 So we've just started recording and maybe we'll just begin in a moment. You'll see, I've got a couple of colleagues with me on the call. They're really here just to sort of manage the technical elements of the call. So Steve who's on is our media experts and he's going to just be doing the editing and things afterwards. He's on to troubleshoot any problems. And Andrea is on as our events coordinator. And so she's just making sure that everything runs smoothly. Okay, excellent. But I think at this point, they'll fade into the background unless there's any. Great. You're both looking and sounding really good. So yeah, I'll just fade away now that be here. Thank you so much. So, so if we need to retake any particular segment, we'll just rewind to the beginning. We've got experts here. Exactly. It's wonderful to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time. My pleasure. It's, I know that it's, it would have been great if we could have coordinated speaking at a meeting, but it's very difficult with time zones. We have, I know, I know those pesky time zone. We have members of our network who are sort of at each stage around the world and so it's always difficult to kind of find a time that works. We have, we have some colleagues from New Zealand that actually log in at 2 in the morning or 3 in the morning for the call. But it's, it's an awful lot to ask for various people. So, I thought if it's okay, what I would do is just start with a little bit of background about what this is about and network itself. And then maybe we could get into our dialogue on our conversation. Oh, I see one of your colleagues. Hi, we're live or not really live by recording. Good morning. Is that connection. All right. It's perfect. Okay. Everything is going very well. I was, I was just explaining that I'm going to start with just a little bit of background about the network itself and what this is about and why we've asked minister to speak. And then we'll get into the conversation. If that's okay for today. Perfect. And it's, it's just, I have to say, you know, I spend a lot of my time talking to people in different countries around the world. And it's, it's amazing to be able to look and see you sitting in an office working. You know, some of our conversations Francis are with people who are, you know, in that, well, as you can see, I'm in the basement of the house, or, you know, all over the place. And so it is, it is definitely, it's definitely great. So, where I come from on this, my day job or where I started from was with the Canadian government. And I was responsible for as part of our preparation for the federal elections in 2019, setting up something called the digital citizen initiative. And what that was is it was looking at ways to engage with civil society to use their expertise in talking to sit to Canadians and getting people prepared to sort of inoculate people against disinformation ahead of the federal election. And in doing so, one of the things as the government became more and more engaged in this and following the election was recognizing that while a lot of the work that's going on has a domestic lens that we're looking at how we apply domestic policy instruments, legislation, regulation, all of these things to look at the global infodemic. The, the problems are really international. And if we're trying to think about how to solve these problems, we actually really need to find ways to work together with people from other countries and other places. There were not. Exactly. That's right. Exactly. Very, very similar. And yet, looking at this from a domestic perspective in government. I really struggled to identify who my counterparts were in other places. It was one of those kinds of things where the minister's office would come to me and say, who should we speak to in Germany. And I would say, I don't even know who in Germany is responsible for that. That's the law, let alone, you know, how to get in touch with them or make those connections. And so the center for international governance innovation where I'm working and the reset network where I know minister you're engaged. Yeah, I'm a narrow investment council member. That's right. They, they approached me and they said, you know, what I think about taking on this role to bring together public servants of all types. So, you know, civil servants, legislative staff, regulators from around the world who are all dealing with these issues and find ways to, to sort of harmonize our efforts essentially and to work together. So we launched in the summer and we've held a series of meetings basically once every month, talking about different issues. And we're trying to do something a little bit different. First of all, we're not multi-stakeholder. So we are just governments. The idea being, then you actually talk to people who you can kind of share ideas with and learn from and have sort of faced the same world. But also, and I think this is equally important. We're really trying to be global and not simply focus on existing relationships and traditional relationships. And so to talk to and hear voices from and learn from the global south from partners outside of the transatlantic alliance from all those kinds of places. And then to deal with, with the actual problems we're facing. So, for instance, we had an interesting session in the fall where we talked about how to talk to platforms that is everyone is dealing with digital platforms. But how do we actually speak to them in a way that they'll understand us and we can understand them. So it's, you know, those kinds of things and you'll see I've got one question in my list I sent