Before we start, I want to mention a few things. I know that a lot of you are already asking questions. I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to interact with our speaker. First of all, he has scanned his code to our code so that you can participate in the discussion through the apps.

You can also ask questions by raising your hand. This is the password you need to enter after you have entered the application. One other thing is that all the seats in the room, they have wheels on them. We tried to make things really flexible, so crowd participation. You can turn any time now or anything, any way, however you want to organize.

You can move around.

You don’t feel constrained looking at this U-shape.

Shall we? I want to first begin with a statement of acknowledgment of traditional land.

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional lands of the Huron-Wendats, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

It’s my great honor today here to welcome Minister Audrey Tang on behalf of the Asian Institute and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policies. Our name’s getting longer.

Not by your career’s vision, which is really a long list. For those of you who really follow Minister Tang’s career, it need very little introductions.

Louder?

Sorry. She has been a programmer, of course. In a different universe from our universe of faculty and students here, she really well-known for her roles in revitalizing some of the computer languages as a programmer. She has also been a consultant for Apple and many other major corporations.

In the public sector, in various past positions, she also serve in Taiwan’s National Development Council’s Open Data Committees and the K-12 Colloquium Committees, as well as the country’s first e-rule-making projects.

She is, of course, for many of us, also known as her political activism, particularly the Sunflower Movement a few years ago in which she’s actively involved. In fact, she describe herself as a conservative anarchist.

In many ways, it was because of that participation that she was invited to join the Taiwan government, become the first digital minister. She’s also known for the only minister without portfolio. In other words, she’s carrying many hats and is very busy, so it’s really difficult for us to get her here for our brief two-hour conversations.

We are really grateful that you are here today. I want to also acknowledge the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office for their help in organizing, to make it possible for us to steal her, Minister Tang, for just a couple hours.

I sort of emphasizing now how important it is to think about the convergence of things that Minister Tang is involved in, the digital world, computer programming, public sectors, as well as private consulting. As we know, for instance, today is the midterm election in the US.

Some decades ago, perhaps you still remember, it feel like a long time ago, but it’s not that long that we felt digital technology is the future. In fact, it has become the future, has become now. It’s full of opportunities and possibilities about democracy, about transparency, about hopefulness.

What happened in the past few years? We suddenly look at it and feel very depressed with the times when we talk about fake news and the post-truth society. Many of us lose faith in digital technology, thinking what the future might be if this direction continue the way it is.

At the same time, there’s no way to stop this trend. We are, in fact, moving to this direction. In many ways, we hoped maybe the talk today, Minister Tang’s intervention, the field she’s been working on, perhaps will provide you with some hopes to revitalize our optimism about digital technology, about the digital future.

Without further ado, I would like Minister Tang to begin her presentation. After that, we will open the floor for Q&A. Again, those would like to participate through their apps, you should use your app to do that. At the same time, you could also just raise your hand during the Q&A. We will also respond to those few questions.

Thank you so much. Really, really an honor to be here. I see that there’s already six questions, the first one being, good morning, so good morning everyone. Very, very happy to be here.

We will be on the record. The video is only taking me in this way, but the audio will be on record. If you want to ask a question, you can either use the Slido app, as we have already seen, or you can write down something and our staff will be happy to put your question on our online system. You can just raise your hand and start talking in any language that our moderator is capable of translating to English.

That’s our main structure. From now until noon, I’ll just be responding to your questions. First, some general introductions about my own work. This directly ties to the top question at the moment, which is, "How do I deal with those people who want to hoard information and power for themselves?"

Without further ado, I will launch into this slide about social innovation and how under President Tsai’s new idea about many plural values of Taiwan...She said two years ago in her inauguration speech that before when we think of democracy, we think it as a fight, a clash between opposing values. Now in Taiwan, democracy must be reinvented as a conversation among many different values.

That is, I think, the values of Taiwan. The acting word here is the plural part of Taiwan. That will be my opening remark. This is why I’m very optimistic about digital and democracy, which is, I understand, perhaps rare in today’s world in people working on digital democracy, so unlike many people today.

This optimism began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I told my teachers and my principal -- I was first year in a junior high school -- that I’ve discovered this new thing called the World Wide Web and the future of human knowledge is being created there.

I write to professors who just write back to me on their pre-prints, doing research. They don’t know I’m only 14 years old, so I’m doing research at the time. I said to my teachers, "I can either be reading textbooks that are 10 years out of date or I can join, participate in creating knowledge that will be in the textbook 10 years afterwards."

