 We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the hero of mandate, the synagogue, and most recently, the sardis of the Coedid River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many indigenous people from across the Turtle Land. And we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. So, it's my great honor today here to welcome Minister Osreik Tong on behalf of the Asian Mutual Teal and the Mount School of Global Affairs and Health and Policies. Our name is getting longer. But not like your career, especially. We keep making a long list. And for those of you who really follow Minister Tong's career in the mutual introductions, she has been a programmer, of course, in a different universe from our university, faculty and students here that she would well know for her roles in revitalizing some of the computer languages as a programmer, and she has all been my consultant for Apple and many other major collaborations. And in the public sector in today's arts, she is also served in the Taiwan National Development Council's Open Data Committees and the K-12 Colloquium Committees as well as the country's first e-ruh-making projects. But she is, of course, for many of us, also known as her political activism, particularly the Sunflower Movement a few years ago, which is actively involved in it. In fact, she is quite herself as a conservative anarchist. And in many ways, it was because that participation that she was invited to join the Taiwan government become the first digital minister. And she is also known for the only minister for our portfolio. So, in other words, she is carrying many hats. It is really difficult for her to really get her here to our conversations. And we are really grateful that she is here today. And I want to also acknowledge the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office for their help in organizing, to make it possible for us to steal her and Mr. Tong for just a couple of hours. And I kind of sort of emphasize enough how important it is to think about the convergence of things that minister of power is involved in the digital world, computer programming, public sectors, as well as private consultants. Because, as we know, for instance, today is the midterm election in the US, right? Some decades ago, perhaps you still remember, it feels like a long time ago, but it's not that long that we thought, you know, digital technology is the future. In fact, it has become the future, it has become now, right? And it's full of opportunities and possibilities about democracy, about transparency, about openness. And then, you know, what happened in the past few years, that we suddenly, you know, look at it and, you know, feel very depressed, right? With the times when we talk about fake news and the post-truth society, many of us lose faith in digital technology, thinking of what the future might be in this direction, you know, continuing the way it is. And at the same time, there's no way we can stop this trend, that we are in fact moving to this kind of action, right? So in many ways, we kind of spoke, you know, maybe the talk today, minister of power's intervention, the field that you've been working on, perhaps for what are some hopes, to revive hopes, right? So we're optimistic about digital technology, about the future. But without further ado, I would like minister to begin her dissertation. And then after that, we will open the poll for Q&A. Again, those who would like to participate through the apps, you should use your app to do that. And then at the same time, you could also just raise your hand during the Q&A. We will also respond to those requests, right? Yeah, thank you so much. Really, really an honor to be here. And I see that there's already six questions. And the first one being, good morning. And so good morning, everyone. Very, very happy to be here. We will be on the record, but the video is only taking me in this way, but the audio will be on the record. So if you want to ask a question, you can either use the Slido app, as we have already seen, or you can write down something, and our staff will be happy to put your question on the online system, or you can just raise your hand and start talking in any language that our moderator is capable of translating to English. So that's our main structure. And so from now until noon, I'll just be responding to your questions. But first, I'm general introductions about my own work. And this actually directly ties to the top question at the moment, which is how do I deal with those people who want to hold information and power for themselves? And so without further ado, I will just launch into this slide about social innovation and how under-presidentize new idea about many plural values of Taiwan, which she said two years ago in her inauguration speech, saying that before, when we think of democracy, we think it as a fight, a clash between opposing values. But now in Taiwan, democracy must be reinvented as a conversation among many different values. And that is, I think, the values of Taiwan. So the acting word here is the plural part of Taiwan. And so that will be my opening remark. And this is why I'm very optimistic about digital and democracy, which is I understand perhaps rare in today's world in people working on digital democracy. So I like many people today. And this optimism began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. And I told my teachers and my principal I was first here in a junior high school that I discovered this new thing called the World Wide Web. And the future of human knowledge is being created there. I write to professors who just write back to me on their preference, doing research. They don't know I'm only 14 years old, so I'm doing research at the time. And I said to my teachers, I can either be reading textbooks that are 10 years out of date, or I can join participating creating knowledge that will be in the textbook 10 years afterwards. It was surprising. All my teachers agreed with it. They faked my attendance records and I get to quit high school and start a few startups. So my optimism in the flexibility of bureaucracy is really strong from that point onward. And then I discovered this fabulous idea called the Internet Society. And it's the organization that still runs the Internet today. It runs the Internet for the past few decades now. The Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ICANN and the other organizations that runs the Internet runs on the idea of radical transparency, meaning that everything we do is public for everybody to see. It runs the idea of voluntary association in the sense that anyone who wants to participate in the development of the Internet, you don't have to apply for membership, you don't have to apply. It runs into the idea of location independence, meaning that the Internet Society doesn't respond or report to any sovereign state. It doesn't even report to the UN ITU. It is by itself Internet is sovereign. And so I'm taking that idea of Internet Governance or Collaborative Governance into Taiwan's politics in the past couple years. And the idea very simply put Taiwan from a clash between ideologies into a plurality of voices exactly as Internet had done to the world 40 years ago. And so this is through this idea called civic technology. Civic meaning that it enables the Society to work together better, and technology meaning that we make it simpler for things to happen. And so for the past couple years Taiwan has been consistently ranked the top country worldwide for Internet participation, for broadband as a human right, for open data, for things like that. And all of this was because at the end of 2014 the Premier at the time declared that open government crowdsourcing collective intelligence is just going to be the national direction onward. So it's almost a U-turn and we've been working on that direction for four years now. But why was that? Because four years ago there was a public demonstration. We occupied the parliament for 22 days. And this is in direct answer to the question about what about people who hoard the information, who hoard the power. At the time in 2014 the MPs were on strike. They refused to deliberate substantially the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement or CSSTA because of some weird constitutional loophole that I will not go into. And so they refused to deliberate substantially that agreement. And that creates a window of legitimacy. So their students just occupied the parliament and did the work of the MPs for them. So there's a demonstration in the sense of a demo, a demo of a better way to talk about a service and trade agreement that involves half a million people on the street and many more online. And so it's called the Sunflower Movement. And around the occupied parliament there's more than 20 NGOs, many of them that goes back to decades of working on human rights, on labor rights, on environmentalism, and things like that. And each NGO deliberates the CSSTA from one different angle. And the people who go to the occupied site just cross-pollinate the ideas. And our work as the G0V or GovZero community is to be a neutral facilitator that enables everyone who talks about everything to be broadcasted online, to have a live transcript online, to be translated online, to make sure that in any of the NGO booths everybody can see at the end of the day what other NGOs have deliberated and how the consensus is made around that day. And so every day we check the points that people have generally brought rough consensus. And so every day we begin with a list of the unresolved issues of the previous day read aloud by the students in the occupied parliament. And so this process over 22 days is very much unlike other occupies which diverge over time into a agenda of everything and nothing. And in this case in the sunflower movement the agenda just coalesced, converged over the three weeks. And then there's five very fun commitments and general consensus of everybody who participated that then the head of the parliament took and then agreed. And so the Occupy was a success and it demonstrated to the entire country that it is possible to get consensus even from very divisive topics from very diverse groups. And so what is GOVZero the civic tech people who provide those communication and digital communication methodologies. GOVZero was started in 2012, I joined in 2013 and it is a very simple idea. All the government services in Taiwan as in GOV.TW I'm sure it's the same around the world that GOV does something. And then for any government service like the legislative, the environmental agency, the national budget you name it anything the civil society participating in the GOVZero movement just built a shadow website that corresponds to our reimagination of the government services. And so just by changing the website address from an O to a zero you get into the shadow government that provides the same information in a more interactive more fun, more interesting way. For example the inaugural project of GOVZero was budget GOVZero the shows the national budget that used to be hundreds of pages of PDF files in a way that is interactive, fun understandable and you can drill down to exactly the part of the budget that you care about and start a real time conversation around that particular budget and the spending and procurement around it. And all the