 okay okay yes I can I can hear you okay mm-hmm yeah I I don't I don't see your face so it's hard to check but I remember such a such a case yes mm-hmm mm-hmm oh yes finally yeah now now I remember you it's easier if with the face you know yeah yeah yeah of course I remember you yeah it's much harder with just a voice okay yeah we can start any time yeah of course thank you thank you mm-hmm okay okay that's why I wear like this right I could put a suit on but I'm not no this is good yeah I have visited Okinawa and Osaka and Tokyo of course and many places in Japan but for Hokkaido I think yeah I thought about visiting in 2015 for the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting at a time I think it was in the Sapporo Convention Center but I did not make it one of my friends Bobby Tom did make it I think and so I think it's not me coming to Sapporo it's Sapporo coming to me every time that we have a hackers on with pizza and it's often with beer and of course on the beer you see Sapporo but I don't I haven't personally been to the visits but I really look forward to after the COVID yes that there will be an excellent thing to do actually after COVID I really look forward to visit and stay for a few more days because previously before joining the cabinet I was touring around Europe to many different places many different hackers once but for each place I used to stay only a day or two and so it's much more like just changing the you know wallpapers the backgrounds of the desktop but then after being the minister I learned that in order to really get into a mood of understanding where people's ideas are coming from you really have to spend a week or at least with with other people so I look forward to more longer stays yeah certainly I'm recently interested in a startup called XR space for extended reality it's the first virtual reality headset with no controller I can just control it with my hands and it's very light with its own 5G connection so I can wear it for like three hours or four hours without fearing fatigue or things like that and so I will make together with some artists a kind of synthetic version of me in that XR space so people can ask me questions and Audrey in that space will synthesize poetry based on the transcripts that I had put on GitHub and so it becomes a kind of interactive dialogue art installation but entirely in the extended reality I really like how 5G can bring people closer and feel like a sense of co-presence in the same room as opposed to Skype where we're very clearly seeing we're in different rooms mm-hmm yeah that's a great question I have interacted indeed with people from like middle school and senior high school and all the way to the you know central government and so on in my conferences and there is I think one thing that really connects Japan and the Taiwan view of technology is the idea that society need to lead the direction of technologies the technologies are not just curiosities but as we often say it must become a infrastructure for the society that are to say to serve a societal purpose and that's why I think while industry 4.0 people know about the idea Japan has the idea of society 5.0 meaning that society is one version newer than the industry and the industry needs to upgrade to work with the society not the other way around and so many people ask questions about instead of disruptive technologies can we work on inclusive technologies and I think that's something that Taiwan and Japan has a lot of common yeah it's interesting because when I was asked to become the digital minister in 2016 we talked a lot within the Gov.0 movement and there's at least like five other people who I think are equally qualified and of course you know some of these people if you have come to Gov.0 summit there's Jia Liang Gao there's also professor Chen Shenwei who have been with us since the beginning of Gov.0 who actually went to the interview with the premier with me and so on so there's no shortage of like digital minister caliber people in the Gov.0 movement and I'm I think only because I'm already retired I'm only 33 34 when I joined the sunflower movement and work on it for time so people see me more I become sort of like a public face but actually there's many people working together and it's interesting because in Gov.0 Japan there's a lot of chapter leaders and regional leaders that could I think in my mind serve equally well as the digital minister and that's I think why in Taiwan we have this system called reverse mentorship where each minister in the cabinet can work with two people usually under 35 as mentors to that minister and so I worked in this office for a couple years with minister Jacqueline Cai and at the time also another Gov.0 collaborator Tony Q also work in the same capacity and so just build a intergenerational solidarity between the cabinet member who are older on one side and the younger people on the other side who already have a digital native connection in the Taiwan case it's Gov.0 but in your case it's Gov. Japan I think it could make changes happen it doesn't have to be me but anyone who serve in that position need to have a very strong connection with the civic technologist community. Yeah it is easier if you are in a place that's clearly marked as the youth advisory council that is to say the Confucianism extends to the respect for the institution so without institution of course seniority is the norm but if you design an institution that's very easily let people see oh this is the essentially the young people's council and the elderly are here to provide resource and support to the new direction that the young people the reverse mentors are creating then