say to contribute can do so instead of just demonstrating to protest, right, to protest against something. It's demonstration for something, with something. So with the people, not just for the people and certainly not just against the government. So in 2014, when people occupied the parliament for the sunflower movement at that march, the main idea at the time was that people want to deliberate about the trade service agreements, saying they don't want to see the parliamentarian kind of just going on strike, refusing to deliberate that. So Gov.0 helped the facilitators, the 20 NGOs, occupying the parliament to set up real-time live streaming, captioning, translation and so on services so that if you're one of the half a million people on the street or many more on a long line, you can very easily tune your attention to one of the very specific discussions about the trade service agreements and then contribute your two cents and then the facilitators after three weeks of occupant gradually converge on coherence, blended, a volition of pretty much everybody. For example, about the use of 4G infrastructure from so-called private sector from the PRC regime in Beijing. Now, I understand everybody else will be having the same conversation about 5G many years down the line, but that was one of the topics we discussed with Gov.0's support during the Occupy. Now, so the Occupy was a big trade because those coherent demands were then ratified by the head of the parliament and then we the occupiers and facilitators were invited as reverse mentors, people younger than 35, to advise the cabinet members in the kind of mentoring, I don't know which direction I guess is bi-directional, so that was then hired by one of the ministers, Tsai, to work on V-Taiwan, which is her idea of making sure that the code, which is law, the code of law, can be updated on the same ways, the same iteration as the code of software and when new code of software enters the picture of Taiwan, for example, so-called sharing economy at Tsai, where Uber came to Taiwan or Airbnb or whatever, then we have a systemic way to kind of run a sandbox conversation and gather people's ideas and feelings from online conversations and the most upvoted one will then set an agenda, not unlike Slido, but again spread through three weeks of time. We use another system called Polis for that and so it was really successful, it helped to push through the kind of polarization around sharing economy or gig economy or whatever, so it moved from a kind of showdown between opposing sides to today with the diversified taxi program helped co-create it by V-Taiwan. Uber is a legal taxi company, the Q-Taxi, but the taxi company's law were relaxed so that local churches and temples and existing co-ops and so on can also take advantage of the surge pricing and other dynamic dispatch, which is real innovations brought by Uber without undercutting existing meters or sacrificing workers' rights and so on. So a net win for everybody involved and so I worked as an intern as a reverse mentor for a couple of years in the cabinet and when Dr. Tsaiwan took office I promoted from intern to a full minister in 2016. I hope that answered your question. That's a very, very elaborate answer and when I first got on GovZero website one thing that jumped out to me was the visualization of government budget because I also feel like reading through Excel is really, really annoying and the fact that you can see the government budgeting in one clear view is really helpful and for those interested I also think V-Taiwan's work on financial sandbox and Uber regulation are very interesting. They have case studies online that you can take a look as well. Moving on to more of a spicy question. Here's a question. With regards to the long-term threat from China, what plans does the Taiwan government have for cybersecurity safety in the future and for to dealing with the Chinese threat? Yeah, it's on two levels. One is the hardening of our public and civic infrastructures against more traditional cybersecurity attacks and we work with white hats. For example, one of my first actions when I became a digital minister is introducing this system called Sandstorm. Now Sandstorm is a cybersecurity product that is almost exactly like the Google apps for Workspace but we have a collaborative spreadsheet document to name it but the idea, unlike Google's offering is that we can host it on our own on-premise service, the internal class so to speak and it takes a kind of zero trust stats when it comes to the individual apps so we can't incorporate any of the popular apps we started with Etherpath nowadays we're using HackMD and so on but whatever the free software community is using nowadays we can repackage it very easily into Sandstorm and one of our more popular apps we're ordering lunchbox together written by a junior civil service man but they don't have to take a lot of cybersecurity or defense trainings because the sandbox in which that their application run already blocks all outgoing connections to the white internet and it adopts a capacity-based model so that there's no site communication or channel communications without explicit authorization anyway, so the idea is that we then work with the WhiteHack community for example, Defcore which will go on to win I think second place in Defcon CTF and so on so like really bright WhiteHack hackers and they along with other teams attacked the Sandstorm system for half a year filed I think three CVEs and then we fixed them and so on because it's all open source and also benefiting other governments and other communities before deploying it as a self-service platform for all people so like the video conference platform GCMEET and so on our policy itself which is also under a GPL free software we all contributed