GOVZero projects really quish our copyright. And so because of that in the next procurement cycle municipalities and the national government can just take a shadow website and make it the official website without paying for license or trademark or patents or anything like that. So it is in computer science language we fork the government fork meaning that we take something that's already there going into one direction take it into another direction with the hope of it actually changing to the direction that we're taking as we merge back to the government. So today in the government website join the GOVZero you can see all the thirteen hundred ministries projects all the KPI spending procurement and anything that you make a public comment will be met with real time response from career public service without having to go through MPs and so on. And so the civic tech people around that time really had a fun time working with half a million people on the street but most importantly around end of 2014 there was a mayoral election the midterm mayoral election and a mayoral election very interestingly all the mayors who did not support the occupy lost the election and all the mayors that did participate or support the occupy won the election some of them didn't even prepare their inauguration speech so they surprisingly found themselves elected mayors and so from that point onward everybody has to say in government collective intelligence because otherwise they don't get to be mayors so it creates a massive change in Taiwan's political culture and I think the reason why that there's so many people working in civic tech is really we are the first generation and 37 now we are the first generation that can do democracy for real I still remember the martial law the people younger than me don't remember the martial law anymore so when the freedom of the press was first given I think 1987 or something like that that's the same year as personal computers so for us you know internet democracy, computers freedom of the press they happen in the same year the same thing it's the same generation and so the younger generation they see democracy and internet as deeply intertwined and that is also why there's so many people working in the Taiwanese free software community and when we see free free software we always think freedom of the assembly freedom of speech because we know freedom doesn't come for free our parents generation our grandparents generation worked very hard to give the freedom and we need to use the freedom to keep Taiwan free and so around that time all us civic tech people were invited then to the national government and municipal governments as mentors advisors under certain ministers to advise the public on the art of communicating with people and collective intelligence since it's the national direction now right? so in 2015 we started working on many different cases just share one with you this one was called sharing economy and around that time Uber entered Taiwan without professional driver license or professional rental cars or anything just people amateur drivers charging each other and so on and it is actually a global thing they started operation over the world all the red ones are the ones that are in dispute and so this is like the virus of that mind and MIM and the MIM is something like this it says that programming code dispatch cars more efficiently and regulations and laws so we just need to follow algorithm code instead of following laws it's okay to break the law because the law is too slow and code moves faster that was the kind of sharing economy MIM back in 2015 and so we everybody faced a problem around this MIM many jurisdictions they maybe shut down their local office operation and so on it doesn't work because the app still lives on it spreads from passengers to driver to passengers and so in Taiwan we're in an exception the taxi driver's union surrounded the minister of transport demanding negotiation but how do you negotiate with the virus of the mind how do you negotiate with the flu it's not even in the same category and so our only way we think is to inoculate people by having people deeply listen to one another to deeply listen to one another's thoughts feelings around the same plane because we know for sure because of our work in the Occupy when people heard from 20 different NGO from 20 different sites they form a holistic picture in their mind and that is a inoculation against divisive messages and so we thought maybe we can just use the same method because for half a million people that proved to work Uber the stakeholders just in the thousands is a small case and so in that case we start with this focus conversation method that presents everybody with the facts of the timeline and most importantly we allocated three weeks also for people to check on each other's feelings like how people feel about UberX in Taiwan only when people resonate with each other's feelings do we move on to ideas on face to face consultation and the best ideas are the one that take care of the most people's feelings and finally we turned that into regulations and this solves an important problem because feelings is a common language that everybody can speak and understand if we start talking about jargons about our academic languages economic, macroeconomic analysis, transportation rules and things like that it creates a division of language where people who are specialists speak one language and people on the street speak another language and in that kind of divided conversation we create a gap in understanding and then in imagination and people would just fill in whatever projection they have so in that situation ideas grow into ideologies and once people are hit with ideology which is a much more potent fighters of the mind people became blind to new evidences people become blind to each other's feelings in that sense it's very difficult to change people out of ideologies so it's actually impossible so what we do is that we change people's feelings that is more possible and so based on crowdsourced data from the government's private sector and the civil society for the first time we deployed AI powered conversation in Taiwan this AI powered conversation is very simple to use we send a link to all the drivers and passengers and so on on their phone using Line, WhatsApp and so on they click and they see themselves as a small blue circle a avatar among the facebook and twitter friends that they have and this resembles the divisiveness or the clusters of people's feelings around the server issue and very simply put it works like this you start with a group of people you start with the people who are your friends of you don't log in you start with a lot of famous people on twitter and facebook and then you see yourself here and then you see one single statement one single feeling from a fellow citizen that says maybe I think that liability insurance is important and that's it and you can click agree or disagree and once you do you move slightly a little bit toward people to feel the same way as you and the next question appears next statement appears from your fellow citizen and then you just click again agree or disagree and as you do so you just move alongside and find your group your cluster of people but then this has two effects the first is that you can see even people who don't feel the same way they're your friends and family maybe you just didn't talk about those over dinner and the second thing is that and after answering a few years or no questions you can share your own sentiment too and ask for people's ideas and call for resonance what it doesn't have is the reply button because we discover if you have the reply button people work on destroying each other's credibility they post cat pictures or whatever and it doesn't focus on the statement at hand so just by taking away the reply button just as we do on Slido here people if you see something you don't agree your best shot is to propose something that you think other people will resonate with will agree so it will then automatically mobilize among the networks of private sector civil society and the private sector and always we find the end result something like this now this is taken from a consultation involving green by our U.S. friends but the Uber case is exactly the same we see people agree to disagree on maybe five divisive ideas that's the ideal of logical split but that's it so people are actually much more interested and more willing to converge on consensus statements that everybody else resonates and if you just look at mainstream media or even social media you would have a flip perception like people are really divided people there's lots of ideology but that is simply not true that is just that being amplified by the media they want to maximize controversy if you actually ask people how they feel like and press yes or no on their feelings always they see that their neighbors feel pretty much the same as they do on many basic matters and so in that case like insurance, like safety like registration, taxation and things like that people broadly agree on just like during the sunflower movement people broadly agree on and then we invite all the stakeholders to show up and livestream the consultation and check with them one by one like this is the will of the people do you agree? they all agree otherwise there will be villains and since you agree are there some good ideas that are coherent, consistent that can make it work which is why Uber is legal in Taiwan now but it's all professional driver's license professional rental cars you can even call taxis using the Uber app it's a full insurance and things like that and we understand something like that has been passed in the Toronto area as well but you're also now re-running a consultation to look at it two years after the ratification and so this shows a very simple and scalable idea of involving thousands of people in a conversation and reaching a consensus which is why I was then invited into the cabinet just around the time of this ratification as the digital minister running the public digital innovation space and when I joined the cabinet I also run a month's long consultation you begin to see a pattern here a month's long consultation with I think more than 1,000 subscribers and thousands of inputs and I basically ask one question like what would you like me to work for the public and what shouldn't be my working condition to negotiate with the cabinet it's very interesting because after a month's of public consultation the professional journalists, civic tech people people from all around the world ask me questions that only answer publicly so all my answers just go to those people subscribing to the newsletter who then brainstormed and bringing more interesting ideas so at the end of it we pleased three pillars that forms my compact not contract to work with the government not for the government and the three pillars is as I mentioned radical transparency meaning that everything that I am a chair of even the internal meetings that I have online and the same goes true for lobbying and journalism interviews and then it's proven to be very useful so when like a lobbyist in this case David Bluth speaking for Uber at the time visits me it's not only on the record like directly, immediately it's on 360 record so that you can put on a virtual