Surprising, all my teaches agreed with it. They faked my attendance records and I get to quit high school...

...and start a few startups. My optimism in the flexibility of bureaucracy is really strong from that point onward.

Then I discovered this fabulous idea called the Internet Society. This is the organization that still runs the Internet today. It’s been running the Internet for the past few decades now. The Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ICANN, and the other organizations that runs the Internet runs on the idea of radical transparency, meaning that everything we do is public for everybody to see.

It runs the idea of voluntary association in the sense that anyone who want to participate in the development of the Internet, you don’t have to apply for a membership. You can just join. It runs into the idea of location independence, meaning that the Internet Society doesn’t respond or report to any sovereign state. It doesn’t even report to the UN ITU. It is by itself. Internet is sovereign.

I’m taking that idea of Internet governance or collaborative governance into Taiwan’s politics in the past couple of years. The idea, very simply put, is to transform Taiwan from a clash between ideologies into a plurality of voices, exactly as Internet has done to the world 40 years ago.

This is through this idea called civic technology, civic meaning that it enables the society to work together better, and technology, meaning that we make it simpler for things to happen. For the past couple of years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked the top country worldwide for Internet participation, for broadband as a human right, for open data, for things like that.

All of this was because, at the end of 2014, the premier at the time declared that open government, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence is going to be the national direction onward. It’s almost a U-turn, and we’ve been working on that direction for four years now.

Why was that? Because four years ago, there was a public demonstration. We occupied the Parliament for 22 days. This is in direct answer to the question about, "What about people who hoard the information, who hoard the power?"

At the time in 2014, the MPs were on strike. They refused to deliberate substantially the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA, because of some weird constitutional loophole that I will not go into. They refused to deliberate substantially that agreement. That creates a window of legitimacy so the students just occupied the Parliament and did the work of the MPs for them.

This is a demonstration in the sense of a demo, a demo of a better way to talk about a service and trade agreement that involves half a million people on the street and many more online. It’s called the Sunflower Movement.

Around the occupied parliament, there is more than 20 NGOs, many of them that goes back to decades of working on human right, on labor right, on environmentalism, and things like that. Each NGO deliberate the CSSTA from one different angle, and the people who go to the Occupy site just cross-pollinate the ideas.

Our work as the G-0-V or g0v community is to be a neutral facilitator that enables everyone who talks about everything to be broadcasted online, to have a live transcript online, to be translated online, to make sure that in any of the NGO booth, anybody can see, at the end of the day, what other NGOs have deliberated and how the consensus is made around that day.

Every day, we check the points that people have general, broad, rough consensus. Every day, we begin with a list of the unresolved issues of the previous day, read aloud by the students in the occupied parliament. This process over 22 days is very much unlike other Occupies, which diverge over time into an agenda of everything and nothing.

In this case, in the Sunflower Movement, the agenda just coalesced, converged over the three weeks. At the end of it, there’s five very firm commitments and general consensus of everybody who participated that then the head of the parliament took and agreed. The occupy was a success. it demonstrated to the entire country that it is possible to get consensus, even from very divisive topics from very diverse groups.

What is g0v, The civic type of people who provide those communication and digital facilitation methodologies?. G0v was started in 2012. I joined in 2013. It is a very simple idea. All the governments there, this is in Taiwan, ends in gov.tw. I’m sure it’s the same around the world, .gov.something.

For any government service like the legislative, the environmental agency, the national budget, you name it, anything, the civil society participating in the g0v movement just built a shadow website that correspond to our reimagination of the government services. By changing the website address from an O to a zero, you get into the shadow government that provides the same information in a more interactive, more fun, more interesting way.

For example, the inaugural project of g0v was budget.g0v.tw that shows the national budget that used to be hundreds of pages of PDF files in a way that is interactive, fun, understandable. You can drill down to exactly the part of the budget that you care about and start a real-time conversation around that particular budget and the spending and procurement around it.

All the g0v projects, we relinquish our copyright. Because of that, in the next procurement cycle, municipalities and national government can take a shadow website and make it the official website without paying for license, or trademark, or patents, or anything like that.

In computer science language, we fork the government, fork meaning that we take something that’s already there going to one direction, take it into another direction with the hope of it actually changing to the direction that we’re taking it, we merge back to the government.