into the commons and asked the penetration testers to work out whatever vulnerabilities to work with the community instead of distancing ourselves from the WhiteHack community the idea is that if you're a WhiteHack in Taiwan we will work all the payment structures incentive structures and so on so you can be rich and famous instead of falling into the dark side which always has more cookies I guess so that is the infrastructure level now on the application level we also work with the ecosystem of fact checkers, journalists and have various companies of course to tackle this information crisis or as some people say during the past couple years the infodemic now the infodemic we take an epidemiological approach that is to say we're not specifically about singling out any perpetrator or things like that because sometimes people just blindly share in the kind of sense of outrage without thinking through about the veracity of such information and that is actually a layer where PRC as well as other outside influencers really powered their energy especially leading up to the election I'm sure you in the US knows something about that too so anyway the idea is that we use this idea of viral vaccination people who have participated in fact checking or left about what we are calling humor over rumor funny memes that dispel those rumors while being themselves more viral than those rumors then helped to lower our value the basic transmission rate of those initial more toxic ideologies or memes or things like that also work with the civil society so anyone can flag the incoming misinformation on COFAX or on Trendmicro's Fangjia Daraen or on who's cause Mei Yu Yi there's many in the ecosystem but just like flagging your incoming email as spam review something about the fingerprint of the email spammer people outvoting such disinformation before it spreads wildly allow us to contact trace before it gets into community spread to use the analogy of epidemiology and then we make sure the contact tracing is public information we will put on mandatory label when you share on more social corner of social media this message is sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party's Zhong Yang Zhen Fa Wei Chang An Xian the political and law unit and in Hong Kong really there were teenage protesters and the photo was from Reuters that part was true but they were not paid and I quote 200,000 dollars to murder police or recruits their younger siblings to get iPhones or something like that that was entirely fabrication from the Weibo account of the Chang An Xian and once people see the mandatory label when they share it's not like we're taking anything down it's rather notice and public notice so we preserved the MRNA and changed the spy protein so to speak so people who spread those things become then more immune to the device of conspiracy theories I hope that answered the question I see it is amazing to hear about it is amazing to hear about the back and forth process that the sandstorm system has underwent and also about hearing about the fact checking process for the fake news coming from China and also the vaccine information moving on there is a question about the technical use case for blockchain and government do you mind shedding some light on that? yeah I usually use the term DLT or ledger technology because blockchain is just one of the many ways to implement distributed ledgers now is that in mind so I think it's useful when there's multiple data stewards that don't quite trust each other and need to establish a kind of consensus on what common good is so we've seen for example that the people who measure air quality specifically PM 2.5 around 2014-15 they don't quite trust the government or the industrial areas to self-report their pollution levels maybe for good reasons one of the good reasons is that at a time there's less than 100 weather stations around Taiwan measuring the PM 2.5 levels and people said I know this polluter specifically because they know that's exactly where those 87 measurement stations are they just purposefully built around those measure stations so they took matters to their own hands and working with civic technologies they built the LAS community and the GovZero air map project of visualizing the real-time measurement of at that time thousands and nowadays tens of thousands of stations many in the primary schools or middle schools teaching data stewardship but also in their own balconies and so because people want to contribute the young children getting their hands on the idea of Arduino or Raspberry Pi or more free software systems they want their first project to advise their parents to make sure that when they go to a job in the morning they don't damage their health or instead they would just go inside instead of going out or to a job and so there's a very clear social responsibility and impact angle in participating in the ledger so when the National Center applies the computation want to join the foray to help doing the air modeling and the EPA the environmental protection administration want to also complete the puzzle by mandating the lamps in the industrial parks also install the air boxes as designed by the citizens they don't quite trust each other but they want the same picture so I believe they work with ledger technologies such as the EOTA distributed ledger and also the National Academy in Taiwan so that those data are put on chain so to speak so that people cannot just leading to an election go back and change the numbers and even if the National Center for High Speed Computation is known for its supercomputer prowess the design was such that it cannot very easily take over a public account of the air pollution and then people feel much more at ease to contribute their models to be run by NCHCs to soothe out the