you related to that. And so the session we're holding next week. This is what interview is about. One of one of our colleagues at a fellow at CG, as well as a noted researcher in Canada, Heidi Twerk had led a team looking at covert 19 responses communications responses around the world and looked at kind of what worked and what didn't. Why certain things worked and really tried to unpack and understand what we can learn from this experience that can then help guide our future work. And as part of this, she said to one of the countries as you may know that she looked at was Taiwan, and she and I were talking and we were kind of talking about what's a practical. Oh, yes. Sorry, Francis, we are recording. And we'll send you so I should have started I apologize. We're going to send you the raw recording from this afterwards so that you have the entire raw recording. And then we're also going to package this into the interview portion. And then a sort of smaller segment so we'll send you all three of those pieces. Anyway, perfect. So I can turn off my camera so it will leave. Yeah, okay, I'll turn it off right now. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Anyway, just to continue. So the goal really is to say, what can we learn about this experience in part to learn about how other countries can emulate some of the efforts that I want has made encountering the misinformation and disinformation around COVID-19. But I think equally importantly, it's to saying, what are the lessons we can learn about this experience that can inform our future efforts on in sort of the broad realm of strategic communications. And so this would be all of the different areas where we're trying to deal with disinformation, but from a government response perspective. And as, as you're, I'm sure, well aware, it's not a thing governments do for the most part incredibly well governments aren't amazing communicators. And so, you know, this is an area I think there's a lot of benefit from us, but I'm learning from listening and gaining experiences. Did you have any questions before we start or is there anything that wasn't clear about what we're up to. There's a technical question. So if I want to share something like this very cute, she by you know, did you prefer if I just hold it like this or do you prefer if I use the WebEx sharing function. Oh, that's a good question. Steve may turn to you. Good question. Why don't you, you can hold it up. I think and then if can you get a slight afterwards. You can send me afterwards and I can cover over it when I edit. Yeah, okay. So, so just making sure that the brightness and everything works. Well, you can see the green light, I guess. Okay, but this frame should be working ish. Yep. Okay, we're good. So I'll just good no glare or anything like that. Yeah, so I'll just do that and stay at the. I think that would be bottom right corner for you. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Any other questions or thoughts before we start. I think we can start and yes. Just a reminder just so we can make sure that there's no overlapping picture and video if minister if you can maybe just wait a moment after Chris asks his question before you respond just so we don't see him and hear you. And I can even. Mute while Chris speaks that help you. That would help, but I don't want to disrupt the flow because they're having some back and forth, but I'll be more concerned about. We might need to mute Chris if we hear any sound. Okay, well, okay, so I'll wait a couple of seconds before responding. That's fine. It's perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. And yes, I was, I was joking with the team ahead of the meeting that I do get enthusiastic about some of this material. And so I really do have to restrain myself. So being muted and needing to unmute is probably not a terrible thing for me to make sure there is that break between us speaking. Okay, okay. Perfect. All right. Let's get lunch into the first question. Thank you. So, we're now more than a year since the start of the pandemic. And as we know, and as we've experienced. A lot of countries have recently gone back into lockdown or really in Canada for a lot of businesses. We've really never left lockdown. We're looking at almost a year in lockdown. You know, we've had some good news from the WHO. It looks like transmission rates are on a downward trend. But, you know, globally, the picture still looks very bleak death tolls and transmission rates are still enormously high. Really except in Taiwan. And I'm really interested to hear your perspective as you look back over the past year. What the key factors were that enabled you in Taiwan to manage the spread of the virus so well. And in addition to that, maybe as you're thinking about that, not simply initially which I think some countries sort of manage the first wave well, but in fact that you've kept that going you've kept that momentum over the course of the year. I think the most important reason is that in Taiwan, we've all had a collective societal inoculation. People above 30 years old remember how bad SARS was in 2003 in Taiwan. And right after SARS, while the memory was still fresh in the society, we institutionalized those memories into the Central Epidemic Command Center, the design of the Communicable Diseases Act, all the institutions that make sure that whenever SARS 2.0, which is how we refer to COVID-19 this time hits, we will be able to play the SARS playbook without, for example, declaring a state of emergency without, for example, lockdowns, because we understand how bad it could be in SARS 1.0. So people collectively would