Today, in the government website join.gov.tw, you can see all the 1,300 ministries’ projects, all their KPI standing procurements. Anything that you make a public comment will be met with real-time response from career public service without having to go through MPs and so on.

The civic tech people around that time had a fun time working with half a million people on the street. Most importantly, around the end of 2014, there was the midterm mayoral election. In the mayoral election, very interestingly, all the mayors who did not support the Occupy lost the election. All the mayors that did participate or support the Occupy won the election. Some of them didn’t even prepare their inauguration speech.

They surprisingly found themself elected mayors. From that point onward, everybody has to say open government, collective intelligence. Otherwise, they don’t get to be mayors.

It creates a massive change in Taiwan’s political culture.

I think the reason why that there are so many people working in the civic tech is really we are the first generation, I’m 37 now, that can do democracy for real. I still remember martial law. The people younger than me don’t remember the martial law anymore.

When the freedom of the press was first given, I think 1987 or something like that, that’s the same year as personal computers. For us, Internet, democracy, computers, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, they happened in the same year. They are the same thing, it’s the same generation, and so the younger generation, they see democracy and Internet as deeply intertwined.

That is also why there’s so many people working in the Taiwanese free software community. When we see "free" in free software, we always think freedom of assembly, freedom of speech because we know freedom doesn’t come for free. Our parents’ generation, our grandparents’ generation worked very hard to give the freedom, and we need to use the freedom to keep Taiwan free.

Around that same time, civic tech people were invited then to the national government and municipal governments as mentors, advisers, understudy ministers to advise the public service on the art of communicating with people and collective intelligence since it’s a national direction now.

In 2015, we started working on many different cases. I’ll just share one with you. This one was called sharing economy. Around that time, Uber entered Taiwan without a professional driver license, professional rental cars, or anything, just people, amateur drivers, charging each other and so on. It is actually a global thing. They started operation all over the world. All the red ones are the ones that are disputed.

This is like a virus of the mind, a meme. The meme is something like this. It says that programming code dispatch cars more efficiently than regulations and laws. We just need to follow algorithm code, instead of following laws. It’s OK to break the law, because the law is too slow, and code moves faster. That was the sharing economy meme back in 2015.

Everybody faced a problem around this meme. In many jurisdictions, they maybe shut down their local office of operation, and so on. It doesn’t work, because the app still lives on. It spreads from passengers to driver to passengers.

In Taiwan, we’re an exception. The taxi driver’s union surrounding the Ministry of Transport, demanding negotiation. How do you negotiate with a virus of the mind? How do you negotiate with a flu? It’s not even in the same category.

Our only way, we think, is to inoculate people by having people deeply listen to one another’s thoughts, feelings, around the same thing. We know for sure, because of our working the Occupy, when people heard from 20 different NGO, from 20 different sites, they form a holistic picture in their mind. That is an inoculation against divisive messages.

We thought maybe we can just use the same methods. For half a million people, that proved to work. Uber, the stakeholders just in the thousands is a small case. In that case, we start with this focused conversation method that presents everybody with the facts of the timeline.

Most importantly, we allocated three weeks for people to check on each other’s feelings, like how people feel about UberX in Taiwan. Only when people resonate with each other’s feelings do we move on to ideas. Our face-to-face consultations and advanced ideas are the one that take care of the most people’s feelings. Finally, we turn that into regulations.

This solves an important problem because feelings is a common language that everybody can speak and understand. If we start talking about jargons, about our academic languages, economic, macroeconomic analysis, transportation rules, and things like that, it creates a division of language where people who are specialists speak one language, and people on the street speak another language.

In that kind of divided conversation, we create a gap in understanding, and then in imagination. People will just fill in whatever projection they have. In that situation, ideas grow into ideologies. Once people are hit with ideology, which is a much more potent virus of the mind, people became blind to new evidences. People become blind to each other’s feelings.

In that sense, it’s very difficult to change people out of ideologies. It’s actually impossible. What we do is we change people’s feelings. That is more possible. Based on crowdsourced data from the government, private sector, and the civil society, for the first time, we deployed AI-powered conversation in Taiwan.

This AI-powered conversation is very simple to use. We send a link to all the drivers and passengers and so on, on their phone, using Line, and WhatsApp, and so on. They click, and they see themselves as a small blue circle, an avatar, among the Facebook and Twitter friends that they have.

This resembles the divisiveness or the clusters of people’s feeling around the Uber issue. Very simply put, it works like this. You start with a group of people. You start with the people who are your friends. If you don’t log in, you start with a lot of famous people on Twitter and Facebook.

