 Unlike many people today, I'm an optimist. The strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge was on the wire web and my textbooks were all out of date. So I told my teachers I want to quit school and start my education on the wire web. Surprising, the teachers all agreed with it. A year later, I founded my first startup, working on web technologies. And I get to join this fabulous internet society. The runs was this crazy idea, an open, multi-stakeholder political system that runs the internet still today. Today, as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm putting into practice the ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old. Rough consensus, civic participation and radical transparency. Surprisingly, it's working and it's gradually changing our society. Two years ago, our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, said this in her inauguration speech. She said, before democracy was seen as a clash between two opposing values. But from now on, democracy must become a conversation between diverse values. Indeed, in conventional thinking, social benefits and business profits, for example, are often seen as opposing forces and the governments are forced to make trade-offs. But the idea of social innovation brings a new way of thinking. For people working on social innovation, the core objective may be achieved by developing business motives to address social issues and environmental issues so the government's role has changed. Instead of being the orbit between two opposing ideas, we're now asking a different set of questions helped by digital technology. We ask, what are our common values given our different positions? And we ask, are there any solutions that works for everyone given our common values? Indeed, in the past couple years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked the top country internationally on open data, on women's digital access, Internet participation, inclusivity, etc. And all this was because we adopted open data and crowdsourcing as our national direction in 2014. It was catalyzed and epitomized by an Occupy movement in March 2014. That was a live demo of mass participation we occupied the parliament for 22 days. At the time, the NPC at Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a trade-service agreement with Beijing so the Occupies went into the parliament and stayed there. For 22 days, we demonstrated non-violently how to deliberate a trade-service agreement with the whole society. There were over 20 different NGOs participating, the Greens, the Labour, the Independents and everybody. We supported the whole deliberation with a radically transparent broadcasting, live-streaming logistics system which was powered by the civic technology community called GovZero. GovZero is the civic tech community with a call to fork the government. We take the government websites which all end in GOVTW and make better open alternatives that ends in G0VTW. For example, the annual national budgets website is hundreds of pages of PDF files and it's very hard to read. So the first community project from GovZero was budget G0VTW which shows the national budget that were very easy to access manner and you can drill down to each and every budget details. And today the system is adopted by more than seven city governments and also powers the national e-participation platform at Join GOVTW. So anyone can just look at this map, find a part of the budget that they care about any question they may have and a career public servant will come forward and answer to that part of the budget. So why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan? I think it is because our generation and 37 now, we are the first generation that enjoy the freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship. Our first presidential election by popular vote in 1996 was also the idea that the wire web got really popular. So internet and democracy are not two things they are seen as one and the same in Taiwan. The movement caused a revolution, a peaceful one. There was a radical transformation of social expectations. The new premier at the time was saying, ok from now on we are just going to invite the occupiers and the civic tech people who supported them into the government as mentors and advisors in the public service and we get to work on issues like Uber. Now Uber is very interesting because it is a virus of the mind. It is a meme called sharing economy that says, code dispatch cars better than laws so we don't have to obey laws, just code. So deliberation was the way that we chose to tackle this issue because we think listening deeply to the reflections and concerns of everyone was a vaccine of the mind that empowered the civil society making us immune to ideologies. And a proper deliberation using the focus conversation method involved four stages. The first one is facts where we collect evidences, first hand experience and objective data. The second one was feelings about the same facts. You may feel happy, you may feel angry and it's all ok. And after people converge on a set of resonating feelings, we talk about ideas. The best idea is the one that address the most people's feelings. Then we translate them into decisions. So to collect people's feelings, we use this AI power conversation system called POLIS. It is an open source system to ask people how they feel. Four groups of people soon emerged. There are taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers and other passengers. And the system shows each group how their shared sentiment are received by other groups by clicking yes and no but there is no reply button. And the interesting thing is it lowers people's antagonism because you can see all the people on different sides are actually your friends on Facebook and Twitter. You just didn't talk about this over dinner, but they are still your friends. So instead of distracting, we attract consensus. After three weeks, we get a set of feelings that resonates with everybody. So it's now much easier for the government to meet with the stakeholders and check with them one by one and then sign this into a new law on ride sharing in 2016. So right after the ratification, I joined the cabinet as the digital minister to bring this culture to more policymaking issues in the central government. Maybe even more interesting than AI power conversation is the culture we're bringing. For example, I'm radically transparent. All the journalists or the lobbies get to ask me questions by only answer publicly. And not just lobbies and journalists, all the internal meetings I held after checking with all participants for 10 working days, I also published everything to the internet. The effect is very surprising because the public service, our career public servants, they usually get the blame if things go wrong and the minister get all the credit. But now with radical transparency, they get the credit because their name was on the accountability trail. And if things go wrong, where is experimental? And that's all my fault. So under this system, they become very innovative and breathtaking. For example, we had the e-petition system inspired by we the people in the U.S. But previously, people distrust this platform because for cross ministry issues, all they get was explanation. But after I became the digital minister, each ministry now assigned a team of participation offices whose sole work is to engage with people petitioning on the street and on the internet. So now in Taiwan, when people start a petition, they know they will be met with career public service that are willing to travel to their places, even if they're petitioning for rural or local development. So we solve a lot of very interesting problems. Like last May, there was a petitioner who talks about the MAC and Linux using of the tax filing system as explosively hostile to use. But now instead of just complaining, we inviting all the complaints from the people to this co-creation workshop, as you can see here. And all co-creators are actually people who have complained the loudest so they learn that they can contribute their expertise and not just complaints as co-creation efforts. And the new tax filing system won an approval rating of more than 96% this year. So by collaborating with Civic Sector, we're building a robust environment suitable for the social innovation to grow. And the way we hold this collaboration workshops, the value called social innovation lab was actually also co-created with more than 100 social innovators. And personally, I'm there every Wednesday from 10am to 10pm to talk with people. And every other Tuesday, I also tour around different regional cities to meet with social innovators. And through teleconference, more than 12 different ministries, people can also see with video conference what's happening around Taiwan and the local issues are being resolved in a very quick fashion. For example, by combining the diversified talents, working on air pollution management and measurement, we engage with thousands of contributors in a massive database which is closer to the air quality of where they are in schools and balconies than the environmental protection agencies. An exceptional advantage in Taiwan is the full support instead of rejection. So we allocate a four-year budget of more than 9 billion Taiwan dollars to work on the various aspects of this civil IoT system. And so, through this way, Taiwan contributes our experience to the planetary civil society, focusing not just on one or two sustainable development goals, but especially on SDG 17, that is to say cross-sectoral, international and cross-discipline collaboration. In conclusion, I would like to share a prayer with you about digital social innovation. When we see 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 when we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.