be willing to do more like wearing mask and washing hands and so on without the state having to do everything in a top down fashion, which frankly speaking does not last a very long time without people understanding the why of it. And the result of a CEC Central Epidemic Command Center is that anything that's related to the epidemiology whenever something gets discovered by the scientists like the asymptomatic transfer and things like that. It gets broadcasted to all corners of society very quickly, very easily, with this very helpful spoke stock, the Zhongchai, a very cute Shiba Inu, explaining not only the science behind it, the practical tips, like if you're outdoor, you're supposed to keep two Shiba Inus away from one another, or wear a mask that's called physical distancing, or if you're indoors, then there's three Shiba Inus away and so on. And so these messages go viral in the sense that people would voluntarily share it because it's very fun to begin with. So by making sure that there's a positive mindset, a positive engagement, we can even make jokes about, for example, this is a classic, this is the Shiba Inu telling you wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands. And this is hilarious because the Shiba Inu is really very cute in putting their feet to their mouth. And so people remember that and share that because this message ultimately appealed to rational self-interest. Instead of saying protect the elderly, respect others, respect the medical workers, which are all fine, but these messages don't tend to go viral whereas protecting yourself from your own unwashed hand tend to. So I'm just unmuting. Thank you very much. That's, you know, it's interesting. I really like that element of humor brought into it. I'm curious though, and if you don't mind pushing just a little bit on it. Sure, of course. I mean, I do recognize, you know, how much you learn from the SARS experience, but what I found interesting is that in a lot of, I mean, there were other countries that have also faced sort of those kinds of outbreaks, and it doesn't feel like their reactions were the same. You know, it sort of, it feels like there's something that Taiwan has done. And I think the breathing in that humor element is super important. And I also really took that, you know, that something I've read that you've talked about is that instant transmission, right, that something comes and you respond immediately. That is, it doesn't need to go through layers of bureaucracy or layers of thinking before it comes out. And I guess really that comes down to an element of trust, right, the trust that you have with the citizens, and then the trust that they have with government. And when you build that mutual trust, you know, it kind of can enable you to kind of carry that forward. I'm really curious around this question of trust and how you feel that Taiwan has created or sort of set the stage for that level of trust in government. Even when our network is talking to a number of different countries, trust is sort of an ephemeral thing that it can be very difficult for governments to rebuild one once it's lost. And it feels like in a short order, Taiwan has really kind of turned around its relationship with people. I don't know if you had any comments or thoughts about that. I tend to think of trust in terms of trustworthiness. And one part of trustworthiness is reciprocal. So before the citizen could trust the government, the government must first trust the citizens. And if the government trusts its citizens, it means that, for example, we're willing to publish the real time mask availability as open API. That's real time open data. So instead of having to review the statistics and publish every quarter or every week, we publish every 30 seconds. Each pharmacies, like 6000 pharmacies, the people queuing in line swiping their national health card can see that the real time availability on their phone actually goes down by two at a time a year ago. Nowadays, it's by 10 every time. And then people queuing in line if they detect any anomaly, they can just call the toll free number 1922 and very quickly point out the problem with the system. And so because of that, this participatory accountability, anyone who think that the government is not trustworthy in some regard immediately become a co creator by calling 1922 and pointing out something that we did wrong. And instead of defending existing policy, our Minister Chen Shizhong, the commander of the CCC usually just says, teach us. So it's an invitation to co creation. When a young boy called last April to 1922 saying, you're reaching on mask, all my classmates have this navy blue medical grade mask, but all I get is pink ones. I don't want to wear pink to school. I'm a boy. Then on the very next day in the daily 2pm live stream press conference, all the medical offices regardless of gender war pink medical masks. And the commander even said that pink pattern was this childhood idol or something. So the boy become the most hip boy in the class for he is the only one in the class that has the color that the heroes and heroes heroes where and so this kind of immediate response is not about a blind trust to the government authority, but about the government trusting its citizens and amplifying the social innovations, the co creations and so on, you know, very rapid iteration cycle and I will argue that builds trustworthiness over time. Thank you very much. That's brilliant. And you know, it's, it's, it's a really striking feature of when when reading about what you've done is, is this sort of the co creation element. But I really like that it's sort