reality google and relive the negotiation and so they're still lobbying but this is lobbying for the benefit of everybody so that they can see where he stands, I mean literally where he stands or sits on the matters and this really enables the public service to be innovative and because for people who studied public administration here there is a classic dilemma for the public service because if they work on something innovative and that works it takes all the credit and if they work on something innovative and it fails the public service takes the blame for not executing well and so it is a pretty bad deal for a public service a career public service to innovate so that they don't do much innovation without the right incentive structure but now with radical transparency it's exactly the other way around because they publish the full context of policymaking so not just what a policy that is made by the administration even in a very early on during the discussion ideation stage we publish the full transcript so if these things turn out to be good ideas the public servant who proposes this idea gets full credit because everybody sees who was the person who proposed something innovative and if it doesn't work out the civil society, the private sector can carry on our conversation and deliver that maybe as social enterprises or whatever so the risk is also mitigated and the things go wrong if the journalist doesn't like it it creates a controversy well I'm the only minister in the world doing this anyway so always blame Audrey so I absorb all the blame and in that situation people are very willing to innovate so I just like to show you a picture of my office before I go into other slido questions because I promise that it would just take 20 minutes I hope it's breaking, yes so this is my office this is my office in Taipei the social innovation lab it is a fun place and the soccer field here it is drawn by people with Down syndrome and supported by the children who care for us which is one of the oldest and most respected charities from Gaussian and they just turned those people with Down syndrome's drawings into decorations over the place and this place is co-created by hundreds of social entrepreneurs and innovators and around that time we also held a one month consultation and the consensus is first that it needs to be decorated, of course according to each social entrepreneur's culture that it needs to open until 11 p.m. every day because it's important for people to mingle and it needs to have a kitchen a cafe and a resident chef and the minister needs to be here every week so I'm here every week from Wednesday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. anyone can come and talk to me it's my office hour provided that they're willing to be on the record of the conversation I can talk more about this idea of social innovation in an open collaborative lab setting you see all those self-driving tricycles running around and things like that but for me this provides a perfect like sandbox playing ground for people to test new ideas like AI and so on in a harmless way in a way that people can have first-hand experience without the fear uncertainty and doubt about digital technologies so that's 20 minutes and let's get back to the questions so wow 15 questions already and feel free to raise your hand anytime Audrey did you mind sharing your viewpoint about cross-strait relationships tell us international status and how this can be improved by digital technology for sure so the t-shirt I'm wearing it has 17 colors and these are the colors of the UN sustainable development books the SDGs for people who are not very familiar with it are a set of consultation results published by the UN after the UNDP run a consultation and I think the sunflower is half a million people the UNDP consulted over one million people some more people around the world and after a consultation called Voices there was a report they asked people all over the world what is the world that you would like to see in year 2030 and then they asked people all around the world and there's like one million different voices and the people in the UN worked to co-lead these wishes into 169 target concrete targets and those 169 targets has two important properties each one reinforces the other 168 so no matter which of these you work in it's guaranteed to reinforce the work of everybody else so it doesn't cancel each other out and the second thing is it encompasses sustainable economy environment and society as a holistic picture instead of separating the world into developing and developed countries or into the private public and social sectors it costs for a cross-sectoral approach to reach those common visions for the world in 2030 and so for us in Taiwan like in my post as digital minister when I was visiting New York during the UNGA and talking to my counterparts in other jurisdictions or when I was in Geneva in the UN IGF I participated as a robot to internet governance forum I always share my work through the SDGs lens and we always say Taiwan can help and by Taiwan can help we mean specifically that we solve our own social environmental problems through economically sustainable means like good business to solve innovation issues around social and environmental problems and my work as digital minister is on 1718 that everybody agrees on the same reliable data 1717 to make sure that it works across sectors and 1716 in that we share the work of our results in a way that is beneficial and not colonizing for every other country so I'll just use one simple example for two minutes to illustrate this idea of innovation that engage all the different sectors in Taiwan there is this global trend of course IOT you may have heard of it the internet of things that is to say small devices that can sense the environment and report that what they sense to the clouds meaning to a large cluster of machines and so people in Taiwan really care about air quality and so without waiting for the government they just engage themselves using what's called air boxes meaning like really low cost like less than a hundred US dollars devices everybody can just put those boxes to their balcony to their schools, to their homes wearing it and so on and it just senses the air quality and reports to the clouds and so the Gulf Zero people of course supported with the ICT technology to visualize so it's not just to measure the air quality of your local home but actually using your home Wi-Fi or some other technologies you can upload to this global visualization network that lets people view at a glance of the digital gap in Taiwan where the Taiwan people has been active digitally but there's many people of course in the mountains in indigenous areas and things like that and that is the government's responsibility to support them with accurate measurements in places that are blank but this is very rare actually in our region in Pacific Island or in East Asia because many other ministers tell me they will not wait for the citizen scientists to organize themselves to be 2,000 strong if it's 100 people they will, you know, get the leader to join the government if they don't join the government and it organized to 1,000 people and it disappeared and the reason why is that this really challenged the legitimacy of the central government if you have two numbers one measured by the government and one measured by this participatory network of course people are going to trust this number that's participated by the citizen even if those two disagree and even if this one is more precise and so because of that it's seen as a threat to the governmental authority for many economies in our region but in Taiwan we take a different approach we say we can't be the civil society we join the civil society so what the government does is manufacture a low cost stencils for people to use to put new spots on the ones that are indigenous or less digitally inclined we have problem as human right and we listen to the citizen scientists who say they really want to have a Taiwan Strait which is partly an answer to the question about the Taiwan Strait because people really care about the air pollution quality because people can then tell whether the air quality is because of domestic causes or whether it's because of air quality from the other side of the Taiwan Strait but of course no citizen scientists will be able to support an air box in that point even if some of them fly drones they can't really do 24-hour drone operation in that particular place but the government can because we have wind turbines power plants that we're setting up in their region so that we say we just install those wind power plants on the top of each of them we set up air boxes that transmits the air quality back to the civil society operated network the most important thing here is cross sectoral collaboration the many people who are environmentalists here they don't necessarily trust the government with their numbers so when we say we're building a national system that aggregates everybody's numbers meteorology air quality, water quality and so on some of them say you guys may be changing our numbers the day before the election how do we know that you will not do that and because it's a hot topic in our mayoral election and of course the national high speed community center will never do such a thing but of course it is people's right to distrust the government and it's the government's duty to find ways to trust the people and so we innovated and find a few people who are very well-versed in this new technology called distributed ledger technology or DLT commonly known as blockchain distributed ledger simply put is a way for people to add new numbers to a common ledger everybody can write to a ledger book and it appears automatically to everybody else's books and you cannot ever erase anything on it you can only add to it and you cannot change the numbers and any attempt to change the numbers will be detected by everybody else holding the same distributed ledger so this is a new technology that's invented by someone who doesn't even have an identity the bitcoin creator that is a hip technology the past few years so we use DLT the distributed ledger to make sure that when the numbers are uploaded to the national super community center it's got a snapshot it's storing a DLT and so whenever people can see if that we want to change the numbers everybody will get notified of it so it will never change the numbers and so that enables a cross sectoral trust and because it's all open source meaning we relinquish the copyright people around the world can just download the code put it into open hardware like Arduino or Raspberry Pi and then just start their own air boxes and if they don't change the code the code by default uploads to the Taiwan network of course they can choose other networks but that means that by default we now have an international network that we can contribute to climate science and things like that and so for that we have a single entry point the website collectiveintelligence.taiwan.gov.tw that collectively measures the planet and let the planet speak through wind turbines on the Taiwan Strait and other places and so this is our position basically we solve our local social environmental problems through technology and innovation it's good business also and then we export that idea through