people yield more to the institution than to the seniority so having a clearly spelled out institution is very important. Yes on the national level there is the presidential hackathon in which the president gives five trophy every year to five teams and this year the five teams the five data collaboratives only one is from the central government everything else is from the social sector and from the local groups this is great because it elevates the status of the regional social innovators they can start with only working in a very small area and there is actually a social innovation from Japan I think it's called Maimitsu that makes people refill their bottles instead of buying new plastic bottles and the Maimitsu team did a map so people can see where are the refill stations around them and so a Taiwan team did something very similar called Fengcha or serving tea but the difference is that they connect them not only to the water refuel stations but also to the regional place making shops as well as the drink shops that actually provides the social entrepreneurs products to for example those out of spec agricultural products and make it into jam and and then make the jam into drinks and things like that so people understand the social purpose of those place making shops in addition to getting their bottles refueled and their habits changed and so almost immediately after receiving the presidential heckles on trophy which was a micro projector if you turn it on the projector president Tsai promising you whatever you did in the past three months will become public policy in the next 12 months so the people install the app increase tenfold and many many more people start to think in different ways when it comes to using water bottles and habit changing and this is a small example but it shows that just having a executive branch power as a commitment pre-commitment to a heckles on can really change the follow-up because without this commitment maybe the environmental protection administration will not follow up to such a high degree but because everybody know that the president has promised publicly to make it happen in the next year in a nationwide rollout everybody in each precinct and district feels strongly about joining this network yeah there is a strong interest especially in places where it's harder to get the humans staff required for like spraying pesticide and so on to switch those work to drones and I understand that in the Japan agriculture cooperative Makubetsu and Hokkaido Obihiro agriculture high school and also the technical high school have also worked on education classes that involves the drones to spray pesticides and was a very large like 16 liter tank and in Taiwan we made sure that when we deploy 5G technology which will bring such drones into everyday use not just experimental use we start in the places where the like the fisheries are and where the farmers are in the more rural places because in the larger municipalities we already have a backbone of high fiber optics and Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi is very dense so the case for 5G is less pronounced but in those more rural places because it's harder to get fiber optics everywhere you farm right 5G makes a lot more sense and so when designing our auctioning for 5G spectrum we make sure the 5 telecom have to pay a lot of extra money which then we reinvest starting this year back to the more rural places to reward the local cooperatives and social entrepreneurs to work with the telecoms on what we call the sandbox for 5G deployment and these include of course self-driving vehicles but also tele health and teleeducation as well yeah just in late September in 19th of September I had a call with the JCI Japan the Okinawa IT Forum for the junior Chamber International I think and there's a lot of ideas being brainstormed around this kind of collaboration we talked about how when I last visited Okinawa there was a typhoon and so for a day I was essentially quarantined in the hotel but I could still see the very beautiful ocean and there's a really good internet connectivity so we brainstormed that even if we had to endure 14 days of quarantine we went flying to Okinawa how to make this 14 days relevant as a tourism kind of experience working with the quarantine hotels that's something the Taiwanese hotels do and they offer a kind of authentic experience of night market and so on even though you're high in a quarantine hotel they can still offer you experience like you're a tourist and so there's a lot of things that broadband and technologies can help to make tourism still relevant and after COVID after we get the vaccines like people-to-people relationship stronger instead of making it like more distance and remote during the COVID days so I still remember fondly of the JCI Japan Okinawa conversation yes and also it's very practical because the sandbox regulations in Taiwan also mandates that there must be a societal problem to solve a societal challenge to be met when bringing those sandbox cases and as I mentioned 5G in municipal areas are good to have but in the rural areas they have many use cases that are must have and so in those must have scenarios there's easier argument for the investors to bring their resources to better the place instead of just being one of the many choices alongside fiber optics and other connectivity methods and so it's both out of a kind of equality based worldview when it comes to especially health education and communication but it's also based on a very practical view of a higher social return of investment in the longer run is also a better return of investment yeah I think it's not necessarily a very