Hello, everyone. I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister and a civic hacker. I’m very happy to be here to share with you for the next 15 minutes about smart policies and social innovation. This is an all-English session. I promised the people over in R0, which is moderated by Peggy, that I’ll recommend the audience here to move to R0 if you’d like to hear a frank debate about the experience of civic hacker working with the government. Their panel is all in Mandarin, while my talk is all in English.

In any case, yes. As Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, our main idea is to promote the idea of innovating with people, and instead of for the people. We are promoting the idea of power with, instead of power over.

This is my office, literally my office. When I joined the cabinet, there is three compacts -- not contracts -- that I agreed with the cabinet. The first is location independence. Whenever, wherever I am working, I am working in the office.

I get to have this kind of office, which is co-designed by hundreds of social innovators. This is painted by people with Down’s syndrome. It turns out they are excellent artists, see the world with a different lens.

The second is voluntary association. I don’t give orders, I don’t take orders. Every ministries work with me by voluntary association. Because of that, I don’t talk to, for example, the Ministry of Defense, saying, “Tomorrow, you’re going to be radically transparent.”

Instead, if they have anything that they would like to engage more people, they can come to this space. Not just for public service, but actually, for everybody. Every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, if you have anything you would like to discuss with me, you can just come here, provided you agree to publish the transcript online.

Finally, the third is radical transparency. We make sure that all the dealings, not just with journalists and lobbyists, but also internal meetings, publish everything online, so that whenever experiments happen, they don’t have to succeed.

If they fail, there is actually no failure, because the context of this experiment, the data, the stores, everything of this experiment is up there for everybody to use. When you visit the Social Innovation Lab sometime, you will see those new alien life forms, which are self-driving vehicles.

They are tricycles. They have the same right of road as passengers. If they run into buildings, it’s no big deal. It’s all open source from the MIT Media Lab, anyway. Some people would like to chase this into a face of a cat or something, to express the emotion of these vehicles.

Or they want to solve a real social problem, like people going to Jianguo flower market. These things can help you carry the pots of orchids. At the end of it, you can hop on it and go back to your home. Then they go elsewhere.

Basically, it’s personal, like personal computing. It’s open, so people can change the innovation, and the most important thing is that it’s transparent. It is happening in a place where hundreds of social innovators can witness how these AIs interact with people day by day.

Why are using this kind of collaborative governance? Because we want to change the governance model. In the previous century, the idea, very simply, is the government is like the rope in the middle. People who care about the environment maybe talk with the environmental agency. That’s one knot.

People caring about economy maybe talk with the Ministry of Economy, which is another knot. The people in the middle, the career public service, is invisible from the outside, but there’s lots of tension that is in between.

That was because the government see itself as the role of an organizer and of arbiter of the civil society and private sector. Now, with collaborative governance, we’re asking a different set of questions. We’re asking, given our very different positions, are there some common values?

Given our common values, can there be innovations that makes things works for everyone? If we keep asking those two questions in a facilitative manner, new ideas can emerge, like those self-driving tricycles, that can be good both economically, socially, and also environmentally.

Everybody gets to have the input into the creation, maintenance, and co-ownership of these kind of creation. This is what we mean by social innovation. Innovation that solves the social or environmental problem, and with everybody’s input.

Now, of course, a key question on everybody’s mind is that, how many laws will this break, and how many regulations will this need to be challenged? Will not the career bureaucracy block the innovators from innovating?

The answer is, hundreds of laws, hundreds of regulations are going to be challenged and broken. This is why we devised this idea of sandbox. sandbox.org.tw is a one-stop shop where you can go to, and then basically, there’s already hundreds of cases that say, for example, I want to offer my private parking space as a part-time when I go to work for eight hours.

I want other people to be able to use it for parking, and charging them for it. I’m not the parking lot, so maybe I don’t want to be charged with the taxation of the parking lot. People can challenge the existing regulations simply by posting their case online for the common good transparently for everybody to see.

The people there will help you pro bono to find the right municipality and the right people to handle those kind of situations. At the moment, there is four sandboxes in Taiwan, and there’s more to come. Each sandbox allows for a limited period, and in a limited space, to break the law or regulation for the experiment’s result to be shared with everybody.

For the thing like shared parking space, that’s the NDC, the platform economy regulation, passed this January, a result the vTaiwan process. Actually, all of these are results of vTaiwan processes. The second one passed this April is the fintech sandbox, where for example, when you open a bank account, you can, for example, provide two ID card over the counter.

Now, one FinTech sandbox is already planning to run, starting later this year, where you can use your mobile identity with your telecom. That will also determine the kind of loan you can get, based on the telecom bills, whether you paid it or not, and things like that.

This is really breaking existing regulations, but we allow them for a year to experiment. Finally, at the end of the year, we expect to pass the UV law, which allows not only tricycles, but also cars that flies, or ships that go to the road, or whatever.

As long as it solves a real social need, the local municipality can offer up a space for the people to devise and play with these new AI creatures for a year. During that year, not only the data need to be shared to a multistakeholder panel, chaired by the Ministry of Economy Affairs, but also, you can extend the scope of the experiment if it goes well.

If it doesn’t go well, well, we thank the investors, for everybody learned something. If it goes well, and if the regulation change after 60 days of public commentary, then the regulation just change to your version.

Your forked version will get merged back. If the members of parliament need to deliberate up for four years, then you essentially get a monopoly for that experimentation period. After the new laws get signed into effect, then the innovation becomes true. If you go to sandbox.org.tw, there is already hundreds of cases.

Now, of course, with the official endorsement and office hour, a lot of people will ask, what about other people living in other counties? We understand that people in Taipei can just come to my office every Wednesday and have hackathons, or whatever.

If you don’t live in a place near to the high speed rail station, isn’t you essentially excluded from this open policymaking process? The answer is that every couple Tuesday, I just go to, for example, that is Hualien, and this is Taitung.

Whenever I go to there, and work with social innovator there, I maybe stay for a night. I maybe stay for an entire day. Our discussion is being live casted to the Social Innovation Lab, to the 12 different ministries’ people there.