open innovation to all over the world and you can find our national strategies on AI just by going to ai.taiwan.gov.tw social innovation just by going to si.taiwan.gov.tw on smart cities by going to smart the Taiwan.gov.tw and on biomedical industries by going to bio.taiwan.gov.tw it's all very short very easy to remember but the medical industry tells us bio and medical are two things absorbing them under bio.taiwan they are not so comfortable with it so that if you type bio.med.taiwan.gov.tw it goes to the same website so I mean the domain name is free of cost it doesn't cost anything right so whatever you want to call it just call it that so I hope that answers the question because it is actually improved by digital technologies and the people who are in their jurisdictions that may face social pressure by publishing those numbers has in their ally Taiwan which is why reporters without borders and other international NGOs set up their headquarters in Taiwan because they know if you put your numbers on a distributed ledger and Taiwan receive it we will never censor your reporting we will never censor your data yes there is a follow up question so I know there is a lot of dependency on technologies and that implies the background of the internet and Taiwan being sort of sovereign or something like that I am wondering what is the cyber security posture of Taiwan and how does it interact with sort of politics in the region with other powers that you have best interest projecting cyber power so our cyber security strategy so just like Estonia we are on the front line and around year 2000 I personally work on the advocacy and translation of a project called FreeNet which is an early version of something like Tor or Shadowsocks and things like that because the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield was still in its nascent stages it was relatively easy to break at a time but in any case I personally work on these technologies I believe that secure communication is a human right and so because of that our Snowden Movement came way before the western world we understand how is it like to use the internet technologies for intranet purposes and we have when we say freedom it is not just freedom to create a symbol and things like that but also negative freedoms freedom from surveillance freedom from coercion freedom from all those different state control powers real situation and so when I became the digital minister our internal workspace is powered by this software called Sandstorm that I personally contributed and so the first act I did as the digital minister is to recompile the Linux kernel to secure to harden it against cyber security attacks and Sandstorm very simply put and I can open our Sandstorm instance at any time which is in blue food is what we call productivity software suite and it has the same functionality as Slack which is a popular app for people to communicate as Dropbox which is a popular app for people to share some files to Trello which is how people manage their work in a structured fashion to Google Doc and Google spreadsheet which is a way for people to be writing and calculating collaboratively I personally maintain this spreadsheet and so all these things are essential for the government to function and all these things are essential for people to trust each other when we share this to every other ministry so any public servant can use this system for free and they can also write new applications to run on it for free and this calls for a dispense in depth at any time we can see all my colleagues what they're working on waiting, doing, done so this creates a a new culture of more than 20 ministries working together each other not afraid of letting every other ministry know what they are up to and this is of course if you work in agile development this is like common sense for the past 10-10 years but for the public service it is something really new and this of course needs cybersecurity so we ask our top notch White Hat Hackers White Hat meaning data type of system and then they report the vulnerabilities the loop holes and file them as CVEs which is like medals in their profession and so in any case we work with the top White Hat Hackers in Taiwan who won like the stories in Defcom and things like that consistently the best hackers in the world for half a year and because this system is open source it's not just attacking from the outside they look at it line by line and find vulnerabilities and so on and they concluded after half a year that this is the most secure sandboxed system that they can find at the moment the state of the art and so we're reasonably sure that in the near public servant who knows a little bit of JavaScript which is a language that writes web applications can write an app that lets people order lunchboxes together which turned out to be one of the more popular apps in our internal app market and we also published them on the web internet too so if you run a digital service here that wants some way to order lunchboxes together you can totally take our contributions we have taken photos of all the restaurants around the Taiwan Central Administration and basically digitizing their menu around lunchtime it's single sign on it automatically remembers my name my favorite food from the last time ordering from this restaurant and then we can just get lunchboxes together and it's very useful but this app is written by someone who is not a certified cybersecurity author exactly because the app is running on an abstracted sandbox contained layer and the defense in depth system is there so the end thing you put on it will be secure by default so that is the answer to your question and also we make sure that for all the major government projects at least 5% of the total budget in procurement for cybersecurity so this is the norm when we do any new project we ask the white hackers to attack and report before the black hats do and so it creates an economy for them they're paid very well they meet with the president and the minister every now and then so that they don't go to the dark side which has cookies so that's answer to your follow up question any question from the audience yes you mentioned about Uber in Taiwan the situation is quite different we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of taxi drivers so if we are not careful about digital technology development in the future we could have a big impact on people's life and I hope that the government policies and any planning or digital technology in the future should always keep people in mind about one priority otherwise we will see huge impact and when people are angry they will vote in their way very quick we will see that on the 24th of November how will be the numbers in Taiwan so that you know you're talking about 2030 let's keep in mind in 1933 human crime and crime most terrible apocalypse created by Adolf Hitler and Adolf Hitler was vote by free democratic election so we should not bet on freedom of democracy we have to defend freedom of democracy because it is so weak and if we cannot make people happy we will see major change in the future yes of course although that's another question what would you enjoy if we are going forward with stronger Uber right so Uber is already legal in Taiwan we ratified that just like here two years ago and we see two branches like if the taxi are already unionized they already have an app developed by a co-op they actually partner with Uber you can now call the Crown Taxi and other taxis using the Uber app so they become one of the venues that the taxis get a business and also because of a new regulation you can now call taxis 7-11 which is a popular I'm not sure what they are anymore old purpose store in Taiwan so that you can call a taxi easily and a taxi fleet that comes to you doesn't have to be painted yellow it basically opens the door for taxi that operates in an app-based telecommunication way and the largest fleets like Taiwan Taxi and so on they all switched to an Uber-like model with their apps and things like that so they actually enjoy higher living quality but it is true that if the taxis are not unionized if they do not join an app-based fleet at the time their quality or their life quality or their earnings and so on are less than before but that has been a stable trend even before Uber joined because the Taiwan Taxi and other fleets that use an app for active engagement is able to retain customers over repeated costs and so the non-unionized and non-app-enabled taxis which mostly rely on the street hailing of taxis they are kind of dwindling down even before Uber enters the market and so it is essential I totally agree that we need to find a way for those taxi drivers to find useful and work with dignity in their line of work but it is also the same actually for example teachers also we are rolling out a curriculum reform next September for teachers to be co-learned with students there are no longer people who hand out authoritarian standard answers and so they must do critical thinking medial literacy and so on with the students and not all teachers are happy with that there are teachers who are very well-versed in the standardized testing East Asian teaching style for decades and when we ask them to change their work style it is very difficult for them to adapt and so this is happening in all the different works of life and we are working toward this way in two ways first that we are asking them not to change their work style but to be essentially mentors that look at existing workflow and find out which part of it can be automated so in a sense they become designers for the generation of people who design digital automations and some of them are willing to do this work and for those people who are not that willing to do this work and mentor the younger generation we improve our lifelong education so that they can rejoin not just community college but starting next year also on what we call university social responsibility programs and so the USR programs are all about SDG so if they care about renovation or revitalization of a community they can join the so called demand based transportation service and so basically become like tour operators and things like that for even future autonomous cars they can accompany people who are elders who live in places where public transport are not that good and basically repurpose their service to that one of long term care like that to accompany people with handicaps, with accessibility needs and so on which is at the moment not very well served by Uber or by the other large app based taxi fleets so that is our main strategy I'm not pretending that this will be an easy migration but this is what every country in the world that is facing with digital technology and AI so what we're now doing is just to include everyone as possible everyone would take a different time to adjust when you ever threatened when you ever threatened I don't know why because as you said all of these sudden changes every people there they are very angry about it so when you personally threatened it's not like assassinating me stops the issue so so no, no, no I wasn't personally threatened people focus a lot of anger of course on me personally but it's not a personal threat to remove me from the game because it doesn't work right? but we do have people and I will just use one simple