high return of investment but it could be a lot of inclusion ideas that came to foster the innovation for the company itself especially if it's a small or medium enterprise most of the innovation happens in the ecosystem outside of the R&D department of that small and media enterprise anyway and so this is the core argument of the open source movement by having access and contributing to an open innovation ecosystem you don't earn money but you reduce cost you essentially crowdsource your R&D and to reduce the cost on betting on the infrastructure investments that could be very costly and very high-risk for example experimenting with distributed ledger technology you can try 10 different DOTs and they don't work as well as the original solutions but maybe you end up with the one DOT that works for a very specific use case and that actually provides business value but if you have to do all the R&D yourself then any SME even the medium size or even larger enterprises cannot afford to run so many experiments in the same time but by teaming up with open innovation communities such as the Ethereum community or the hyper ledger community and so on essentially you only benefit from the cases where it makes business sense to you but you also empower your own staff to understand the latest and the greatest in open innovation so that when they see a new challenge coming they will not say oh these are not invented here they will say oh I know this maintainer and I would just give them a poor request or give them a call and then we'll work on this emerging technology all together so the case is not on an immediate ROI case this is not an investment case this is a business development and a HR case yeah Trent Micro is a really good example because they have a few staff members that just voluntarily in their spare time work with the Gov Zero project called Covax that's crowdsourced the end-to-end encrypted channel is called line it's also used in Japan it's actually also a social contribution because of the earthquake right so on the line system there's many people sharing misinformation and that's where most of those disinformation came from they basically look at what misinformation gets trending and start designing intentional disruptive campaigns out of it so the Trent Micro after taking a look at the Covax project where people can crowdsource the fact-checking around the trending reported spam and other misinformation on social media they roll out their own version of Dr. Missage which has a mascot it's a very cute dog maybe not as cute as Hatsune Miku but still very cute and so people just share it and invited the Dr. Missage dog bot to their chat room so any time they share a misinformation the dog will actually sniff it and then respond with clarification sometimes very funny clarifications immediately and so that makes the disinformation campaign much harder to spread when people are vaccinated with a cute dog it's called a humor over rumor and so even for small and medium enterprises owners such open civic tech communities are still there right so you can have for example when I worked with the social text company they have their own open like I think it's modeled after the food camp but they call it the bar camp so because bar after food right so the bar camp is a kind of friendly hackathon where people are invited to use the social text campus for open innovation and also we have what we call a weeky Wednesday where we can take like 20% time off and work on such social innovation projects and on the Wednesday there's a demo to show the company what social innovations we have produced with the community and I think it's exactly because of that system Trent micro promoted the doctor message from being a side project into being a institutionalized section within their company so that's what I mean by open innovation yes I think it's a interesting topic to talk about inclusion when you come from an indigenous viewpoint the ideas are very different from a like civic participation because the exclusion was not because of your age like you're too young to vote people understand okay one day I'll be old enough to vote and it's not about this enfranchising like because you're a woman you're not allowed to vote well now we know now that with the stuff for gates working and also intersectionality in mind the voting is the basic power that the women can express themselves and so on so these are like natural progressions and although different jurisdictions in Asia have different timescales we more or less agree that we should be more inclusive when it comes to public participation but that's because each one of us have been a teenager and half of us went through the female puberty me included and so there's a large amount of people but for for I knew or from the moedict viewpoint Amis and other indigenous languages it's not like that right if it goes to a referendum people who have even heard of their cases is strictly in the minority so the usual direct participation of referendum or representatives in a parliament and so on are not guaranteed that with time it will get better in fact it may get worse because less and less people remember the culture and there's also the worry of appropriation like if people see this as mostly a tourism thing or as a kind of cultural diplomacy thing then it actually deprived the indigenous people of their own agency of their own willingness to to act and so I think this is a complex topic that cannot be tackled in five minutes but I would just very quickly say that it makes sense to start from that point of view from indigenous point of view and code not for I knew but with I knew and the code for mentality works