of it turns around that criticism on its head right because criticism is no longer a negative criticism just becomes a positive in terms of contributing to and helping society move it forward. Do you feel and I wonder if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about for just for people who aren't aware the V Taiwan that sort of platform that you've built because you know it feels in a way that in addition to your preparation because of the preparations you've done with with sort of the the hacker community or kind of being prepared for the civic engagement also contributed equally to your ability to respond to the to the virus. Certainly. So, V Taiwan is a project done by the gov zero or G zero V civic hacker community. And let me do this again. V Taiwan is a project of the G zero V or gov zero community in Taiwan, which is a civic technologist community that contributes into participatory democracy online. And the idea of V Taiwan is that instead of having just a handful of representatives talking about an emergent phenomena like Uber, or about crowdfunding or about teleworking or things like that. These emergent phenomenon stakeholders can actually represent themselves rather than having someone represent them and using AI that's assistive intelligence. We can make sure that people's common feelings common values are given to air of the agenda setting power, instead of just the polarized divisive zero some toxic behaviors that sometimes we see private infrastructure so called social but actually anti social media. And so this pro social media, if you will, for deliberative democracy is really helpful in framing the conversation around, for example, sharing economy in 2015. Instead of debating endlessly about whether not carpooling is sharing economy, but time sharing is sharing economy what really is sharing economy should they be called platform or gig economy instead. And that leads us practically nowhere right we instead of talk about what is considered the norm when people drive around random strangers and charging them for it. And people understand that hey we can agree that insurance registration, making sure that the road is fairly used that people do not undercut each other in like unfair competition and things like that. These are things that people commonly care about regardless of whether they're a taxi driver or a Uber driver. So nowadays, Uber is a Taiwanese taxi company actually the Q taxi. But we also revamped the taxi law so that those so called multi purpose taxis can use a software meter and they don't have to paint their car yellow and things like that. So everyone wins and we have many co-ops and companies entering this multi purpose taxi. And so this very small picnic tells us that for each emerging female nominal, we can use AI and online conversation in a way that's actually pro democracy as long as we see democracy as a type of technology that we're willing to change and hack ourselves. Thank you so much. You know, and I mean, I just say I find that both the example and and you're you're retelling of it really inspiring. You know, it's funny. It's one of those areas we had that we had a similar set of conversations here in Canada around Uber and taxis, but somehow in these conversations we never we didn't create that space for people to actually be able to share their feelings and to sort of understand every side. And I think that that open space just feels like exactly what what the, the technology should be used for right it sort of in effect. It was a really interesting thing, you know, sort of reading about your work and sort of following what what's been happening in Taiwan. A lot of the time in the work that I've been been undertaking both in the Canadian government and now with the global platform governance network. When governments in civil society get together and we talk about the role of big tech and society we talk about the role the technology plays. There's a tendency for the conversation or for the discussion to end up focusing primarily in the challenges brought about by big tech. I mean, I think there is still this kind of, you know, we recognize the positives. I mean, the very fact that we can have this conversation and we can include people from around the world is an incredible benefit to, to, you know, to us as we try and solve problems communally and together. But it really struck me and hearing you speak now. How positive you are about the role of society and how positive the role that tech can play in society's challenges. I'm interested to hear your thoughts, because I mean, I think this is something it almost harkens back in a way to the kind of where we thought the internet was going to be. You know, in this kind of way that we'd be problem solving and community community actions and community activities. How do you think other governments can kind of recapture that spirit of tech, tech optimism that what we've lost and really what's the key from your point of view. I think the key is to think of them as digital public infrastructure, much as we have town halls and parks and public libraries and other public infrastructures where the civil society can gather and public deliberations taking place. As long as we have sufficient amount of these investments into public infrastructure. For example, the detail and conversation took place on Polish, which is free software. And as you can see, it doesn't even have a reply button. You can agree and disagree on my idea about passenger liability insurance are very important, but you can't really attack me or throw me. And if you agree, you move closer toward me. If you