 What are the opportunities offered by digitalization for the future of work? In Taiwan, we have this national strategy called DG Plus or DIGI, where we break down the digitalization into four components. The first one, D, stands for development of infrastructure. The second is I for innovation. And third is G for governance. And the fourth and the most important one to me is the second eye for inclusion. Indeed, we have seen that digitalization have brought tremendous amount of innovation in terms of how we can move beyond the space and time boundaries and engage in work relationships with people who are in literally different time zones, who are working across many different disciplines, people previously constrained by their mental or physical handicaps and so on can be assisted by assistive technologies and integrate into a larger world-scale economy. So these are the opportunities. However, the opportunities are not without its drawbacks. For it is through algorithms and code, code of text, that's the regulations, and also code of machines, that's the algorithms that regulates the intermediary relationships of those new configurations of work. And so as with any algorithmic governance topic, we really need to hold two things to account. One is whether this digitalization platform for the future of work is aligned in its value with the workers. And the second is that if there is a mismatch in value alignment, can the workers take the means of intermediation to our own hands and in open-source software, we call it fork. Forking the intermediary platforms so that we take control of the platforms that dispatches the kind of communications and links offered by the internet. We see the internet itself as evidenced by the end-to-end innovation principle offers precisely this kind of freedom. If you do not like any particular internet protocol and how it works, one can fork a different protocol without consulting or seeking permissions from previous attempts at decentralization. So the World Web, for example, did not ask for permission from Gover and the newest iterations of say the Ethereum distributor ledger did not ask for permissions from Bitcoin. And so this kind of value alignment and workers control I think are the main opportunities as provided by open internet in the governance mechanisms toward the future of work. The imminent digitalization of broad areas of life, how are we preparing ourselves in the present for the future of work? So how would we make sure that the workers understand and is empowered when it comes to the value alignment as well as the fork, the capacity of forking of the working platforms? I think what's important is in our education system we need to switch from a literacy point of view when it comes to digital media to a competence point of view whereas in the previous days of radio and television it's just about one person speaking to many. Literacy was of course important back then but nowadays especially in Taiwan where the broadband is a human rights anywhere in Taiwan even on the top of Taiwan almost 4,000 meters high are guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second both ways for just 15 euros a month otherwise it's my fault. And so because of this we more and more see our students our next generation as producers of media and producers of source code and data and in this sense they are workers already and need to understand the ethics the impact their work may have on the society for example about the fact-checking about journalistic integrity and so on because they are really the producers of both media and data. And so because of this we make sure that for example when we're measuring the air quality using the air boxes that's less than 100 euros per sensor each sensor installed in the balcony or in the school offers a concrete case for the students to understand what does it mean to be a joint data controller what does it mean for the GDPR requirements as applied to data what does it mean to join a distributed ledger and how to hold the ledger to account and so this kind of preparation especially on the earlier ages of education I think this is a really good chance for the whole society to look at the landscape of sustainability the landscape of community development and see that each of us can participate even just part-time as a part-time fact-checker as a part-time data contributor and understand that in a liberal democracy it's not just about uploading three bits of information every four years which is called voting by the way but rather about day to day democracy and day to day solidarity when it comes to digitalization upholding the good quality of life and good quality of decent work what are the main challenges that workers, governments specific sectors of society as well as young people and older people are facing in order to make the best use of the new conditions in my personal opinion the most important thing here is intergenerational solidarity whereas the younger people, the digital natives understand the idea of worldwide connectivity and world collaboration the older people has the wisdom of making sure that the new ideas are feasible and could integrate with the social norms instead of disrupting the social norms in the name of innovation so in Taiwan we have this idea of reverse mentors people who are under 35 years old joining the cabinet to reverse mentor the existing cabinet members who are often older than 35 years old I'm 39 now so I work with my young reverse mentors who shows the direction of the planet who shows where are we going to make sure that there is intergenerational solidarity and the older people realize their ideas making sure that there is sufficient resource and sufficient support and so on so for example the reverse mentor for the minister of labor proposed a couple of years ago that we need to attend the world skills competition worldwide and highlighting the champions in the Taiwan National Day Parade just like Olympic athletes well not only it's the case last year and this year but also for future years because people now understand that if we highlight the capacity of the world skills champion it's not only bettering their individual careers but also making sure that they can be introduced to the K-12 education curriculum and work with younger people people who are even younger than they are and to build the community to make sure that there is a ergonomic inclusive park and schools, buildings and all sorts of community development targets then the even younger people learn that there's a ladder of skills that they can work with those champions have someone they can look up to and then instead of just academic achievement they can see is actually those immediate solidarities across the various generations that can connect them all the way to the minister of labor as well as our premier, our prime minister and so I think just showing this intergenerational solidarity is led by the younger people I think this is one of the most important points in this new condition of intergenerational solidarity How to ensure collaborative and social economy in a context of increased digitalization in Taiwan we called the social sector the social sector that is to say instead of calling it the voluntary