They have to answer in real time. Had it been one-to-one conversation with one ministry, there’s a tendency for one ministry to push to another ministry. Now, because all 12 ministries are here, they will just talk among themselves and figure something out.

For example, the cooperative movement is now being reclassified to be qualified to enter a lot of local revitalization projects. Associations, nonprofits, can now own subsidiary companies. There’s many regulatory innovations that are born just by the people in their natural habitat, explain their cases for the people in the 12 ministry to see and to reach a horizontal understanding, and a virtual team.

Of course, we will make sure that all the new innovations are on display for everybody to see. For example, if a self-driving car, truck, or whatever is going to be enrolled into the sandbox, even before the multistakeholder panel, we make sure that it’s on display in Shalun City, which is very close to a high speed rail station.

We can just go to the zoo, a virtual zoo, to see those new creatures. We have lots of simulation scenarios, like during...I don’t know to translate 遶境（Pilgrimage Procession）, the circulation of the goddess. For example, lots of motorcycles, lots of different traffic situations.

You can first see the simulation here in the control center before integrating it in our everyday life. The most important thing here is that we see AI as something that could be amended by the collective intelligence, instead of something that overwhelms or oppresses collective intelligence. AI must always work in conjunction and in service of the collective intelligence.

That brings to our AI-powered conversation all the FinTech, platform economy, and the UV sandbox has gone through this process. In the vTaiwan process, we use AI to moderate human discussions, to ask people how they feel about a certain thing.

We crowdsource, of course, the facts, and then we ask people’s feelings. In this conversation, there’s no right or wrong about feelings. It’s just whether it resonates with people or not. Based on the feelings, the stakeholders can then propose ideas. The best ideas are the one that take care of the most people’s feelings.

For example, Lisa Lin Kuan-yu, during the UV consultation posted that she thinks field test of an automotive driving on public roads should have a predictable space and time boundary. Now, you can agree or disagree.

If you click agree or disagree, your avatar will move among your Facebook or Twitter friends to show how much resonance your ideas have. In answering for a few questions, you can also propose new questions for the AI to do the clustering, and a principal component analysis.

Always after three weeks or so, we find people agree to disagree on a few divisive statements, but they always coalesce on the consensus statements. We use those consensus statements to make judgments about, for example, whether to continue the sandbox conversation, or whether to make the regulation, and to define the boundary of those new sandbox laws.

The interesting thing is, if you use the social media, it’s usually the other way around. What makes it different from the social media is that there is no reply button. If you have the reply button, you will maybe attack this sentiment or this statement.

Because there is no reply button, just like on Slido, the only recourse is to propose something more nuanced, more eclectic, for other people to vote on. In this way, we make sure that people’s feelings are what binds the business interest, the social interest, the environment interest, in a collaborative governance way.

Without which it is just individual people talking to individual agencies. Through this cross-agency mechanism, we make sure that people’s feelings are really reflected into the process. When we went through Taiwan, we discovered some many common interests, and people already using civic tech to solve their local social issues.

I’m sure a lot of people here in Taiwan know about the AirBox, which partners with the g0v air pollution visualization network.

Now, in many UN-related meetings that I gave telepresence or in person presence, when I showed those 2,000s of points that people just set them on their balcony, on their home, on their schools, and so on, the number one question I get from other people from Asian countries is that, “Doesn’t this undermine the legitimacy of your national Environmental Protection Agency?

“Isn’t this a threat to the national administration? In our country, not 2,000 people. If it’s 200 people, all these people will either get disappeared, or we will just poach them into the government. In any case, we would not let this kind of movement grow to thousands of people strong.”

My answer is always, like in Taiwan, we see the freedom of expression, of assembly, of speech, as core value. They are not instrumental values. The most important value is the vibrant civil society. If we cannot be the civil society, we’ll just join the civil society.

This is the Civil IoT’s Project’s stance, which is a sponsor, I think, to this very summit. We basically, in any cases where you can set up, we’re not going to compete. We’re going to offer, for example, more example measurement devices, but in places where you cannot enter as a citizen scientist.

For example, here, this is very important, because that tells whether the air pollution comes from outside of Taiwan, or whether inside Taiwan. If we don’t have that number, it’s very difficult to tell whether it’s of a foreign nature or not.

There’s no way that AirBox people will go to the middle of the Taiwan Strait and put the air sensors there, but we are going to. In our offshore wind turbines, we’re going to set up IoT system to make sure that they report back to the same system that the civil IoT system is using.

This is really multisectoral, and the open data not just come from the government sides, but also from the citizen sides as well. I hear that people like Jserv is working on distributed ledgers to make sure that their numbers are snapshotted and stored on an Iota distributed ledger to make sure that we don’t change the number the day before the election.

It helps to put everybody to account. The great thing about this kind of technology is that it spreads naturally, because it’s open innovation. We don’t have to sign a bilateral agreement with a country or whatever.

It’s all on GitHub. People just learn about it and deploy it everywhere in the world. In this way, we attract the best people to use this common evidence in a way that can establish the common conversation among people of human activity and environmental, meteorological data.

A lot of mayoral candidates ask me if we can post the winners of this online before the election. We cannot. I’m sorry. I think science is more important than the election. We will do the science right, and you will see the fruits of this visualization later next year.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I see main work is working on the partnership for the goals, not just for economy, environment, or society in different silos, in different portions of one space, time, and things like that.

But to make sure that innovation are good simultaneously for all the global goals through this common data and evidence-based discussion. Finally, because I talk about AI, distributed ledgers, and virtual reality, whatever, other technologies, there is a poem that is my job description that I wrote became the Digital Minister I’d like to share with you.

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 finally, whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember: the plurality is here.

Thank you so much.

Derek, are you hearing us?

Yes, hello. Can you guys hear me?

Yes, we are hearing you. Please welcome our next speaker, Derek.

Oh, boy. Hello, everyone. Hopefully, the connection holds. It’s crazy to think that right now, I’m calling you guys from the other side of the world. Good afternoon. It is currently 3:53 here in Canada in the morning. I’m very excited to be joining you guys here today.