Then you see yourself here, and then you see one single statement, one single feeling from a fellow citizen that says, "Maybe I think that liability insurance is important," and that’s it. You can click agree or disagree. Once you do, you move slightly, a little bit toward people to feel the same way as you.

The next statement appears from your fellow citizen. You just click again, agree or disagree. As you do so, you just move alongside and find your group, your cluster of people. This has two effects. The first is that you can see even people who don’t feel the same way, they’re your friends and family. Maybe you just didn’t talk about this over dinner. [laughs]

The second thing is that after answering a few yes or no questions, you can share your own sentiment, too, ask for people’s ideas, and call for resonance. What it doesn’t have is the reply button. We discovered if you have the reply button, people work on destroying each other’s credibility. They post cat pictures, or whatever.

It doesn’t focus the statement at hand. Just by taking away the reply button, just as we do on Slido here, if you see something you don’t agree, your best shot is to propose something that you think other people will resonate with, will agree.

It will then automatically mobilize among the networks of private sector civil society in the private sector. Always, we find the end result something like this. This is taken from a consultation in Bowling Green by our US friends, but the Uber case is exactly the same. The people agree to disagree on maybe five divisive ideas. That’s ideological split, but that’s it.

People are actually much more interested and more willing to converge on consensus statements that everybody else resonates. If you look at mainstream media or even social media, you will have the glib perception, like people are really divided because there’s lots of ideology.

That is simply not true. That is just that being amplified by the media that want to maximize controversy. If you actually ask people how they feel like, and press yes or no on their feelings, always they see that their neighbors feel pretty much the same as they do on many basic matters.

In that case, insurance, like safety, like registration, taxation, and things like that, people broadly agreed on, just like during the Sunflower Movement, people broadly agreed. Then we invite all the stakeholders to show up, livestream the consultation, and check with them one-by-one. Like, "This is the will of the people. Do you agree?" They all say they agree.

Otherwise, they will be the villains in this story. "Since you agree, are there some good ideas that are coherent, consistent, that can make it work?" which is why Uber is legal in Taiwan now, but it’s all professional driver’s license, professional rental cars.

You can even call taxis using the Uber app. Has the full insurance and things like that. We understand something like that has been passed in the Toronto area as well. You’re also now rerunning a consultation to look at it two years after the ratification.

This shows a very simple and scalable idea of involving thousands of people in a conversation and reaching a consensus, which is why I was then invited into the cabinet around the time of this ratification as the Digital Minister, running the Public Digital Innovation Space.

When I joined the cabinet, I also run a month-long consultation -- you begin to see a pattern here -- with more than 1,000 subscribers and thousands of inputs. I basically asked one question, "What would you like me to work for the public, and what should be my working condition to negotiate with the Cabinet?"

It’s very interesting. After a month of public consultation, the professional journalists, civic tech people, people from all around the world, asked me questions, and I only answer publicly. All my answers just go to those people subscribing to the newsletter, who then brainstorm and bring in more interesting ideas.

At the end of it, we coalesced on three pillars that forms my compact, not contract, to work with the government, not for the government. The three pillars is, as I mentioned, radical transparency, meaning that everything that I am a chair of, even the internal meetings, I publish the full transcript online.

The same holds true for lobbying and journalism interviews. It’s proven to be very useful. When a lobbyist -- in this case, David Plouffe speaking for Uber at the time -- visits me, it’s not only on the record, like directly, immediately, it’s on 360 record, so that you can put it on the virtual reality goggle and relive the negotiation.

There’s still lobbying, but this is lobbying for the benefit of everybody so that they can see where he stands. I mean literally, [laughs] where he stands or sits on the matters. This really enables the public service to be innovative.

For people who study public administrations here, there’s a classic dilemma for the public service. If they work on something innovative, and that works, then the minister takes all the credit. If they works on something innovative and it fails, the public service takes the blame for not executing well.

It is a pretty bad deal for a career public service to innovate. They don’t do much innovation without the right incentive structure. With radical transparency, it’s exactly the other way around because I publish the full context of the "why?" of policymaking, not just the "what?" of policy that is made by the administration.

Even very early on during the discussion ideation stage, we published the full transcript. If these things turn out to be good ideas, the public servant who proposed this idea gets full credit because everybody’s sees who was the person who proposed something innovative.