disagree, you move farther away from me. And after three or four weeks of conversation, and this is maybe the most important picture that police can show you is that the divisive ideological things are like exactly maybe five. And there's far more consensus statements that people's feeling that are shared regardless of their ideological positions. And there's a surprisingly large amount of coherence in people's common feelings that are just not amplified when you're deliberating on a private infrastructure, optimized for addiction and optimized for short term attention span and selling of advertisements. So this is akin to holding a public deliberation, not on a public park, but rather on a nightlife district, a bar with bouncers and selling addictive drinks. And I don't think the deliberative quality will be very good, right? So I think the whole idea of public infrastructure, which we grasp intuitively when it's a physical infrastructure, we need to lift it to the digital infrastructure and do what I call the people public-private partnerships, in which the people that's the social sector sets the agenda, co-governs the infrastructure. The public sector, the career public service, endorse the use, the binding power, only to those infrastructure that are publicly co-governed using free software and open governance. And finally, the economic sector participates in helping to scale this out, to scale this up, but always under the norms that are already set by the people and the public sectors. Thank you. And you know, I mean, it's interesting. I think you hit on such a key feature of this in the last, your last statement and I really, I love that, that kind of conception of people public-private partnership, you know, sort of putting the people first. And that's really not, you know, where I've seen conversations around the digital infrastructure that it should be public infrastructure. Very often it ends up being with sort of government saying, well, we should build another internet or we should build another website and then force people to use it. And sort of, it feels like that's really a non-starter. That's not going to achieve what we want to achieve. But as you say, having something designed by people then used based on free infrastructure really seems to be quite exciting. And I also really liked, I don't know if you had more to add, but I really liked how we avoid the trolling, because I think, you know, that's become, and I think you're right that, you know, so much of that is based around we're using for-profit infrastructure that's more akin to like a nightclub than a public park, that is in fact driving divisiveness rather than driving consensus. But I mean, I think that's a really quite exciting way to turn it around. You know, it ties in actually something we talked about in one of our conversations in the fall in the network. We were talking with a few of our colleagues in government and in research about how do we, as I said, how do we talk to platforms differently? How do we engage differently? And where do the challenges lie? And one of the things that one of our colleagues Rebecca Trumbull from George Washington University recommended, she said, you need to have more data scientists and government. So you need to have more people who understand how this works. And you need fewer sort of people who can be sort of hoodwinked by the digital platforms and sort of taken into their way of looking at the world. And instead have people who can actually explain, this is how things work. And then they need to talk to the data scientists and the engineers within the platforms. And you know, that's how you're going to find a different set of solutions. But when I listen to your, this idea of a people, public, private partnership. And for some of the things of yours that I've read, it almost feels like, I wonder if you would say that we should almost flip that around that rather than having the data scientists and government. What we actually need to do is open up more government to data scientists. I mean, more, you know, sort of, let's not let's not try and recreate their part of things but actually let's have the community experts or the community engage and do their part of the government do its part to amplifier or support or populate with data. Totally. In Taiwan, the open API directive says that whenever we collect any data that is not, of course, pertaining to national secret or privacy issues, anything that is clear of these issues, we need to publish it as soon as it's collected. This is actually quite radical because around the world under the freedom of information acts, it's usually first by request and also always reviewed first by the career public servants before anything goes from the state to the people. But by saying that this is open API, there's no way that a public servant can review and approve the publication of the medical mask availability data every 30 seconds they wouldn't be able to do anything else then. Right. So we need to instead build a data pipeline that is very good on the server security from that is very good on the privacy preserving from and so on, and just keep the data pipeline running. And once you have that data pipeline, then you get, for example, in Taiwan, we have a legislator before joining the parliament. She was the VP of data analytics at Foxconn. So she knows something about data science and P go home and and she analyzed along with the open treatment community, the map of the mask availability and concluded that even though it looks fair on the kind of satellite GPS map. It's actually unfair if you take into account the time is