I think my introduction was done a bit earlier, but just again, my name’s Derek Alton. I’m part of the strategic partnerships team for the digital collaboration division for the government of Canada. Let’s start this presentation here. I’ll share screen.

Are you guys able to see my screen OK?

Yes.

Perfect, all right. Good, excellent. This presentation’s about imagining a digital nation. This is a topic that has become a very hot topic here in Canada over the last couple years. We’re really trying to bring our government into the 21st century.

The focus of the mandate of our government for the last three years is, how do we make Canada into a digital nation? How do we make the government of Canada a digital government? We have a new CIO who’s really focused on transforming the way our government works on the inside.

In the last year or two, we’ve also shifted into more of a leadership role on the international stage. We are hugely honored to become co-chairs of the Open Government Partnership for this year. Hopefully, I’ll see some of you guys at the summit we’re hosting in May for the open government partnership.

As well as we’ve joined the D7, the Digital Seven, which are seven countries, governments around the world, that are putting a big focus on how do we become more digital as governments? The key thing about digital is it’s not just putting government services on a website.

That’s not necessarily what makes something digital. It’s much deeper. It’s more of a cultural change, a cultural transformation. To that end, one of the things that we’ve been working on as the government of Canada is a set of digital principles.

Now, we’re calling them digital standards, that will help give some direction and help us as a government become more digital. This is our second iteration. In the fall, the final version of this was made and sent out to the world.

We got a whole bunch of feedback both internally, but also from all sorts of different community organizations and groups to help us figure out what should these digital principles, these digital standards be.

This is our second iteration. There was just a launch a couple weeks ago. It’s evergreen. That means it’s going to be continually changing and growing as our context shifts, and as we learn more through doing and trying to live out these standards, we’ll get a better understanding of how we need to tweak each one.

I don’t want to talk too much about the digital standards, per se, but rather on a specific project or initiative that I’m involved in that we believe is helping -- or we hope is helping -- model what it means to be a digital nation. That is the Open Accessible Digital Workspace.

The way I like to think of the Open Accessible Digital Workspace is it’s an example of open government in practice, taking the concepts and the theories, trying to apply it in how government works on a day to day basis.

We’re really trying to reflect on how government can work together to empower, connect, and work with people to co-create with each other, citizens to create a better world. First things first, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve?

I think the problem we’re trying to solve with this is that the context that we live in has shifted. We now live a digital age. The majority of our interactions, and how we engage and experience the world, is now mediated and moderated by digital technology. Case in point, this presentation.

That’s had huge ramifications on how we experience the world, how we interact with the world, and the role government plays within that. Our society’s become more networked as a result. There’s way more data floating around that we can work with.

As people, we’re much more engaged in shaping our world and personalizing our experience to the world around to better meet our needs and our desires. This is something that government has been slow to respond to.

We’ve been very siloed. Government, society’s become more networked, and we’re still working in our silos. The world is changing faster and faster, and we’re still behind the curve, slow to react, and slow to change and keep up with the pace of change.

We really need to do better. We need to be better at government. There’s also lots of opportunity here. We could do so much together. We could work, co-create with citizens and experts across sectors in a way that we never could before.

We can find, recruit, and nurture talent, help connect skills with opportunities to use those skills to make change. We use the crowd to solve issues that matter to our citizens. Nowadays, we realize that the answer to our problems might not be within the knowledge of the actual team that’s working on the problem.

It might exist on the other side of the world. We now have the tools to help capture and harness this knowledge to the society and the collective world. We’re trying to create an open and inclusive, diverse, digital public space.

Public spaces are so key to democracy. What does a public space look like in the digital world that we now live in? There’s an opportunity to, now that we’re more interconnected and can share information, to build things once to the benefit, not just of our own team, but across society, across the globe.

We don’t need to keep all trying to solve the same problem independent of each other. The outcome of this is that there’s an increased value that we can create with reduced cost. Something that really highlighted this problem for me, or this opportunity for me, is my role in strategic partnership means I get to interact with lots of different organizations and groups.

Particularly other governments, both within Canada, the many different levels of government, but also around the world, meeting people who work in governments in different countries, and realizing that we’re all trying to solve the same problems.

There’s a huge opportunity here if we start collectively coming together, and solving them together, as opposed to trying to solve them in our silos. This is the opportunity that exists, and this is the hope we’re trying to capture with the Open Accessible Digital Workspace.

What is the Open Accessible Digital Workspace? I like to think of the Open Accessible Digital Workspace as the digital public square, the public square of the digital world. It’s something that’s based on open source software, open standards.

The workspace is a suite integrated, accessible tools that connect people to each other and information they need to work better. It’s something that we can fund and contribute to new and existing open source projects.

Through that, that investment, we can raise the bar not just ourselves and our team, but for everybody. That’s the benefit of open source. Anyone can add services into it. They can use the data to make better decisions.

It becomes a public good, a public service, to all of society and all of the world. By building it together, and we can create a diverse and inclusive space for all sorts of voices and different perspectives. This digital public square can be used and reused, and adapted and changed. It’s free of advertising forever.

That’s the vision of the Open Accessible Digital Workspace. That’s conceptual. Another metaphor I like to use to make sense of what it is that we’re talking about, we’re talking about this Open Accessible Digital Workspace, this digital public square.

It’s the idea of a toolbox, a digital toolbox. We use tools to help us do things more effectively and more efficiently. We develop a set of tools that we use regularly to help us build bookshelves, build a house, do all sorts of different things.

We also interact and live in more of a digital world. We’re starting to develop more and more of a digital toolbox, a set of tools that we use to work in a digital way. For example, right now, we’re using Skype. This is an example of a digital tool.

You guys are using Slido, I believe. That was mentioned earlier. That’s another type of digital tool. Email, instant messaging, these are all digital tools that we’re starting to use to help us get things done and do things together in a digital world.

The idea of the Open Accessible Digital Workspace is to create a suite of open source digital tools that are free and accessible to everybody, and that integrated, so that collectively, they develop this common platform experience that allow us to connect, to collaborate, and to do and be governments in real time together across geographic areas.