mobile immobile and oversee influences of the air pollution and that model has been since then taken to a local referendum about water pollution and waterways and so on water box and many other data sensor relief and so on so it's no coincidence that in February 2020 just one month into the epidemic we built this musk rationing maps more than 100 of those applications literally in just three days because we piggyback on the existing mapping efforts from the F-Zero and many other communities that already visualize the air and water qualities. It is very interesting to hear about the usage case of universal ledger system on sustainability work and air quality, water quality control. There is another question on how has Taiwan been able to maintain its technology edge? Actually, yep. What makes Taiwan so successful that such a critical country in global technology progress? Yeah, I think one of the main ideas that I like very much in Taiwan is that social innovation and industrial innovation are not seen as kind of two part of size of the spectrum because I run an incubator myself in the social innovation lab every year we emit a dozen or so startups and a dozen or so impact oriented organizations to incubate together and I was just at a pitch day a week ago and this year in the two dozen pitches if I close my eyes I can't really tell which one is the profit oriented startups and which one is the purpose oriented impact organization they fuse together so that we of course there's very high profile cases, right? For example TSMC working with Foxconn together BNT vaccines which is of course extremely high impact socially but at all levels I believe Taiwan really cares about inclusive and sustainable innovation. We don't like in some other jurisdictions prioritize one sector over others so in other jurisdictions focusing on banking or other jurisdictions focusing on the manufacturing or things like that there tends to be some capture, right? of the industrial related regulations so there's a reasonable cost to the environment or to the social cohesion advance one particular sector over the others but in Taiwan it all has to be Pareto improvements actually it doesn't work if you just say we don't pollute or we don't disrupt the community nowadays you have to say how are you contributing to net zero how are you contributing to the social cohesion and equity instead of just standing by and doing nothing and this has propagated not just on public listed corporations but also small and medium enterprises and that I believe allows the SMEs which are very agile to begin with to then work with the community of people who can see those emerging issues certainly the air box civic type people see those transforming faster than the EPA around PM 2.5 and that then inform edimax and many other manufacturers to adjust their products to serve that particular level of crowdfunding crowd sourcing participants in a kind of prosumer fashion and that is I guess a constant chance to innovate again with the people and not just for the people see it is great to hear how the private sector and the government sector in Taiwan has been able to mobilize so quickly and be so agile in order to stay at a forefront of its technology another question that people are interested in is if gov zero get people more power to influence public policy what happens if the decision of the people is not optimal you know for example when people vote on removing the mask mandate the mask saves life I think this echoes with the idea of the risk for running with democratization in exchange for populism yeah so I think many view citizen participation in the light of previous representative democracy that is to say the like once every four year or two year voting and referenda and so on and the common thing of these designs previous designs were that they are very low bandwidth if you have a ballot of 20 referendum questions that's just 20 bits uploaded once every two years right so the latency the time to wait between actions is very long the bandwidth the actual bits that you are able to express is very low so in a low bandwidth high latency situation of course you would then say maybe there's some role for the face-to-face communications of or at least more low latency high bandwidth conversations of small amount of people not exceeding a subcommittee of the parliament or something less than 150 people because they figure optimal things out faster and we have ethnographic evidence of that but that was before the internet all of those low bandwidth high latency ideas of democracy were pre-internets nowadays with internet which is itself an inter-network connecting many networks together the fact that we have the internet that we have today proves that it's okay to work behind the numbers in a more participatory way and the key is that we move from the decisional stage from the decisional into the agenda setting stage so one example is the sliding so if all of you are voting on slide then maybe the top question is not an optimal question but that doesn't matter because we're not making a finite resource zero sum allocation at the stage we're making an allocation of which question is discussed before other questions but the lengths of time that we dwell on each question still depends on the nature of the question so it is mostly just agenda setting power not decision making power and when we are doing agenda setting or in design thinking terms when we're just discovering and defining our common values the more the better and we measure not by the head counts we measure by the plurality the diversity of people's opinions and feelings so for example in polis when we vote on the next agenda it doesn't matter if we mobilize 2000 people voting exactly the way you do because the visualization shows the plurality