spent on public transportation in rural places. So if people take like four hours to go to a pharmacy in a pharmacy closed, even though it looks on the map that is actually very close. It's not actually very close. So the government distribution algorithm is actually biased while it actually looks fair initially. And when she brought it up in a parliamentary interpolation because it's evidence based. The minister simply said legislator teaches the minister doesn't have to defend any policy because it's obviously something very good insight. And the very next day, we started preordering into 24 hour convenience stores. We redistributed our supply and demand algorithm in conjunction with the open street map community and things like that. And so, yeah, exactly as you said, then a data scientist as a legislator or as a social sector participant has as much as agenda setting power as minister. And MP simply said the very next day that yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's creation. Wow. You know, in previous work, I've worked a little on the open governments issues and was involved with some of the open government work here in Canada and in other places and I mean that that just sounds like a dream for some of my colleagues to sort of hear that. And it's really interesting because I mean I think you're absolutely right that the freedom of information by request is the norm, but even more from having sat on that side of the desk and government. And the tendency is to try and release as little as possible, or else to flood with so much information is to make it unusable, rather than to kind of think it just as you said is, how do we actually solve problems together. And then how do we give the, the, the particular the information that's that's going to be needed. And I think that that solution of having it be open API is exactly the way to go forward. You know, and it does open up a question for me. So one of the things we wanted to talk about is to think about, how do we take the lessons that you've learned through this experience and through the other experiences you've had, and then apply them in the in the question is sort of that both foreign state interference and disinformation, and sort of for some of our other network members disinformation campaigns by extremists or others and kind of learn from these examples. And you know, one of the conversations that happens a lot and I'm sure you've been privy to this, these kinds of sessions is, is that there are some people who argue that the antidote to disinformation is more and better information. But it doesn't sound like that's, that's, that's all that you've got into one that they can mean that that kind of the rapid response the humor you've got some other sort of pieces in there. What would you say are the key building blocks that governments need to put in place to sort of help build that societal resilience, just as you talked about the community inoculation against the fake manipulated menu misleading information. Is there anything more you what you can add on that. Certainly, in Taiwan we make a distinction between disinformation, which is intentional and misinformation, which may not be. And against this information is not just humor over rumor, because there is, is almost like in a cybersecurity since there's a red team operating. One case in point is that in the mayoral election and referenda of 2018, we've seen a lot of money poured in to say Facebook and other social media platforms to do hyper targeted precision targeted messaging that are not in fact wrong, but actually more like mal information in that it insights a certain. Let me do this. Certainly, so one part is a clear distinction between this information, which is intentional and misinformation, which may not be. While misinformation can be countered quite successfully using Q spoke stocks and humor over rumor and things like that. This information when it's intentional and backed by a lot of money, sometimes by foreign states, that's not as easy to counter using humor. One case in point is that in the 2018 local election, we actually saw a lot of money poured into say Facebook and other social media was precision targeted advertisement that are opaque. And that could not be attributed back to who gave the money, compare that with the campaign donation and expense, which must be filed to the National Auditing Office, and is always restricted to domestic donors only. So it's almost like through those social media platforms, they found a way to bypass the democratic oversight of campaign donation and expenditure. Now, interestingly, the solution did not originally came from the government, it came from again, the go zero community. There's a project that asked the volunteer to go to the National Auditing Office, because at the time they were already publishing the expenditure and donation information but only on paper. So they took out the paper, scanned the paper, did this OCR and computer vision, but OCR is called otaku character vision recognition, because people see like a capture each single self of these large spreadsheets and compete with each other and quickly turning these into digital versions. And so this almost like civil disobedience of the past elections really put a lot of pressure on the National Auditing Office because the office may say, hey, you're not absolutely sure that these crowd OCR diversion is the correct one. And the civil society can simply say so that's why you should publish this open data. Right. And so finally the legislature is not light and as the National Auditing Office to publish as open data so investigative