That’s the idea of Open Accessible Digital Workspace. That’s the broad vision. We pitched this through our governments internally in the spring, and we were given a three-year runway and some base funding to see if we could take this from a conceptual and into actually something practical that we could actually build, use, and share to the world.

Where do we start? How do we build this Open Accessible Digital Workspace collectively together? With a real toolbox, there are certain base elements. First, you need a toolbox that help you organize and access the tools that you want.

Then you have some base tools that are the foundational tools. If you going to build a house, you’re probably going to need a hammer. That’s pretty much a standard tool. You’re probably going to need a tape measure. There are some base tools.

We’re thinking, what are the base, important tools needed for a digital nation? Here’s our first crack of what this can look like. First off, the idea of a single sign-up, authentication, a way that you can identify as you as yourself, that then connects you to a profile, a profile that you can then move and move around to access all the different tools.

This connection of a single account sign on with a profile as a service, for me, I view as this being a digital toolbox. This is a container that the tools then sit within that give you access to the tools to be able to move and shape them, and design your own set of tools within that toolbox.

The next one that we’re working on is this idea of an open collaborative space, a base foundational collaborative space, that allows people to connect form groups around issues and projects they’re working on, and share files, and have discussions, and that base level of collaboration.

Where are we doing this? We’re using the open source platform, L, and we’re actually working on it with the government of the Netherlands to develop this base foundational platform. Another thing we’re working on is, we’re calling it Kruger Marketplace, but it’s the idea of connecting talent with opportunities.

There’s a ton of different ideas and skill sets. How do we more effectively connect those skill sets with the opportunities that exist? We’re developing a base platform that does a lot of that. That’s another that we’re building as a base foundation.

Another thing was one that actually developed quite by accident. As a team, we realized we needed instant messaging to more effectively connect and collaborate together, and get our work done. We, after a couple of months of testing different options, ended up selecting the open source platform, Rocket.Chat.

It’s like an open source version of Slack. It’s an instant messaging platform, and just adopted it, and started using it as a team to help us work better. Then word got out within the government. All of a sudden, all these other teams started using it and adopting it.

These are the base foundational tools that we’re currently working on to try to build that foundation for an open accessible workplace. That’s where we’re at right now, but we recognize that we can’t do this on our own.

This is something that needs to be, the true potential of this lies when we come together and collaborate across different groups. The strategic partnership team that I’m part of is really working hard to find ways of connecting the dots between the work that other groups are doing.

For example, when I was in France, France is using Riot. We’ve got an instant messaging platform that I’ve been working with, and doing great work on it. Maybe we let France really develop that, and that becomes the instant messaging platform for the Open Accessible Digital Workspace that we can all use anywhere in the world.

Taiwan, you guys have got a bunch of different platforms that you’re using to do a lot of really cool stuff that makes it easier for citizens to participate actively in co-creating policy and programs. These are platforms that we can adopt and be part of the Open Accessible Digital Workspace.

How do we create space for different organizations and governments to start sharing with each other, and collectively build this interweaving network of open source platforms and tools to create this digital public sphere that allow us to work?

That’s the big question we’re working on this year with strategic partnerships. We’ve got a series of different pilot projects we’re working on. One of the things I’m working on right now is finding ways to bring municipalities together to identify a common pain point, and then identify an open source digital solution to that pain point.

Then have those municipalities collectively together invest in supporting the development of that open source solution, which then gets adopted into the Open Accessible Digital Workspace. Of we can show how that model works, that becomes something that can be replicated anywhere and everywhere.

To allow all sorts of different groups, so they can start adopting it in these open source platforms, so over time, we develop this large suite of open source digital tools that help us do our job. They’re all interconnected and woven for this Open Accessible Digital Workspace.

I think I’m going to stop there for now. Oh, one more slide I should show you guys. This is one I get really excited about. For me, this is how I envision, when we talk about what is this Open Accessible Digital Workspace, this slide for me helps visualize it.

You see you’ve got the enterprise authentication. That’s your doorway in. That’s your toolbox to get into your set of tools. That then connects you with your profiles and service. That’s your profile that helps you then personalize your access to the different tools.

Then each of these is different type of tools. It’s a micro service model, so it’s a series. Each tool has a specialized use case. It’s more of a toolbox, as opposed to a Swiss army knife. What this allows people to do is it allows them to mix and match.

It allows them to choose the digital platform, the digital tool that they want to use, and then just build it into this ecosystem of interconnected platforms. This means that groups can go open source, which is what we always encourage.

They can also choose to adopt proprietary software as well. Maybe they’re already in an arrangement, some type of sole contractor that’s given them a platform that they’re paying for, and they’re already in for a three-year contract.

They can just bring that in. Hopefully, the platform will be interoperable, and be able to part of this ledger ecosystem. This allows for more experimentation. It allows for more personalization, and it makes it easier for all sorts of different groups to build pieces that they see missing, and then add them to this growing ecosystem.

I’m going to stop there. I look forward to digging more into this in the Q&A. Thank you so much, guys, for this opportunity to present this idea. I hope you guys are interested. Please reach out if you want to learn more, and I’d love to work with you so we can collaborate more effectively together.

My name is Clément Mabi. I come from France. I am from the University of Technology de Compiègne. Before to start, I would like to thank the organization team who invite me, to thank the Bureau français de Taipei, the French office, to make this trip possible.

To echo to Audrey and Derek, my first question will be, what should a digital nation be? First a normative perspective, so a theoretical one, a digital should be seen a nation where people have found solutions to mobilize digital culture in order to organize the way of living together, and renew the relationship between citizens and institutions.

By more co-construction of public policies, and more transparencies of public institutions. This call for digital technologies should allow a continuous democracy, and therefore a more permanent public deliberation to promote the abilities of technologies to reform public services, and enhancing citizens’ trust in the government.

From a grounded perspective, my argument will be to say that the digital nation needs two main ingredients to succeed. A state, an administration, that has completed its digital transition, and a mobilized and organized digital civil society, through civic tech.