example because it's such an interesting example that illustrates how we deal with the idea that everybody is free to raise e-petitions that makes everybody's anger very apparent and this is the let me just find this somewhere somehow I think it's this one, yes so last May there was not to me personally but to the Ministry of Finance there was a petition last May we have an e-petition system where anyone who raised 5000 e-signatures verified by SMS and email can ask the Ministry to come forward and respond to that person and this person says that a tax filing system is explosively hostile to use I think that's the accurate translation and his petition is full of negative energy that I will spare you the content but it went viral a lot of people just called for the Ministry of Finance to resign because their experience using MAC and Linux and iPad to file taxes is really explosively hostile if you use Safari which is the default browser on iPad and MAC to open our tax filing system page last year it will say please wait for a few moments for the app to be installed the Java applet will take some time to start but because Safari blocks pop-up windows like advertisements one of our MP MP Huang Guo Chang waited for four hours and nothing happens along the way I mean filing tax is not a happy experience for most people and if you add things like that along the way people are just going to explode and so 80% of people online who posted on our forum ask the Ministry of Finance to resign or they accuse the vendor who make this software of you know collusion or bribery or whatever and there's many it's not quite death threats but very angry satires and parodies made of the central administration so not to me personally but you know something that the person who wanted this to work maybe it could be exactly exactly we don't know because it's still anonymous we don't know this person and how we handle it very simply is that in every ministry we have a team of participation officers or PO's this is a new installment as of last year it's a national regulation that says in every ministry in addition to the media officers that talks to the mainstream journalists and MP the parliamentary officers that talk to the MPs we now have the third kind of people the participation officer that talks to people that talks to people who raise e-petitions that talks to people who are on the street that talks to people who are very angry maybe at a government maybe at each other and so the ministry of finance PO Yang Jin-heng at the time is very quick to respond within 36 hours he posted a public invitation to all the people who complained saying by virtue of your complaining we cordially invite you two weeks in the future to join our co-design workshop to make a better text filing experience and so your entry ticket is your complaint and after he posted this invitation and if you don't live in Taipei feel free to dial in to our youtube live stream and answer and input your ideas over with Slido so it's also not Taipei only and after he posted this invitation it's changed the sentiment more than 80% of people start offering useful criticism start offering what they have to input and only less than 20% are still saying the minister must resign and so just simple invitation changes things and so finally we meet this person and so he is actually professional user experience designer so the one who cares suffers and so that's his profession and his profession has been increasing its standards led by Apple for the past 10 years so what's working pretty well 10 years ago stays unchanged for 10 years are now unacceptable by Apple users standards and so basically he contributed to all these ideas co-creation workshops by channeling what people have said online on Slido and on our e-position platform and for people who learn design thinking this is called user journey mapping this is one of the very standard like basic learning in your first year in design thinking we divided the experience from before the text filing during the text filing after the text filing and into what the user actions are what their needs are what their problems are and what their emotions are and the important thing here is that during the co-creation workshop we work with the trolls and work with the people on the internet in a way that doesn't count the numbers of sentiments if 5000 people have the same sentiment it's just one post it notes it doesn't matter if you mobilize or not it measures diversity not counting of heads or showing of hands and the other thing that we promise is that unlike other jurisdictions we will never harmonize your comments and so basically if the people on the internet says that the words are just explosively overwhelming we just post that if they say it's just so over decorated I feel confused we just post that so we never harmonize people's sentiments we show them on an overview map and check on each other's feelings that's our core principle and we even allow people's sentiment to challenge our own assumptions out of scope challenges like last year when people are filing for the text at around the end of it a mess cut from the Ministry of Finance will jump up and down and say thank you for your contribution to the country in a time to make people feel better and as someone from the internet pointed out quite brilliantly when I think about filing text I don't feel better at all so just shorten the experience don't even bother one second to make me feel good it's not possible which is I think one of the most insightful contributions so we re-oriented our design based on that and co-created the text filing system used to look like that and now it looks like this and this year is 96% of approval rating and the other 4% know that their input will be taken into account in the next year's text file system sorry you had a question my name is Gloria I'm the president of Canada Hong Kong link which is a Canadian community organization supporting the movement in Hong Kong as well as Taiwan and I had a question regarding your innovative technology I thought this idea in the survey engagement perspective however there's always a downside in technology and my question is in face of the common hacking into technology either by 5 cents or 10 cents in creating the fake traffic opinion or even by direct hacking into your system or maybe by inserting a chip in some of the social media devices by foreign powers such as CCP in the joint venture in developing the 5G technology exactly so what would be your strategy and tactics in preventing all this kind of shop power manipulation infiltration from happening in Taiwan yes so yes we had yes sorry oh yes go ahead how to fight for this kind of situation especially the election will come in November in Taiwan and since Taiwan's government has been showing visual defense that means that China are trying to intervention or attack Taiwan's election or they did that in every single election before are you saying that and how Taiwan's government using open data government or using technology to protect Taiwan's election or attack the developers that's an excellent question so you asked about both cyber security and disinformation cyber security I think I've already answered is an early part of the strategy basically making sure that our white hat hackers they are not trained academically they are trained in the field and that they are paid very well and they get recognized and they have very high social status and we guarantee 5% for major government projects 6% for municipal and 7% for small projects that goes to cyber security so they have very good living and don't go to the dark side I think that is the strategy that we have and we have a new cyber security act that mandates such personnel in all the critical infrastructures and all the and that's I think pretty much what Estonia has done and so in the front line that is what we do and we've been doing that for a decade or so now so yeah we're pretty much there this information though that's another thing all together because it's not attacking the fabric of technology it is attacking the fabric of trust so it's a different thing like completely different thing and so I gave a talk around this topic in the Taiwan global cooperation training forum just before I fly to Canada so I'm going to give you a very abridged version of my talk of how we tackle the problem but first so I used a ton misinformation if it's intentional or wrong like evidently objected to wrong or causes harm but not at the same time so for example parody it's intentional and it's false but it's not intentional to cause harm because we don't know it's parody it's just political commentary or for journalistic speculations right maybe they sometimes cause harm but it's not their intention because they have partial information and the government need to clarify it but sometimes there are actors that manufacture information that is both intentional and false and intend to cause harm and when those three pillars conditions meet we call them disinformation and they're no longer misinformation so in Mandarin Zheng Yi Xun Xi and Jia Xun Xi respectively and we don't use the F word the fake word to describe news in Taiwan this is a presidential level decision in her national day speech she used the term disinformation Jia Xun Xi instead of fake news Jia Xun Wen and this is the same for the inside administration we don't use the words Jia Xun Wen anymore and the reason why is that personally both my parents are journalists and the term fake news is self to me although we can use it to describe disinformation it carries the connotation that somehow this has something to do with the journalistic output and this is a attack and a front on the status of journalism in the society but we need journalism for democracy to thrive and so we will not misassociate the term news with disinformation which is why we never use now in official communications the term fake news in Taiwan we just say disinformation organized disinformation crime criminal disinformation but not fake news so this is just terminology and the second thing is that we observe that it is a global phenomenon that it reduce trust of everybody not just public sector but especially among the people with different feelings and thoughts and that around this region according to the civic term we are the only jurisdiction that has a expanding civil society space in terms of freedom of assembly speech and so on we are not saying that we are like I don't know Scandinavian or New Zealand or Australia but in our region we are the only expanding one and everybody is shrinking and so because of this maybe in five generations down in the future the freedom of speech will be seen as an instrumental value as in other jurisdictions but here in Taiwan now today freedom of speech is seen as a core value because I still remember the martial law many people still remember the martial law and nobody want to go back to the martial law era so that forces us to find innovations that attack that fight disinformation specifically without harming the non disinformation content that is freedom of speech that is satire that is journalistic reporting and so we basically said say that if you have a friend that you meet every Wednesday for a dinner or you go to movies or you play basketball together if you hear about gossip about that friend you will not