or the third sector we recognize the social economy at its roots, the cooperative developments the credit unions, the mutuals and so on as a legitimate sector in itself helped by social entrepreneurs helped by the not-for-profit local place making groups the community colleges as well as individuals that just have good ideas about how the society needs to organize better and so just calling it a social sector I think have a truly collaborative repercussion on the framing of digitalization for digitalization is of course a technology or a set of technologies but if we interpret technology only in terms of its business applications that's to say the so-called private sector then we risk only making investments on so-called industry 4.0 which is fundamentally about the business interests but not the society 5.0 which is a Japanese nomenclature to ensure that the social sector takes a higher version a longer view and a view based on wisdom of where those digitalization technologies should go so in a sense in digital plus the development of infrastructure is just an instrument to serve to foster innovation and innovation is just to make sure that we have a good new cross-sectoral co-governance of the digitalization age but this co-governance in turn must serve the value of inclusion to make sure that people are more and more collaborative across sectors instead of fighting out zero sum games we need to make sure through accountability mechanisms through open innovation through effective partnerships across sectors to build what we call trilingual which is the cross-sectoral teams for example in our annual presidential hackathon and then we choose five teams five teams of social innovators and our president gives the awards there's no money attached to the award but the award is a micro projector if you turn it on it shows the president promising whatever social innovation the team has done in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months so this I think is the role of government in terms of strategies and public policies to promote digital inclusion is just by sharing the agenda setting power and empowering people closest to the pain what is the role of platform cooperatives how can the social and solidarity economy take better advantage of the current vertiginous process of digitalization platform cooperatives for example the open collective that I have contributed to or the air box that I just mentioned or the circuit plus platform which is one the presidential hackathon one of the five winning teams about making sure in a pokemon girl like game people can go to the water refill stations instead of buying more plastic bottles all this shows that the solidarity economy is not necessarily based on any large-scale top-down system that's kind of pre-designed a one-size-fits-all rather it's more like a toolkit where people with the idea of appropriate technology can at any given point appropriate that technology and fork it to fit the local needs so I think the role of platform cooperatives is to be nimble, to be open and to encourage forking making sure that anyone who think that your idea is good can just take and fork and remix that idea and turn it into a local social innovation somewhat paradoxically this is actually what some of the most international projects that I have contributed are done for when we solved for example the mask rationing problem back in February this year to make sure that more than three-quarter of Taiwanese population have access to medical masks we make sure that the people who distribute the mask are the local pharmacists that have the maximum trust and solidarity with the local communities and the civic technologists such as Howard Wu and Fijian Kang from Thailand City who built this real-time map availability technology chose an open API and also open source way of making sure that people can when they're killing in line more than 140 different civic technologies to keep this system honest and accountable and then later on because it's an open technology people as young as 14 years old in South Korea managed to convince their government first in the municipality of Seoul to publish the availability of medical masks in pharmacies in a similar way and so the first map that works in Korea was actually written in Thailand City even though Fijian Kang doesn't speak Korean he speaks JavaScript and so this is how nimble that intergenerational and cross-sectoral and international solidarity can work on the current vertiginous process of digitalization and if you can show that the common good is indeed realized on just your neighborhood it will get picked up and it will get replicated and innovation will have a higher basic transmission rate than industrial innovation What are the good practices of the social and solidarity economy in the creation and maintenance of decent work in a context of digitalization? I think the good practice beyond the freedom of forking and the value alignment of the algorithm I think the third important part is that all the community members partaking in the co-governance need to make sure that they are truly stakeholders We have seen many platforms ostensibly open as in transparent and participatory but the requirement of participation is so high the specialized knowledge required so much that it is virtually just a few people maybe five people, seven people and most of them in the original family that can run this platform and that although if you look at copyright license, if you look at the governing structure it looks value aligned and it looks like anyone is able to fork on paper it's not necessarily so in practice so I think if we're making decent work, especially around platform economies in a cooperative way making sure that people can customize it without a lot of prerequisites training is very important if we design our systems much like Lego blocks such as the Sandstorm.io system that my office personally set it up for the public digital innovation space as well as anyone in the Taiwanese public sector to use this allows anyone who come up with a small module such as I don't know ordering lunchboxes together to share the same cybersecurity the same single sign-on the same vetted way of trust of getting into a cybersecurity hardened sandbox and share it with everybody we work with without any surcharge or without any administration by professional administrators so this is what people in the software world call as citizen developers if we adopt software platforms and open hardware that can cultivate this idea of citizen developers and citizen science then the maintenance of decent work across those open platforms are virtually guaranteed if on the other hand only a few people understand exactly how the system works and the system was designed in the monolithic way that is virtually impossible for people to remix then even though you can fork you can't change it much even though it's value aligned when there's more people joining the collective and the multi stakeholder panel and forum comes with an evolved set of values then you will find that you're constrained by legacy software and so just making sure that the modularity is as important as value alignment as well as the freedom to fork thank you for listening