For my demonstration, I will use the French case. Is France a digital nation? France is famous for many things. Yeah, of course, sorry.

France is famous for many thing. Wine, stripes, our cut accent in English, but also revolutions. What about our digital revolution? Has France started its digital revolutions? Can we see a 2.0 nation, or at least 1.0 nation?

I think we are on the better version. We can see the development of a digital democracy with more citizen initiative, like petition, mobilization platforms, public consultation software or collaborative toolbox.

However, many barriers remain before this promised land, before a digital nation? Let’s keep it modest. It’s true that there is some positive trend. We have since 2011 an open data policy, which is by default, in every administration since 2015.

We are officially involved in the Open Gov Partnership since 2014. There was an OGP summit in Paris in 2016. We have the development of major public consultation, like for legislative drafts, with around 20,000 participants for the most successful in 2016.

We have a proactive policy of inclusion since 2017. The institutions organized an innovative coalition of actors in France called The Mednum, which is bringing together on an equal footing all of the actors involved in the issues of digital inclusion, including public authorities.

The reason, so a reform of the National Assembly to adopt some digital principles, like a new petition right, or possibility to citizen agenda setting in 2018. There is a new program called Public Interest Entrepreneurs program, which try to introduce agile meters from startup to the administration, a bit like PO network, I guess, here.

There is also a national impulsion for the development of a tech for good ecosystem in France due to the President Macron, but there is also in France, we still have a very strong representative and leadership-based political culture. A very strong also administrative, centralized culture, as we can see.

Even if you can notice some exceptions, like for the National Addressee Database, which is a very interesting example of a French collaborative project between civil society and administration, we can see that the French administration is pretty shy for common goods.

We can also see that French NGO were very skeptical about the French or GP action plan, especially on the part concerning the transparency of public action, and the action of lobbies. All of this overview give us a very nuanced view of the digital transformation of the French state.

What about the second part? Two second dimension of digital nation, the mobilization of the civil society. We have, since 2012, the rise of a French civic tech community. How is it likely organized, the French civic tech?

We have, like in many countries, like here, initiative who wants to change the rule of the democratic game, and give citizens a new place, due to digital culture. I want to assume here that behind this unique expression civic tech, we have in reality a large variety of political projects.

How to find one’s way through this frenzy of initiative? To achieve this, I think it’s necessary to shift from a tool-centered perspective, what tools can do, to prefer a political project perspective, what citizens can do with tools.

In order to, I suggest a rough mapping of the French civic tech, organized around the two main tensions in the community, the how and the why. The first tension, the why, includes the desire to induce social transformation with, on the one hand, those who seek to deepen institutional democracy, and on the other hand, those who seek to transform and renew the institutions.

The second axis, the how, characterizes the degree of institutionalization, and the proximity with the public authorities. On one side, we find projects that fall within a rational of counter-democracy, like I said earlier this morning.

That is to say, they want to affect institutions from outside. At the other end of the axis, we find projects that collaborate actively with the public authorities. This work reveals several trends that allow to identify four groups of civic tech.

The first group is the external critics. It’s for group initiatives working on deepening democracy by monitoring institutions. The work done by the French NGO, Observatoire Citoyen, cities on overlook, and its tools, nosdeputes.fr, our representative.fr, is a good example.

Using an open source platform, it’s assembles all the data concerning representative activities, attendance, participation commissions, things like that. They use it to make graphs and visualization to allow citizens to follow and evaluate their actions.

The second groups, the external reformers, seek to deepen the functioning of representation by encouraging collaboration between citizen and institutions. In this category, we can find tools for collective intelligence and debating platforms, like Politiversity or CAP Collective. Or this one, called voxe.org, with a tool for comparing electoral programs.

For the time being in France, the external reformers are the best developed category of civic tech, the most visible. Perhaps also, they’re less critical. They’re less critics about French government, but we can discuss it, and those who used to empower the unempowered.

The third group, the critical reformers, would belong to the field of counter-democracy. They seek to transform institutional democracy by disruption, like Ethan Zuckerman said this morning. Here, the idea to mobilize civil society in order to renew institutions in a civic perspective.

Like you know very well here, activists and developers meet at the Academia Sinica to improve those civic techs. In France, the Voxe Network has been organizing since almost two years, to contribute to those dynamics, and to develop an active, open source community in France.

The last group, the embedded hackers, were groups, actors seeking to hack democracy from inside. Here, we find, for example, platforms that want to associate citizens to law-making. This is the case of the platform called Parlement & Citoyens, citizen and parliament, which proposes an online debating tool to bring about citizen amendments in legislative drafts.

Examining the French civic tech this way makes possible to highlight at least two major results. The first one, that there is a tension between two vision of civic tech. Each performs a different conception of democracy.

On the one hand, we have the civic startups, which try to consolidate business and general interest by collaboration with institutions. On the other hand, civic hacking try to prove that collective interest is now associated to common good and to communities that use them.

Civic startups improve democracy by delivering a service, when civic hacking try to empower a network based on shared values. The second results is that there is a risk that French civic tech will be absorbed by gov tech initiatives, as a kind of sponsorized citizen expression.

We observe that the role of public actors in the civic tech ecosystem is not very really clear. Most of its action to open democratic markets, which largely reinforce and empower the civic startups model. Meanwhile, civic hacking remains fragile in France, because communities’ works need time on innovation to develop new kind of public and private coalitions.

To conclude, we can see that the main challenge for having a digital nation in France or everywhere else, 1.0 or 2.0, is a problem of political determination. Open is often seen as a concession, as a detour to ultimately preserve power relationship.

For the civic tech, we can see that the risk is to focus on technological solutions, on economic benefits, without a real strong political perspective. If they think only about services, public authorities will miss an opportunity to find solution for the three crucial issues for the digital future of our societies.

Fighting against inequality, the promotion of a full citizenship, and the defense of democracy as the expression of people’s will. Thank you.

Please welcome our next speaker, Perry Chang.

I’m sorry that I will speak in Mandarin, because it’s easier for me to deliver my message.