read the gossip you will just say I'll check with them the next time we meet you will just message them and wait for their response on the other hand if that friend only meets you for 3 months and only speak in legalese of course you are motivated to spread rumors about that friend because there is no useful fact checking or clarification around and so our government commits ourselves whenever we see disinformation that's spreading before it can reach a critical mass it's like epidemic before it reaches the critical mass within 4 hours we are committed to provide evidence based clarification and so this turns the people's mindset from a real time strategy or tactical game to a more like turn based game like chess or bridge or something when people hear something that is disinformation or rumor in the morning they know that by noon time there will be a clarification from the government when they hear it on the noon news they know that by evening news so this is our first line of defense and the second is that if we don't do that or we don't do that fast enough of course there are room for organized even criminal disinformation to grab and then for that we will have to work with the civil society partners to reveal their attempts in a timely fashion and so just very briefly we do two things first with partner again enhance availability of reliable data encourage effective partnerships by partnering with educators who as the part of the new curriculum as I already mentioned we teach media literacy critical thinking by asking the teacher to serve not as an authority but as a way to challenge students to think independently so this is like we have some done that blocks the flood a little bit that cleans the water a little bit it's flooding but ultimately we need to teach children to swim children need to learn how to tell the set agenda the framing the things like that in the information they receive if the teachers are authoritarian if we say some printed font in some place is always standard answer this information piggybacks on that it's like a back door in people's mind and when it's format in that way people just spread it without even thinking and if children are taught the art of critical thinking instead of media literacy then that actually gets mitigated but for people who are of course still suspectable to such kind of disinformation we find most people are encrypted channels line is the largest one it could be WhatsApp it could be telegram or whatever so there's a lot of people using only line on Taiwan and those people think maybe line is the internet because they don't have the time or inclination to learn Google or some other way to check for the facts so if they receive some disinformation on the line platform they are very amenable to just spread it without double checking because there's nowhere else to double check in their internet using experience so it's very important to bring to the line and to end system and the line company said that they can't help because it's end to end encrypted they don't even know what is being sent in their messaging platform they only know the stickers that you use but that's not very useful right so we partner again with the Gavzero community there is a Gavzero website for everything so this is Gavzero's contribution it's called Covax and just to make sure that people don't think of Gavzero as misogenic or something every time you refresh it's changed to a different relationship so it's not particularly gender biased right so if you go to the Covax website I ask you to add that bot as a line friend to a line friend there's about 50k 60k users now anytime your family sends you something that you think is perhaps a rumor you can send forward very simply to their bot and their bot can get back to you the bot is literally named is it true or not and this is a very good first reaction to any disinformation campaign if you just reply to every disinformation it turns people's mind from a fast thinking reaction to a slower thinking mode where people think stop and think is it true or not this bot helps to remind people of that and they just reply very quickly whether this is true or not but the most important contribution of this bot aside from the media literacy education for the elderly is that we see all the trending disinformation campaigns is used to be hidden if it's entering encrypted what we found is that those organized disinformation perpetrators they test in different channels suspectable to conspiracy theories and test the strains like A, B testing it to find the most viral strain after testing it for a few weeks before then amplifying it on all the other social media channels this is like the breeding ground for disinformation and before we don't have any visibility to this breeding ground we're seeing exactly the same approach as we did around 20 years ago I'm a veteran of the SPAN war 20 years ago people thought email would be broken and that our inbox would be taken over by Nigerian princesses or something like that and our work around that time is the same, we ask people to flag their junk emails to contribute to the public awareness we develop tools like SPAN assassin and things like that and the community organized around what's called SPAN house that reviews all the junk mail efforts and to review the perpetrators and their patterns of operation and so you can see which rumors are being tested and trending here in Taiwan and as you can see it's now election season so many of these are political but on the other hand always actually you always see if you eat something and something together you will do something to your health this one is still trending even though it's election season because people I don't know they genuinely care about the health of their family or something like that so these are still trending even though it's midterm election and so but what's important here is that it gives each rumor a URL a website address so that it can be talked out in the open so you can share it on social media and ridicule how ridiculous this is and you can do the fact finding together everybody can join and also basically that it lets people have a complete overview of what kind of campaigns are currently operating in Taiwan like around referendum there's many rumors now spreading around the five referendum concerning marriage equality and we're pretty sure it's not the CCP it's actually both Taiwanese people trying to make people vote one way or another in the referendum but then there's a dedicated task force to look at rumors from both sides and then to devise neutral responses that can convince both sides that marriage or the existing civil code or things like that or some physiological facts and things like that are not what the rumors are saying and so this is important because then it makes people aware that there are concerted campaigns doing their work and finally it feeds to the Taiwan Fact Checking Center so once something that becomes public knowledge that's not in the secret encrypted channel it becomes the purview of the Taiwan Fact Checking Center the TSCC which is very active nowadays they basically look at all the trending disinformation campaigns and do a real investigative reporting style report on whether this is true or not and they hold themselves to a really high standard by disclosing exactly how they're investigative reporting their sources, citations everything like true journalism and because of this they are part of the International Fact Checking Network the IFCM at Pointer Institute and because of their membership anything that is clarified as wrong here is actually taken into account by popular social media algorithms such as Google and Facebook things that are clarified as wrong the IFCM member on average I'm not saying just in Taiwan on average Facebook says it reduces the exposure of these messages up to the one-fifth of previously and they're still working on that and so having this is very important because this is totally independent it is not pro DPP or KNT or MPP these are all very well respected journalists doing journalistic work but once they find that these are actually this information it can massively reduce the virality of that information on social media so this is our last line of defense in the collaboration with civil society so just to recap media literacy first and then timely response and then through COFAC and other bots review those virus before they get really viral that is how vaccines are made anyway and so once these are reviewed the Taiwan Fact Check Center is into the process but the most important thing is that everything here is transparent and accountable so everybody can join and even the government itself can be held accountable if we make any mistake we also correct and clarify within four hours and it's also posted on COFAC and other civil society partnerships I hope that answers at least part of your question yes it's excited to know there's so many websites the funding of course of PFCC is entirely independent they are not taking neither is COFAC to taking government money for the record because if they take government money if their majority of their money is from the public sector then it creates a conflict of interest and they will not be able to hold ourselves to account but there are many people in the civil society actually supporting their work and this is actually a special thing in Taiwan that we don't find in many other places at least in East Asia because as I mentioned our civil society's development starts even before our first presidential election our first presidential election is 1996 but the lifting of martial law is almost 10 years before that so there's 10 years of time before the legitimacy of democratic institution is established 20 NGOs many of them occupy the government of the 20 NGOs established their own credibility that has a higher legitimacy even compared to the administration some of them continue to this day and so there's many people who are working on organizations it could be a co-op like the Taiwan Homemakers Union or it could be a foundation like Care for Us it could be a company like Li Ren working on environmental justice and things like that a very high legitimacy and a good business model that's been running for 30 years and not to mention Siji and France right and so they are all independently having a good sustainable business model and so when new like Taiwan Fact Checking Center starts it leverages these old NGOs like Media Watch and Human Right and things like that and so both the credibility and the human force and the volunteer base and things like that is just like that and then after not only three months I think just three months yeah they joined the International Fact Checking Network usually it takes years to prove the credentials but because the people who both trapped this all have like decades of public credibility it gets recognized internationally very quickly and I think this is unique in Taiwan that people in the social sector has organized even before the democratic institution and even now has higher legitimacy in many areas of sustainable development compared to the public sector I thought there was so sorry Just I'm curious you mentioned Estonia as another similar model to Taiwan where Taiwan has gone completely digital but do you receive personally or government through the government any calls