using opinions clustering of the various different feelings of priorities so people's diversity matter but it doesn't matter if 2000 people vote examples that we just count as one dot so in that configuration the incentive then become to convince people across the aisle because we hold ourselves to account only to answer the agenda that convinces across all the difference Uber taxi drivers regular taxi drivers passengers and so on and only these common values can mandate a real-time stakeholder conversation of which again is very low latency very high bandwidth using slido like technologies over life streaming and so on so we would not move to remove mask mandates but we may brainstorm how to communicate mask relationship with the coronavirus better actually we did something like that and which converged into the message the mask is there to protect yourself against your own washed hands which is a rough consensus right even if you you know have different takes on aerosol spread or things like that there really is no denying that wearing a mask reminds you to wash your hands more if you get this message to other people it doesn't talk about respecting the elderly respecting the vulnerable it appeals entirely on a rational self-interest and that's kind of rough consensus we get from collective intelligence if we open up the ballots making power to the people instead of just a voting power on existing ballots yeah I think I read somewhere on the gov zero page that actually democratization of policymaking helps you to reach consensus and I think that's kind of a point that you touch upon just now another question that people are interested in what is something that you are currently working on that makes you jump out of bed every day with a sense of excitement and purpose yeah today at 2pm we're going to have a kickoff meeting of the 6G 6th generation telecommunication infrastructure idea song so the and I'm very excited about that the idea of idea song builds upon our idea of presidential president which is for five years now thousands of civil servants, social innovators entrepreneurs and so on work together to propose more than 200 each year sustainable development goal targets, realization plans in answering to people's wishes we call it a kind of wish and fountains so the idea is very simple people use a new form of voting a high bandwidth voting called quadratic voting which allocates exactly the same marginal cost to the marginal value of each vote so that people can understand which synergies their ideas had with other synergies of other people's idea when building to accomplish the SDGs together so out of the 200 or so teams we QV quadratically vote top 20 we cashed in for three months on a local proof of concept and five ones that actually won is a trophy a ship of Taiwan a micro projector underneath to turn it on it projects after sign on giving you the trophy so it's very meta and the promise of the president is that whatever you did locally for the past three months will become public policy in the next fiscal year with all the personnel and budgets and regulations support that's how we got for example a lot of telemedicine and many other like net zero apps for mobilizing people to conduct their actions and more environmental responsible way and things like that through such social innovations with the promised government of support now many of those highly regarded ideas are feasible in the next fiscal year but sometimes there are some ideas that would only be possible in the best estimates when we have true co-presents for example with people in different places that's like five years or ten years down the line so for this long horizon ideas previously we think then we give them a note of recognition and nothing happens but this year we want to try something different we want to then use those long horizon ideas instead of coaching them into a POC which is impossible right we coach them to work with artists that the interactive game designers the speculative designers and so on to build interactive futures so to speak to realize their vision and then we invite the researchers working on 6G technology to actually live in the future for a while to guard their research directions and so on so that we have an impact not just on the next year's fiscal budget but we also have an impact on the national allocation of research budget again moving from implementation level over decision level into the research and agenda setting level I'm very excited about this more kind of long term pluralist thinking I see wow the idea of the concept is extremely extremely attractive I wish I'm catching a plane right now be back in Taiwan and participate in it another question that people are interested in is with Taiwan being the first Asian country to legalize same sex marriage in 2019 some may say that Taiwan is at a forefront of the quality for all however the value system in Asia is still undeniably more conservative so have you personally encountered resistance in your political educational and technology work yeah the internet was built upon this very pluralist principle of post health law and I quote to be conservative in what you do and be liberal in what you accept so I think there's merits to both liberal and conservative thought because in Asia especially in Taiwan it pays to conserve traditional institutions especially when we have more than 20 national languages if you can sign language and the idea is that for example when we want to look towards metriarchical social configurations we don't have to look for the Amis culture is metriarchical the Taiwan culture which I believe is part of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen our president's opinion says that gender doesn't matter when choosing lines of succession and so on so