[non-English speech]

OK, let’s start our QA session now. Hello, Derek. You’re back. I believe Perry just posed a question for Audrey, so I hope she will answer it a bit later. I want to ask my own question, and then we will start taking questions from Slido and the floor.

My question is, it’s good, it’s fantastic to have the four of you here to talk about your vision of a digital nation, but I want to ask something about, along the line with Perry, about the older system, specifically the procurement system in the government.

As Audrey has mentioned, Taiwan’s going to have several sandboxes programs, and for France, you have entrepreneur programs, which is a very new advancement. I’m wondering, how are you going to bridge the results of these programs into the existing government?

What kind of reformation in the existing procurement system is required, do you think, so that we can channel these innovations into existing government, especially given that, as far as now, in Taiwan and Canada, procurement information are not even open data yet. What’s your view about this?

Do I take one? What is the order?

Derek, you want to speak first?

This way, the sequence?

Let’s follow the sequence. Derek, please.

Wow, start off with an easy question. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, this is trivial. You’ve heard it hundreds of times. [laughs]

The short answer is, procurement is one of the big sticky things. When we talk about creating a digital nation, government becoming more digital, one of the key pain points, key sticky points on this, is going to be completely transforming how procurement happens.

That’s hard. That takes time, because procurement is tied to policy, rules, and regulations, and those take a while to change. One of the things we’re trying to figure out is, how can governments do more micro procuring?

Small-scale procurements that allow us to more nimbly support civic tech spaces, for example. This is one the things that, with the municipal innovation pilot project I’m working on, we’re hoping will help, is it’s four different vehicles in which governments can move smaller amounts of resources into spaces like the civic tech space.

There’s going to be a lot of experimentation. I know when I was in the UK, they’re also experimenting with new ways of doing procurement that allows for this lightweight, quick shifting of resources. It’s definitely a tricky one. [laughs]

It’s definitely a tricky one, particularly because governments are entrenched into certain ways of moving resources. One of the big challenges we have in the government of Canada is, historically, we have invested a lot into digital tech through a lot of major companies.

That’s how we’re designed. We’ve already got preset processes, relationships, and stuff like that that direct us towards these larger more traditional tech companies. Now, we’re trying to rewrite the processes to allow us to have more nimbleness. It definitely takes time.

It’s going to take some time, and some failure. We’re going to make mistakes as we try to figure this out. It’ll be interesting to see the repercussions of when you make mistakes with money. How that plays itself out will be interesting.

Literally, the first policy that I started to work with two years ago as Digital Minister is procurement policy. That was because I advocated for very much the same thing before I become the Digital Minister. I really wanted to get the procurement laws fixed.

We’ve made some improvements. For example, at the moment, if you start a government procurement, up to $1 million Taiwan dollars, you can actually just go to the most valuable or the most fitting process.

It was just 10 percent of that. It was around 100K that has been raised. I cannot take credit for that. It is PCC and Commissioner Chen’s work, but it really enables us to basically have a tenfold increase on procurement on medium and small enterprises. That’s the first one.

The second thing is that we made the Linux Foundation open API standard a national standard, so that if you start a procurement, and the vendor provides something that is only human readable, but not machine readable, you can demand that vendor to develop a machine to machine interface for it.

If they say, “I’m going to charge you a lot more for that,” you can say that, “You are not professional, according to our procurement laws, so I’m going to another vendor.” This is another change that we have already put in. It’s actually already in effect.

At the moment, the new procurement law is in the parliament. We expect it to be passed later this year, which will further enable the best value bid, as we call it, and also opens the doors for best value bid to mean social value and other kind of value, in addition to economic or professional value.

That is, again, pretty good news. Finally, the procurement data, the public procurement agency, has ruled that it could be made available as a freedom of information. Because when, in hearing open data, we say that it has to be compatible with the creative commons attribution license.

Which means that you can use it for a lot of commercial propose. You can even change the numbers and things like that. There’s basically no restriction of you modifying the data by yourself, and there’s a lot of reservation, actually, for that.

Personally, I work on a dictionary called the Moe Dictionary When we talk with the Ministry of Education of releasing dictionary data, they have one reservation about the open data license. They don’t want people to change the number of strokes of a character, or to translate the dictionary into a simplified character that confuse everybody.

Finally, they chose a license that is restricted, according to international open definition, that basically say you can only do limited modification of it. You can still visualize it, but you cannot change it a lot. Then you can only use it for purposes that are of common good, of domestic people.

Under these new terms, in our next open data council, we’re going to announce that the procurement data is going to be available under these revised terms, which we will not call open data, because it is not creative commons attribution.

It will be publicly available, and able to be analyzed, although you cannot freely modify it, and there are some restrictions.

Do you want to answer the question about shipping information officer, or later?

It used to be that the deputy premiers I mentioned was the CIO, but that was the previous administration. At the moment, our CIO is Minister Wu Tze-cheng, who is also the Science and Technology Minister Without Portfolio, and the head of the Board of Science and Technology, which has real procurement power and authoritative power.

Which is why at the moment, the FinTech sandbox — or indeed, sandbox.org.tw — really works pretty well. Cryptocurrency, for example, the financial minister just said, “OK, we’re going to be in charge of the financial anti-money laundering part of the cryptocurrency.”

At the moment, of the head of BoST, Minister Wu Tze-cheng, I think, is doing a fantastic job, which you just described. I do agree with you that we cannot always rely on the fact that the head of BoST, the head of NDC happens to be very forward-thinking.

There needs to be some way to guarantee the responsible agency. I think we’ve made some advance by having a GDP or negotiation office within the NDC, which will talk about these kind of cross-regional issues, but we don’t have a law to support this kind of thing.

Again, at the end of this year, we’re going to pass hopefully the Digital Communication Act, 數位通訊傳播法, which again, is a vTaiwan output. The Digital Communication Act will, for the first time, task the Execute Yuan to build in a level that is above all the different ministries.

A task force that has sufficient budget to work with the civil society. Any civil society organization that can work within the sphere of Internet governance will be considered into the governance system. I think it really took a lot of time.