differently and must adjust when you're working with indigenous people it's not for them it's with them and even after them that's the right attitude yeah sometimes it's a matter of language in Taiwan we call programming software design so I'm a software designer we don't say that we're software engineers and it's just a simple word change and admittedly in programming there's the part of us that talk to other people which is more like design and there's the part of our way that talks to computers which is more than just writing code is also engineering the architecture but by emphasizing that it's about program design that's to say working with people not only we have gender balance in the people who choose software design as their career but it also enables us talk to other designers like interaction designers service designers and so on and which are all very important to the practice of designing software and with the AI assisted intelligence programming I think the code generation part the actual writing code part is more and more automated nowadays GPT-3 you can just tell it the specification the user story and say here are the react code to make this and then GPT-3 will actually just write some react code for you so it's very apparent to me that's the people to people skills the autonomy to find and define these issues by yourself and also listening to others to interact and then finally to find those common values out of the different positions these are a designer and a facilitator skill and if we see software programmers as more designers than engineers then I think that we enable and prepare us for such a future yeah I think just like we are not expecting all the children to become coders but it's important to understand computational thinking right the abstractions that we use to simplify a very difficult situation or a difficult challenge into manageable ideas so is design thinking important even if not all children end up becoming designers and design thinking which is a ideal idea is basically saying if people have variously different positions we can always discover their feelings and then define a common feeling a common value upon which we can then innovate and develop and then deliver something of value to the people and so this double diamond shape of course it can go on and on if you are an open innovation the delivery is just the beginning of another iteration but the idea that people have common values and here is a set of thinking mechanism that people can arrive to common value despite their differences this is very important even if you're not a professional designer so I think computational thinking and design thinking these are just like universal vocabulary that we can use more in our day-to-day social innovation and that will empower people even with zero coding experiences to contribute more of their time in a way that basically lifts up everybody's perspective because with each contributor you see a new perspective on the project that we're working on together it's much more inclusive this way yeah when I first participated in internet governance projects I have my email address that's what people understand that they can communicate with me most people I communicate with has no idea I'm just 15 years old or 16 years old so the internet doesn't know your your age right and so even if I'm a teenager right now I think I can still work well as a ministry in the cabinet and also maybe as a member of the open government partnership national action plan council which just formed and this is not a hypothetical answer because we do have a teenager in our open government partnership council and she was brought into the council because she initiated a very famous initiative about three years ago when she was just 16 years old and asking for the gradual banning of the plastic straw for bubble tea and in Taiwan because it causes a lot of damage to the sea right to the ocean and also the carbon footprint and it was very successful and so basically we don't know when the petition came whether this pseudonym I think her pseudonym was I love elephants and elephants love me so I don't know the age of this initiative's proposal and but they very successfully mobilized more than 5,000 people and we brainstormed the ways that the single-use utensils makers can make the straws in a way that are maybe from organic straws maybe from plastic maybe redesigned so you don't have to have used a straw and so on in a way that is truly co-creative and her contribution was a lot to say to the popularity of the platform the joint platform and so now she of course is our national action plan board council member but she's still a teenager 19 years old at the moment her name is Wang Xuanru and so I use this example by saying I don't really see necessarily a difference between teenagers and adults and elderly people when it comes to social innovation each of us have something to contribute and as I mentioned often I quote Lena Cohen that there is a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in people who have less preconceptions see the crack not as part of the building but as something that the light can get in and of course a fresh perspective always works well but you don't have to be a teenager to have a fresh perspective just step outside of your comfort zone and then work with people who you don't know well and then very quickly they will see the crack in you and you will see the crack in them and together the light will come in and that's my message now I actually have to go I have another meeting on the APR IGF like in 13 second minutes thank you thank you yeah me too live long and prosper yeah okay bye yes see you bye