there's many many traditions in the indigenous nations and of course on the newer migrants each of those cultures in a transcultural way bring something to sign about the plurality of possible social configurations gender relationships and many other relationships and so it pays to conserve that because if you drive progress from one that is not progress that is decimation literally cutting by one-tenth the opposing side of the culture that already exists in Taiwan actually can engage in conversations so I really like the ideas that I believe David Greba and the other David express in the dawn of everything as a new book that I was just reading that to talk about various prehistorical and ancient ways of configuring the society by the more newer anthropological evidences that also the social innovation is possible and probably have been tried and probably people are still trying it so instead of driving progress on a single vision we need to have a pluralist conversation so they become a conversation between many diverse values so in a sense we don't face resistance we are the resistance we are resisting any particular optimizing view of optimizing one particular utility GBP or whatever to sacrifice the other equally important other 16 different sustainable development goals so that we focus on a more mental level of conversation so if you take conservative as a kind of conservationist of existing cultures and institutions I'm conservative too but I'm really growing what I accept I see yeah I feel like with the way you talk about plurality it echoes a point that my professor used to make is you want to avoid making policy that's designing the fast train to the wrong station and I think that kind of echoes your thought we have a very interesting question from our audience Tom he said I used to help with the national security agency work and in our work we found that there were big holes in the information security system of TSMC will the Taiwanese government consider centralizing the management of security system for high sensitive tech industry yeah I think we just proposed some drafts on trade secret protection and so on based on these ideas the draft I think will be deliberated in the parliament so I will not comment too much while it's being deliberated in the parliament but that is something that is very important in our agenda and out to that sometime this year we will also have a dedicated administration I think that's the shoe a self-sustaining government organ dedicated for cyber security so the administration for cyber security I'm still thinking about the acronym maybe ACE the ACE the ACS people instead of just more at a coordinating role like the current department of cyber security will also take a more proactive role in defining the cyber security policies especially working with those highly sensitive and highly important economic sectors previously the department of cyber security because it's a department within the cabinet office we mostly focus on safeguarding our own infrastructures the public infrastructures as I mentioned but I think the economic infrastructure and the civic infrastructure is equally important so I think the new administration of cyber security has a slightly larger mandate as compared to the department of cyber security partly motivated by Tom's question it's nice to know that Tony's government has this cyber security mandate to make things safer for us there's a question I think it speaks to more of your unusual education background since I know that you're self-learned a lot of things what are your thoughts on the current Tony's education system what are we doing well on and what are some areas you think that we need to address more I think the time education system because I'm a little bit biased because I'm part of the curriculum community we learn from the homeschooling and alternative education communities to put autonomy and interaction toward common good as the core competencies I think it's really good that we're one of the first Asian countries to move beyond the literacy mindset the relative memorization you know this Asian stereotype that I'm very familiar with when I was a child we're moving on so for example this year when we're having kind of every student use a tablet we make sure that the tablet is constructed with competence in mind the tablet when you're constructing with literacy in mind mostly served as digital alternative to books right but when you constructed with competence in mind you have like sense from the room to engage with the free software community for the kids to build their own AI models to improve their own classrooms to build a forum like software like from the Minerva School in a more federated way we want to open up the possibility for the parents and students to be co-creators to the whatever curriculum implementation that they're using and I think they will make the tablets a connecting device with their families instead of alienating the device like we have seen in many other jurisdictions and so I think that's a good part of it. I think one of the areas that we need to address further is the use of assistive technologies. There's already a lot of very good technologies that can for example provide real-time captioning when you're speaking in Mandarin it's already eminently possible to machine translate that into English and real-time caption that it's very actually you were in ALS I'm talking about right so it's very mature technology now and very affordable too and you don't have to sacrifice privacy for that to the adoption of such technologies in actual tablet-oriented conversations in the schools is the uptake is low-ish I think we need to build more trust and more assistive frameworks and that is important because if you look at the educational results of Taiwan's