I personally worked on the previous version of the Digital Communication Act, when it was still called the Electronic Communication Act. That was 2015 or ’16. I think at the end of this year, because of CPTPP, this is finally going to be passed. After that, we will have the sufficient unit and budget for it.

You have something to add to this question?

[non-English speech]

We can take a few questions now. You can use the microphone in front of you. If you want to ask a question, please first tell us who you are. Please keep it brief, and make sure it is a question.

My name is Paul Trevine, sociology student. I’m employed here in this building upstairs. Thank you very much for all the presentations, very interesting. My colleagues, we are preparing a service on risk and new technologies.

I was just wondering, I think all of you share the same values of, I think your keywords are openness, to be open, to be transparent, to be participative. I think Clément’s presentation mentioned how to protect democracy.

I just wonder, I know it’s not a topic of the panel. You’re more concerned about how to share data and these sort of things. I’m just concerned, because recently in Taiwan, we had this problem of fake news which led a diplomat based in Japan to commit suicide.

I found that terrible. I don’t know the reason, but it seems that the fake news was created by China. It’s also true, we all know that the risk of being hacked by China is a reality. I guess Taiwanese government is doing a lot to protect government, digital information.

I’m just concerned, do you have any research group working on how to protect the average citizen of being hacked, or how to protect Taiwanese? Maybe the same question could be asked for France and Canada.

Those countries could be also hacked by Chinese hackers, actually. I just wonder. It’s good to be open, but how to protect yourself from people who don’t share your democratic values.

Derek, do you want to answer first?

That’s a big question. The short answer is yeah, there’s definitely people working in the government of Canada on this question around protecting citizens, protecting government from digital espionage, organizations meddling in the digital space.

The big one in Canada that has shaken things up is what’s happened in the US with the last US election. That put everybody on notice that this is a thing. This can happen anywhere. There’s definitely teams within the government of Canada who are working on...

We have an election coming up next year, so that’s one area of focus. I think your question was actually beyond that, looking at what’s government doing to protect citizens against this type of stuff? I don’t know. That’s a really good question.

Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not sure what can be done. I think we’re still figuring this stuff out. This is a new space. We’re still learning the rules. We’re still learning the role government needs to play in this space. I don’t think I have, actually, a very good answer for you at this point, but that’s a great question.

Thank you, Derek. Audrey, please?

First, I would like to encourage to google this keyword, “moderate approach to moderating.” I will post it on Slido. It will point to a World Economic Forum report. I’m no longer working with the WEF on the future council at the moment, but I used to work with these people.

I think that provides a great overview that I cannot explain everything in two minutes or so. I will point out two things. First, I think it’s not helpful to use the F-word. I never use the F-word, the word you just used to describe news.

Both my parents are journalists, and I think that’s an affront to journalism, if you use the fake, the F-word. I distinguish between two kind of information. If a journalist produce content that later proves to be not entirely true, they had not done their fact check very well, then it’s misinformation.

They’re still doing their journalistic duties. It’s just it so happens that they reported something that is counterfactual. They are not intentional. This is misinformation. On the other hand, there are people who post as journalists, who write something that looks like a journalistic output.

They are not professional journalists, and they may have a counter-democratic intent. We call it disinformation, because it is intentional. The F-word describes both things, and I think it’s very unhelpful to discussion. This is the first point I would like to make.

The second is that for misinformation, I think in Taiwan, what we do is that in the government, we don’t lie when we can help it. Whenever there is a misinformation from the media, now every media ministry has a scoreboard of how short the timespan between the initial misinformation and the clarification to add to the factual issue.

On the Executive Yuan’s website, there is a whole section dedicated to timely response to journalistic misinformation. I think average score now is four hours. We’re just keep upping the thing, shortening the timespan due to the peer pressure.

Basically, if people would like to wait for three or four hours, you can almost always reliably get a clarification from a ministry if there is a journalistic mistake. That’s for misinformation. For disinformation, that calls to a completely different solution.

I think that the most helpful metaphor is how we solved spam email before. Back in 2000, spam was a real thing. People called it the Spam Wars. I participated in spam assessing. People thought can technology can fix this, or regulation can fix it.

People thought it takes a strong consumer protection. People think we should all switch to Gmail or whatever to solve spam. On the other hand, finally, when spam was solved, it is not by any single actor. It’s by a lot of small civil society and public sector activities that gradually increase the cost of spam until where it’s not profitable anymore to send spam.

I think we should use this approach on disinformation. There’s a lot of civic tech projects in Taiwan, such as the CoFacts Group and so on, actively contributing to this area.

I think we have to think that open is not like open every door or every window. I think when we mean open government, open information, or things like that, it’s not like opening every windows or every doors of a country.

It’s to organize the circulation. This means you can have some protections. I think there is two main issues. There is the question of security, like you said, the question of manipulation. For the manipulation, you can develop at least one legislative approach to organize a content policy, and to organize some fact checking application, like we saw during the summit.

You have the security issue, about how to protect yourself, how to protect your infrastructures. There is many way to do that, like you said. I think it’s important to keep in mind that we should not put all our action to, in the same way.

That’s why I’m never talking about digital transformation of the state, never. I’m talking about digital transition or adaptation. I think we have to be clever on our move. We have to keep in mind that some of our societal aspects, some of our political aspects, have to keep in real hands.

We have to keep the hand on them. I take just one example. I’m not sure that online vote can replace the traditional vote. We have seen in different election, in different experimentation that it can be very dangerous and manipulated.

I’m taking one question from Slido, and then one more question from the floor. The question on Slido says, “How does privacy and information security fit in the digital nation? How do you propose to address the privacy of the citizens?” Derek, please?

I love how I keep going first, too. I don’t get much of a chance to warm up here. I think a couple things. I think part of it is giving people more control over their data will be a key thing to helping ensure their privacy.

That each person is able to choose how and when they share their data, and what that looks like. I think the other part of it is being clear what spaces are public spaces, what spaces are private spaces, and what spaces are pseudo public/private, and how that works within those spaces will help as well.

Giving people the information to allow them to protect their privacy when they want to, or to engage in spaces made much more open when they want to. I think an interesting question that I’m curious, in response to that question, is how our understanding of privacy is going to shift and change in the coming years.