on studying your digital governance model and any appetite for applying something in other parts you know eastern western societies northern southern like I I'm just so in awe of everything that I've heard and learned but just the very governance model is there appetite and are you know are people calling you for stories yes yes yes so as we speak now actually a delegated this in South Korea for the open government partnership submit in the Asia Pacific region and people from civil society and our national development council our gender equality department so on are all in South Korea sharing our digital governance approaches as we speak and as we speak there's a delegation from my office three people design as coders in Madrid working with Madrid City applying this kind of collective intelligence but on public construction projects so we can all put on VR mixed reality and see a new airport from the feeling of the future airports which is one of the things that we cannot actually do now because not all people can view a movie or a PowerPoint and visualize a building in their head it requires an architect's training but if we can put people into a hypothetical architect's visions like live in it and do deliberation within it it's called holopolis and the Spain people really likes it and so we're working with them and the impetition system actually we took the commentary system from Peter Reykjavík in Iceland and so at the moment again one of my colleagues is working with the Icelandic pirates pirate party to work on this information and port this model that we just thought to WhatsApp and other venues that makes sure that Icelandic elections are in October by this information and things like that and we do participate actively in both the digital nations raking group and open government partnership events yes well you respect minister looking forward to digital technology and future AI will you keep an eye constantly on the genie factor because rich people are getting much richer and poor people are getting poorer yes definitely so yes and this is a very interesting time to introduce our AI network of development so this is an AI project right but it doesn't take anyone's job away this is basically a playground a sandbox for people to feel like how I don't know wolves and early hominid co-domesticated into dogs and human beings by learning to follow each other's eyes and nose and numberable gestures and things like that what I'm saying is that it need to solve a real social problem and it needs to the norm need to be set by everybody not just people in Silicon Valley or MIT and then these things must be open in the sense that local people must be able to think of it this is actually the idea of personal computing back in 1980 when Taiwan become personal computer where personal computer is known for right late 80s the previous blockchain was of a mainframe computer a huge computer that is maybe one tenth powerful as this iPad but anyway and people connected with it as terminals and you don't have any control of the logic that's running on the mainframe but the promise of personal computer and later on mobile computing is that you can install the apps that fits your lifestyle and it kind of co-evolves with you it must be the same with AI that people need to be able to interrogate, to communicate to change like this flashing red light when it's feeling uneasy to maybe I don't know an emoji or a dog face or whatever as they feel like this is what personal computing means and which is why we make sure first problem is human rights and AI integrated to all levels of education so that all children can feel that AI is something that they have agency over and it's something that they subscribe to and have agency over them and this is the utmost importance in Taiwan's AI development philosophy and so when anyone apply for a sandbox experiment which is application to break laws and regulations for a year to prove that it's good for the society this is a new innovation system we introduced just this year anything that you have in AI or for banking, AI for transportation, AI for I don't know parking lot allocation you name it, you can go to sandbox RGTW and say there is a social problem or environmental problem here or economic you need to regional revitalization I think that this regulation or law is blocking the society from progressing I would like a year to prove to the people who are on the ground the vulnerable people, the people who are the most impact with technology that this is a good idea that people think is a good idea it becomes law, it becomes regulation but only if people who are impacted knows and agrees that it's a good idea and so if it's about platform economy like sharing your parking lot space it goes to national development council if it's AI banking it goes to fintech and if it's and crew vehicles which will pass maybe early January next year it goes to administrative economy and this is again very different in other countries it will go to administrative transportation which will have very different rules for ships and boats that kind of transportation and drones that flies and cars but for the administrative economy they are all the same and so you can have lots of hybrid that flies drives and MP3 feels like goes to the land after sailing for a while and then it all needs to correspond to a local need like in the remote islands they don't have sufficient boat to transport them or in the rural or indigenous areas the MRT doesn't quite go there so they need a bus that serves as the last mile of MRT or things like that and they can all experiment for a year including the business model if it's a good idea it becomes law or regulation if it's not a good idea the entire society learns something the data is shared for the next innovator to try a different angle so it builds upon each other and finally if the MPs need time to deliberate on the law level because we're a continental law system we need a real law change if it has to go back to the parliament you can continue to operate to serve the people's societal needs for up to four years essentially a monopoly but afterwards of course competitor will enter the market and so we basically tour around Taiwan I personally every Tuesday tour around Taiwan so Wednesday I'm in Taipei social innovation lab but every Tuesday I'm in this is Hualien and people who are even more remote like Taidong or so on can teleconference in but anytime I go there and talk to the local people who are the most impacted by technologies they will tell me the real social needs and environmental needs and at the same time 12 ministries related to social innovation got in the social innovation lab in Taipei and see through my eyes I'm like an investigative reporter they see what I see in the place that I stay for a couple days or meet with the local indigenous assembly or things like that and all the ministries related to social innovation are there so previously the people here would say we need our local co-op to be recognized in some procurement rules or they would say that we have a local association that would really like to be a social enterprise by using impact investment programs and things like that but usually in the previous battle days they would talk to one ministry and that ministry would say oh we're just a ministry of interior we register we'll have to talk to with the economic ministry we'll have to talk with the ministry of health and welfare and so on and it would take like five months before anything even comes back to that innovation but now because all the ministries are there and so it's impossible for them to go that into that bureaucratic flow they have to actually in a very relaxed mood with a resident chef remember to brainstorm to solve a local need within two weeks so every local issue that's brought up need to be resolved on the record after two weeks after each meeting and then I tour to another place carry on the conversation and if they cannot be reached in two weeks sometimes resolved by another regional innovation meeting to solve issues on the previous region but if that doesn't happen in two weeks we list it as an open challenge for people to work on and if you want to apply for a sandbox experiment or something you can cite that as a rationale and say just by surfacing this problem and having other record radical transparency record of the ministry saying we really don't know how to solve this problem you get an automatic pass into the sandbox system where you can take a try as a social entrepreneur to solve the problem and we will adjust the regulation and interpretations for you so this is co-creation not just for the people but with the people that is the philosophy yes well I'm in this for the long haul for the long run I joined as an understudy minister as an advisor to the public service around the end of 2014 and the people who invites me are Minister Jeheun Cai Deputy Premier Simon Zhang these people are Jeheun was from IBM Asia director of law IBM Asia Simon Zhang was director of engineering Google and I was at the time of course you know independent contractor and advisor Apple and so we share very similar ethos right we share this idea of rapid innovation and sending to users and working with people as people and so we are all nonpartisan I don't have any party affiliation I don't even care about political parties and so people know that I'm here for the public service who are neutral and who are here also for the long run and so when the transition happened after the election Simon Zhang transitioned to I think Dr. Lin Chen and the two premiers both independent there is something that's never happened in Taiwanese political history Simon Zhang asked all the ministries to publish a checkpoint documents of including open governments where things are going including data and evidence and everything to the public internet and for the new premier and the new cabinet to download from the public internet to complete the transition he even asked for the transition to be live streamed but people said you notice too many meetings maybe we just published a summary which they did in any case that benefits me because I joined the new cabinet only five like five months after they formed I joined in October the new cabinet was in May but I was able to hear the road running so to speak because the transition was in public and I can study the transition documents as can any other person on earth and so this basically says anything that is institutionalized as open government in Taiwan there's no going back because it is the new norm people starts to feel that they are entitled to get this from the government so every cabinet must only move more forward because when we talk about for example the joint platform and you know e-participatory regulation and things like that the KMT people loves to say that this was passed under President Ma Angel because that's what they did around 2015 and President Tsai Ing-wen of course has open government as her main campaign and also the participation offices which was signed to effect by Mayor sorry Premier Lai Ching-de was because when he ran for mayor for the Tainan city for the second term open government was his platform and for a while he has a very interesting relationship with city council because he refused to go to the city council because the head counselor was involved