journalists can do the analysis, which they did for the first time in 2018. And lo and behold, people see that almost nobody filed the social media advertisements as campaign donation or expenditure. So it's clearly a bypass. So we turn around and talk to Facebook and friends saying, look, this is the social norm. This is not like we're passing a law or something against you, but people have already put a lot of pressure on the National Auditing Office. And now they're turning this attention to you. So it's like a trade negotiation right we can talk to Facebook saying, so this is not a state request. This is rather a analysis of the societal temperature. And if they do not publish at least to the same kind of open data in real time, their advertisement library when it pertains to political social issues for independent analysis and calling out dark patterns on the next election. They may fall social sanction and this force of social sanction is not initiated by the state, but rather by the people. And that's why Facebook in 2019 made one, I think the first jurisdiction where they published the entire advertisement library under open data, actually as an open API, so that by our presidential election, there's no such dark patterns that happen on Facebook and so on. So that's a successful negotiation. That's incredible. And I mean, as you say it's very different experience that I think other countries have had in dealing with the social media companies, but it sounds like as part of it just as you've said it's what it's driven from the community and it's driven from that, that community based conversation it's less about governments coming in and saying, we're going to restrict what you do we're going to drive you towards a certain end it's more just let's engage and let's come up with a common set of solutions. You know, it was it was it was difficult coming into this and sort of looking at areas where things had not gone well. You know, it just, it really feels like looking at not just the pandemic but a lot of these other challenges the Uber example others that you know things are going on a really good track in Taiwan in these areas. But you know, as we're looking at our government as we're thinking about these things. And one of the things that that I think we sort of realize is governments, they tend to be afraid to take risks. There's a huge avoidance factor that comes in and so there can be a real fear about trying new things. One of the challenges that that I've experienced in the space is at the same time as we're afraid to do the new things we learn the most when things don't go well. I mean it's it's those failures that actually teach us right that's that's kind of those experiences. Well, just to fly by there's been a ton of talk about your success in the public response to coven and of course in these other areas as well. Are there other areas where you think some of your experiments didn't work and how do I mean I have a little bit of a sense in that kind of the way that when somebody comes into the criticism it just sort of builds it into the solution. Is that it's a constant iterative development and so there are no failures in that kind of sense, like you're sort of constantly failing is that is that. Yeah, definitely. So, so I'll go back to the mask rationing map example, because internationally it's been reported as a huge success but it's actually a huge failure on the first day of launch on February 6 in 2020 when the mask availability map was first produced in the pharmacy version that is a lot of pharmacists concurrently invented something new, the take a number system. So, this social innovation is basically instead of handing out the medical mask in return of swiping their national health car for the customers, they instead took the healthcare cards from the customers and asking them to go back and. They process the IC card in the pharmacy during the lunch break and as a customer to return, for example, 7pm or something and collect the mask and their IC card in exchange to the numbered cart that they gave us right so all this pharmacist social innovations actually are at odds with the mask availability map, because if you analyze it like if you're a x Foxconn. Analytic person, you will see that this particular pharmacy didn't sell anything until noon, and in the noon, like in a very short time someone like 10 minutes, they sell everything on their stock and and this kind of real time API is actually misleading, not useful at all. And so one of my nearby pharmacies even go to the length of putting very large banners posters on their front door on the glass window saying don't trust the app exclamation mark. And so that of course is spectacular failure, but the way that the cece recover from these failures is simply saying, so we didn't anticipate it. And we're running a weekly iteration we're using agile development. So by the next spring's delivery that's next Thursday, it's always next Thursday. Anyone who come up with ways to fix it, we will implement that fix. And so a pharmacist said, Okay, why don't you publish your open API to different times lots instead of one one for collecting the cards and one for collecting the mask. Why not. Right. So the pharmacy that use this take a number system can just register like seven to nine a.m. and seven to nine p.m. in two times loss so we did that the very next week, but the nearby pharmacy still didn't take that poster down. And so I took a deep breath. I walk in and I asked, oh, so so why they're like, actually their cards run out by, for example, 8am. So there's still one whole hour where they're on the map, but