Each of these words and how I understand them within a cultural context is fluid. It changes with time. I think privacy is going to be the term that’s really going to be reimagined over the next 5, 10, 15 years. I don’t know where that’s going, but I am really curious, because I think it is going to shift a lot.

My question, I think the idea for privacy and security should not be confused. I’m going to answer the two separately. For cyber security, and this is also actually an answer to the lack of IT budget, we will very soon increase massively the IT budget.

Starting next year, I think, for all the government, major projects, there must be five percent, regardless of whether it’s information projects or not, to be dedicated to cyber security. If it’s smaller projects, it’s six percent. If it’s an even smaller project, it’s seven or something like that.

At the moment, it’s under one percent, but it will jump by a very large degree just by the virtue of having all the government procurements be including cyber security as a very strong element, at least five percent of the total project.

I think this is because we really want a good relationship with, for example, the HITCON community and the other white hat hacker industry and civil society in Taiwan. We want those white hat people to work with our system.

Like when I set up the Sandstorm system in PDIS, I worked with Def Corps and the other people to do penetration testing and so on. We make sure that they feel they have contribution to the society. They are paid very well. They get meetings with presidents every once in a while, so they don’t go to the dark side.

This is very, very important. [laughs] The dark side always have more cookies. That is part of our procurement strategy. For data privacy, I think I would just want to say one thing.

When we think of data, control of data, or whatever, we’re using a metaphor that treats data as an object, as an asset. I think this is a very dangerous view. This is my personal opinion, but also my opinion as Digital Minister as well.

I think data should be seen as the beginning of a relationship. If you have data in somebody else’s control, that begins a relationship where you can ask, “Where have my data gone? How are you using for a purpose?” and so on.

Which we translate to 問責（hold-to-account） here. The people controlling the data, they have responsibility to keep it updated, to keep you informed, to get the propagated content and so on, which we translate as 當責（be accountable） here.

We need to build accountability mechanism between it that makes these kind of bridges possible. The GDPR is a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough. We really need to go even farther than the GDPR for the mechanism in between that we can protect people’s privacy by design.

This is what we call 課責機制（accountability mechanism）. Interestingly, all those different words, 問責、當責、課責, all translate back to accountability. It shows that accountability is a dynamic relationship.

When we think of data accountability, it should be seen a relationship, and not data as OIO, as asset, or as objects.

One more question from the floor, please.

Thank you, Audrey, Derek, Clément, Perry, and PM for this panel. It was very, very inspiring. I think that the representation has explained on how existing nations like Taiwan, Canada, or France are addressing new models, new methodologies, thanks to digital technologies.

The title of the panel was, “Imagining a Digital Nation.” I’m wondering if any of you have any idea of how to go one step beyond. I mean not only managing the digital capabilities of the existing nations, but to imagine new nations that might not exist in our political maps, but in data of online communities.

Platform-based economies might emerge from the geography of the Internet, like nations that don’t exist right now in the map, but they can be imagined with this new paradigm.

Another easy question for you, Derek.

Thanks, guys. Actually, could someone repeat the question? I could only get bits and pieces of it. Short version of the question.

I was asking if you can imagine a digital nation that might not exist at this moment, but that can emerge from the Internet, out of the geographical frontiers that exist right now, new kind of nations because of the Internet.

I’m sorry.

Thanks, guys.

Could we imagine a digital nation? I think so. I’m trying to think of the author. I’ve been reading a bunch of authors who’ve been talking about this concept, about how the Internet is causing us to almost become like an interconnected organism.

There’s a collective identity that’s developing as we become more and more interconnected. The Internet’s forming this societal, global human brain that’s really challenging our concept and nation-states and borders.

We’re trying to figure out what that exactly means. I think is going to force us to really reimagine what nation-states look like, or if they exist in the future. I think these are actually all really interesting questions.

Estonia’s doing some interesting stuff with their e-citizen system, that anyone can become a citizen of Estonia. Businesses can as well. That’s really shifting the idea of borders as well. I’m not really answering your question, but I am acknowledging that I think you’re touching on something that we’re going to be wrestling with more and more in the years to come.

I’m going to pass this to the other panelists, who I think will have better answers.

Audrey, please.

People know I’m a conservative anarchist. An anarchist is someone who works to make sure that the power is horizontal and not vertical. I think Internet still today, the Internet Society, the Internet mechanism, is itself sovereign.

It is the largest sovereign system that is not part of any multilateral system. It doesn’t report to the UN ITU, although it runs a forum with it. It doesn’t report to the US government. It spun off after Snowden. It has its own legitimacy mechanism that is built entirely out of radical transparency and radical participation.

It’s very easy to imagine a digital nation, because that is the Internet. The Internet is a digital nation. Whether it can keep its identity as sovereign is everybody’s question. There are different world orders now.

There are people who are Balkanizing the Internet by essentially turning it into intranets. There are people who are introducing new innovations on Internet that is basically surveillance technologies that is not for anybody’s benefit but theirs.

If Internet loses its own legitimacy, then it doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have a navy. It will lose its sovereignty. I think it’s in all our best interest to participate in Internet governance, make sure that the Internet can keep its sovereignty, and project its values back to the terrestrial beings.

Just a few words, because I’m a research, so I used to observe more than imagine. I guess in my presentation, I gave you some elements with my normative perspective. I think a large part of my job is to make a civic arrangement, to read, to make a normative and philosophical perspective, and to put it on trial with what I can observe in reality.

From the normative part, I consider there is two main issues for the digital state. There is the question of infrastructure, with the openness, security, and everything. That’s the administration part for, like I said, a state who is able to adapt to the new issues offered by digital.

The second one is about the mobilization of the society. If you are offering some openness, some open tools, you need to have a multitude to use them. If nobody is able to take the opportunity you are giving to the citizen, you would not have your digital nation. You have both to manage, to include people, and to give them infrastructures.

I think that it’s for this session. Thank you, everyone, for your participation. The next session has already started at conference room R0. If you want to go there, please proceed. Thanks, everyone, again.