in some I don't know criminal investigation or something like that so instead he bypassed the city council and when precinct to precinct township to township and talk directly to people and do the regional innovation thing and with the you know research and development officer Dr. Chen Mei-ling with him and taking into account of the requirements of all the different precinct like being a direct democratic mayor instead of going to the city council and answer to representative democracy of course that got resolved and later on he entered the city council but then he had first signed experience and after he became the Premier not only he signed this PO regulation but he personally went on a tour to all the different cities and counties in Taiwan exactly as the same as he did in Tainan city and also helped by the head of national development council the same Dr. Chen Mei-ling in Tainan and so this is great because he went on economic innovation tour and I go on a social innovation tour but both with the idea of regional revitalization which is our new national direction starting next year so what I'm saying is that open government on a national and municipal level it is a culture that cannot be turned back now but now in the township precinct level that is still just now being devolved into those government jurisdictions and Tainan city for example just adopted the participation office and network and many other cities are committed to do that after the midterm election and so yeah I'm very optimistic I'm nonpartisan which every party that runs the cabinet I'm working with the cabinet not for the cabinet anyway so I'm here for the long so yeah shall we go back to a slide though for another 10 minutes and I'll answer it quickly yeah so because the anonymous questions are often the most interesting right so yeah the examination UN the examination UN is an interesting partnership in our open government work we have a 5 branch government and the examination UN and the corrective UN are unique inventions by Dr. Saniston and we're in partnership with those two very unique branches the corrective UN which has no counterpart I don't even try to translate that is the one that audits at the administration and make sure that we keep ourselves honest and so we enroll them into the open government platform by providing them this free platform that they can ask people for fear of uncertainty and doubt each and every innovation by the public sector so before they were seen as people who blocked the progress but now they're seen as people who further the process by looking at each new thing and ask the people what are your fears, uncertainties and doubts and we will professionally collect all your doubts into like 9 points of new auditing questions and ask the minister in charge of social entrepreneurship that's me and then I will answer with the 9 point by point which they then establish the new auditing rules and then so the innovation public sector can continue and they can answer to corrective UN bosses saying we have answered all the people's doubts so obviously we have done our job so instead of being the enemy of both the citizens and the administration they're now friends of the both citizens and administration just by shifting to open governments and we're very envious of them because when we post a new question for people to contribute ideas a public consultation if it's obscure like domestic local urban renovation maybe 40 people can and we consider that a success but for the same small scale thing when that corrective UN asks who has fear, uncertainties and doubts as you can see hundreds of people came obviously it's easier to put your doubts rather than your suggestions so that's the corrective UN the examination UN similarly we have petition systems that works for them also for example there is a public e-petition obviously by public servants there are petitions for the new leave of absence rule previously when we take a leave it has to be at least half a day long but nowadays because people are really want to care for the elderly or actually there's a teleworking initiative going on also they petitioned collectively and the examination UN was very active in actually contributing to the open government process actually they just ratified this e-petition by actively participating in the process that accurately reflects the collective will of the public service and so they can be seen as the enlightened one and then the administration because it's still waiting for a few days to publish the pressure is from examination to the administration to ratify this new rule that is being petitioned by 5000 public servants and so again examination UN is now seen as a friend to the public service rather than someone who holds back the public service and all this is because as I said the credit is shared the credit is spread in a way that is due and the risk is absorbed by participation nobody needs a a cause or a signature by the upper echelon of public service because they can cite the political will and the consensus and say this is what people really want and the examination UN and the corrective UN are totally on board with this philosophy as well do you worry that I would become the tool of neoliberal capitalism I am a vessel of conservative anarchism which is very different from neoliberal capitalism anarchism means very simply that I take no orders and I give no orders I have not given a single order as additional ministry or everybody in my office volunteer to work with me I had an agreement with the secretary general that I can poach at the most one person from each ministry who volunteer to work with me and so literally I can have 34 staff because there is exactly 34 ministry at the moment I have 22 and so for example this is our foreign affairs ministry delegate to our office and so this creates a culture a voluntary association people just brainstorming any idea anything that they want to do bring a comic book or whatever bring a t-shirt and people just go ahead and do it and it makes sure that because every ministry is a different social environment or economic value so if something that is the consensus of these people and the innovation that we do can be done in a way without resorting to horizontal power and so this is to vertical power which is entirely horizontal power new power as we call it just a book about it and so anarchism is by default a way for people to associate that achieve what we call Pareto improvement improvement that leaves nobody behind and through a conservative lens meaning that I don't go to the Department of Defense and say tomorrow you are going to the Albaracum Transparency people only bring to me cases that I feel that they are wicked problems meaning that they are structural problems that has hit the national equilibrium meaning that nobody can act alone to solve the problem everybody needs to coordinate form a consensus and move together to solve the problem so if the problem is of this shape is brought to my office and I don't know if I can open government but if they think that they can solve it just fine with their old vertical power model they don't even bother me I don't even know about these things and so this is a way that complements but doesn't reinforce neoliberal capitalism or any form of vertical power sorry a vote is a vote by majority a consensus is something that's acceptable that everybody can live with and become majority rule there is a document called the Dao of IETF of Internet Engineering Task Force it says we reject kings presidents and voting we believe in rough consensus and running code meaning that anyone who has even anything as you said in the minority so to speak and we don't say that but anyway we don't even look at those numbers those numbers don't even mean anything as you can see these numbers of people they have no correspondence to the area of diversity of their opinions if you mobilize 5,000 people and vote exactly the same way you will add number here but area will not increase because this is diversity of opinion by majority rule and we say if we are to enter the agenda you need to convince everybody in every group it's called a super majority so that especially you need to convince people who are diametrically opposed to you and only then it becomes a binding agenda for the rough consensus so we explicitly said that any sentiment that only has local consensus is we read that aloud but it's not entering the agenda we respect people's differences but only the commonalities enter the agenda and so there's many technical ways of achieving that there's the idea of overlapping consensus there's the idea of if you abstract to the common value high enough people can always reach a common understanding there's the idea of sustainability I can't go into details that is our philosophy yes so we're almost at time like two minutes so let me go back to that okay sure actually we did this information one some major social consensus challenges facing Taiwan I would say that there are many people in Taiwan at the moment still believe in authoritarian power structures there are people who still think that a efficient authoritarian rule is sometimes better than a somewhat more deliberate one month long decision making process that involves rough consensus to me one month or two months is a good time period to have a iteration but there are still some people who believe that you really need to fast track things and you know just by a majority rule or just by some political people will to not go through a proper conversation for two months and for me I think this is a culture of the people who are educated before the martial law gets lifted and the people who are gets educated after especially the educational reform of the 90s and so I think the time is on our side and also that we do all we can through lifelong education efforts to make sure that people respect the plurality and so this to me is the difference between IT and digital IT which Taiwan is known for even before lifting of the martial law is more like hardware precision low cost you know supply chain management and so on which time is still very strong at but we cannot use that culture for the consensus forming democratic culture it calls for a digital culture so I'm going to read you a poem as a conclusion which is my job description when they asked me for a job description two years ago that highlights the difference between the IT way of thinking about politics and the digital way of thinking about human beings and it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that a singularity is near that is always keep in mind always remember that the plurality is here thank you so much thank you so much minister Pong I was so impressed and inspired and amazed by the fact that the digital infrastructure in Taiwan and so tied together with society in the spirit of transparency and participation I'm very impressed perhaps the ease in fact something we could call the Taiwan way and the Taiwan way I can see a teacher saying Taiwan can help and peace helpers I can see many people here many politicians and many people in the room whether you are social innovators entrepreneurs or academics I already want to steal many ideas I think the Asian Institute of Public could use some of these ideas and so I'm so glad that I steal you from the world so thank you again thank you very much