bilingual program if you measure just the reading and comprehension listening parts Taiwan's children are already bilingual what's missing is of course the speaking and expressing the writing the outbound parts but that of course takes forever to change but if you have the right amount of assistive technology because you already can still check the machines because they don't have any problem reading the captions or listening to machine translated synthetic voice then you become instantly bilingual if we just learn to use like eyeglasses assistive intelligences in our education system so that's something I'm passionate I'm happy to help both the alternative education community and basic education communities to to help that make happen. Wow that really just blew my mind and we have seven minutes left and I feel like it's time for us to transition to a live audience today so if anyone wants please feel free to raise your hand and we can get started oh yeah Yuting do you want I'll have to unmute you here we go Hi I have a simple question about so you know like Taiwan has different Uyens I mean like executive and also like a legislator and other Uyens and then I'm wondering how do you collaborate with other Uyens not just legislative Uyens or also the jurisdiction and also other like examinations yeah yeah so I know that because most of the resources are in the executive Uyens and then I know there's some like weakness in the cybersecurity of other Uyens and then I know there was news on that like some hacker maybe from China trying to take advantage of that and is this issue being solved has this issue been solved by you or other people yeah thank you yes yeah and that's partly of the motivation of the administration on cybersecurity because previously when he was just a department within the cabinet office it takes a part of the Uyens cross-Uyens negotiation because the idea is always that the examination is examining as the control Uyens the legislative Uyens overseas our budget right and so the judicial Uyens of course tells whether we're legal or not so it's them supervising us it's very rare that the executive Uyens gets to supervise other Uyens but in terms of cybersecurity that's a must right so I think the presidential office actually the president is a constitutional organ specifically designed to do cross-Uyens orchestration with this idea of anti-war cybersecurity and national security more and more coordinations are now being moved toward the national security council level so we've addressed that constitutional it's a loophole it's a drawback of coordination starting from the executive Uyens and later on when we designed the kind of the founding acts of the administration of cybersecurity we were very clear to make sure that they're in charge of the Huo Jia, Zitong Anjue, the international or country-wide cybersecurity related matters instead of just Zheng Fu which is within the executive branch and things like that so with the national security council's coordination and the new ACS I believe we're also making strides to resolve these issues in a more stable way but nowadays with the coordination from the national security council we already were able to establish cross-Uyens support We still have time for a few questions so please raise your hand Sita Allison Chen has a question Okay Allison would you like to unmute or you're in a place where you can type maybe Do not read it so would you set the future of the LGBTQ community acceptance within Taiwan's culture particularly for gender and are there particular challenges that you see As I mentioned many indigenous nations in Taiwan also have the non-binary gender non-conforming and so in ideas or even the ideas of more than three there is an input field so you can describe yourself so I believe as part of conservative thought in Taiwan we need to make sure that we communicate more of those different kind of gender norms that already exist in Taiwan already there's many films in Taiwan tackling this connection between the indigenous cultures and gender thoughts mainstreaming in Taiwan so I'm positive that people understand more and more that there's more than one way to structure the gender norms and gender narratives in Taiwan which I believe is fundamentally a good sign because the idea as I said it's not about I was part of this half of population I was then part of the other half of population the idea is that I had an experience working with some of these people and then I had another experience working with these people but it doesn't mean that I learning English doesn't mean that I'm distancing away from Mandarin-speaking community it doesn't work that way right so basically the plurality of genders is a fact and when we make sure that we share our common experiences in a way that's truly transcultural then we can make it quite normal for anyone in any biological configuration based not discrimination but value for their different perspectives to whatever issues that we're tackling about and that is true inclusion that's not just diversity or you know the rationing right of C sense whatever that we do on this diversity level is just to pave the way to true inclusion on a societal level I know a lot of people still have a lot of questions we are getting a hard stop so I was wondering if people can turn on your camera so we can take a group photo yeah I feel like we can ask okay I'll just take a screenshot we're getting kicked out right now but thank you so much everyone for joining us special thank you to Audrey for spending an early morning in Taiwan for us and I just want to take this time to thank our executive team at TCS and all the people who has been part of the planning committee this has been a great event and I really enjoyed working with each and every one of you thank you