the number were inaccurate. And so I'm like, okay, so if you are the additional minister what would you do that's the favorite question I would ask people and they consulted their pharmacy group and the very next day told me that if they use the back end system to input that they have sewed a lot of mask more than their stock, then they get into negative availability. And that made them disappear from the map. So it's a hack, almost like a white hat hacker thing, because we didn't check for the signs in the integral field. But that's a workaround and that enabled them to took down the banners. So I went back, talked to the National Health Insurance Agency about this innovation, and they formalize it and invented a button that any pharmacy can just push it and disappear from the map like the cloaking device. So that's after more than three weeks, more than three spare strings. And so I think the most important thing here is that each failure can be turned into an opportunity to co creation. But if we say we'll fix it but actually fix it only like one month or two later, then people don't have that kind of patience. It really has to have a really short iteration cycle like one week or at most two weeks for this kind of co creation to work. Wow, that's, that's amazing. And, and, you know, it's, it really makes me think earlier this year, we had a conversation about how to maintain horizontal efforts, given sort of, you know, traditional vertical accountability structures and government right is that, you know, so often in a government where you have an analyst reporting to a manager reporting to director, it sort of goes up to a minister and then down. And it can be very difficult to kind of work cross purposes and yet what you're talking about or what you're describing is the perfect example of how working across those areas of bringing in the public of thinking all the sort of different roles, and each time there's a mistake kind of or a problem or a challenge, learning and fixing it. If you don't mind me asking, as the minister is sort of coming at this in this sort of on this cross cutting perspective. Do you find there's a challenge. I mean, how does how does one get past that challenge of this sort of vertical account abilities and the responsibilities of, you know, sort of people saying but I have to report to this person I have to work on this issue. Certainly, I think the diversity and inclusive culture is the most important. My team, the public digital innovation space is around 20 people, more than half of them career public service, and we very intentionally only allow one secondment from each ministry. So the more than 12 ministries that have since the common to my office understand that they cannot send to people at the same time they have to rotate. And the reason is that we want a fresh perspective. Every time a new person come to our team, everybody can learn from them because they are the only one with that particular perspective. Because you have such a cross cutting, maximally horizontal diverse team, then people are willing to share what they have launched with the community with like working out loud as a center. Ethos, because there's no like subordinates in any particular sense because everyone is belonging to every different ministry right. So no matter what their ranks are people work as peers in my team, but they of course do report to their own minister. They still take whatever they learned from the Peters back to their ministry and stay themselves go back to the ministry after a year or two. Right. And then someone else rotates in and the trick here is that by working out loud this culture, even after they go back to their ministry is still permeating almost by osmosis to their ministry about how horizontal structures instead of fighting vertical structures actually reinforces like a bridge that connects those vertical pillars reinforces the idea of resilience. Whenever any particular pillar makes a mistake that may actually offer a very good learning opportunity for the other pillars in the same office that's the same idea of biodiversity by the way. And so because of that, we have collaboratively culture that's willing to take risk, because what's risky for one pit is member is actually not risky for other penis members, and that's sort of HR policy I think is also very important. Thank you so much. It's a brilliant answer and in fact it's, it's exciting to see how you're hacking government essentially by you know rather than trying to deal with how do you deal with their vertical structures and your horizontal structure. It's more like encouraging them to see the benefit of horizontal by passing out the seeds of your of your efforts into the back into the into the sort of that larger the larger biosphere of the government of the government work. This has been so wonderful of you and I really appreciate all of your time. Did you have any final thoughts or questions you want to share with with us as we wrap up. There's certainly no need to I just, I, if there's anything else on your on your mind that you wanted to share I'd love to love to hear from it. Certainly, since the theme today seems to be turning mistakes into co creation opportunities. I'll just conclude by quoting my favorite poet singer songwriter Canadian. And in the verse answer that said, ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. And that's how the light gets in. So live long and prosper. Thank you so much. Wonderful, wonderful to meet you. Fantastic day. Yeah, really, really good interview. And I look forward to receive the recording. Thank you. I'll see you soon. Bye bye.