If it doesn’t work out, the civil society, the private sector can carry on our conversation and deliver that maybe a social enterprises or whatever, so the risk is also mitigated. If things go wrong, if a journalist doesn’t like it, if there is a controversy, I’m the only minister in the world doing this anyway. Always blame Audrey. I absorb all the blame.

In that situation, people are very willing to innovate.

I’d just like to show you a picture of my office before I go into other Slido questions because I promised that it would just take 20 minutes. I hope it’s working.

This is my office. This is my office in Taipei, the Social Innovation Lab. It is a fun place. The soccer field here, it is drawn by people with Down syndrome and supported by the Children Are Us Foundation, which is one of the oldest and most respected charities from Kaohsiung. They just turned those people with Down syndrome’s drawings into decorations all over the place.

This place is co-created by hundreds of social entrepreneurs and innovators. Around that time, we also held a one-month consultation. You see a pattern here? The consensus is, first, that it needs to be decorated, of course, according to each social entrepreneur’s culture. It need to open until 11:00 PM every day because it’s important for people to mingle. It needs to have a kitchen, a café, and a resident chef.

The minister, I need to be every week, so I’m here [laughs] every week from Wednesday 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Anyone can come and talk to me -- it’s my office hour -- provided that they’re willing to be on the record of the conversation.

I can talk more about this idea of social innovation in a open, collaborative lab setting. You see all those self-driving tricycles running around and things like that? [laughs] For me, this provides a perfect sandbox playing ground for people to test new ideas, like AI and so on, in a harmless way, in a way that people can have firsthand experience without the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about digital technologies.

That’s 20 minutes. Let’s go back to your questions. Wow, 15 questions already. Feel free to raise your hand anytime also.

"Audrey, did you mind sharing your viewpoint about cross-strait relationships, Taiwan’s international status, and how those can be improved by digital technology?" For sure.

The t-shirt I’m wearing has 17 colors. These are the colors of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs, for people who are not very familiar with it, are the set of consultation results published by the UN after the UNDP run a consultation. The Sunflower is half a million people. The UNDP consulted over one million people, so more people around the world.

After a consultation called A Million Voices, there was a report. They asked people all over the world, "What is the world that you would like to see in year 2030?" They asked people all around the world, and there’s one million different voices, and the people in the UN worked to coalesce these wishes into 169 concrete targets.

Those 169 targets has two important properties. First, each one reinforces the other 168. No matter which of these you work in, it’s guaranteed to reinforce the work on everybody else, so it doesn’t cancel each other out.

The second thing is it encompasses sustainable economy, environment, and society as a holistic picture instead of separating the world into developing and developed countries or into the private, public, and social sectors. It calls for a cross-sectoral approach to reach those common visions for the world in 2030.

For us in Taiwan, in my post as digital minister, when I was visiting New York during the UN GA and talking to my counterparts in other jurisdictions, or when I was in Geneva in the UN IGF -- I participated as a robot to Internet Governance Forum -- I always share my work through the SDG’s lens.

We always say Taiwan can help. By "Taiwan can help," we mean specifically that we solve our own social-environmental problems through economically sustainable means, like good business, to solve innovation issues around social and environmental problems.

My work as digital minister is on 17.18, meaning that everybody agrees on the same reliable data, 17.17 to make sure that it works across sectors, and 17.6 in that we share the work of our results in a way that is beneficial and not colonizing for every other country.

I’ll just use one simple example for two minutes to illustrate this idea of innovation that engage all the different sectors. In Taiwan, there is this global trend, IoT. You may have heard of it, the Internet of Things, that is to say, small devices that can sense the environment and report what is sensed to the cloud, meaning to a large cluster of machines.

People in Taiwan really care about air quality, so without waiting for the government, they engaged themselves using what’s called AirBoxes, meaning really low-cost, less than US$100, devices. Everybody can just put those boxes to their balcony, to their schools, to their homes, wearing it, and so on. It senses the air quality and reports to the cloud.

The g0v people, of course, support it with the ICT technology to visualize. It’s not just to measure the air quality of your local home. Using your home WiFi or some other technologies, you can upload to this global visualization network that lets people view, at a glance, the digital gap in Taiwan [laughs] , where the bulk of Taiwan people has been active, digitally.

There’s many people, of course, in the mountains, in indigenous areas, and things like that. That is the government’s responsibility to support them with accurate air measurements in places that are blank.

This is very rare in our region, in the Pacific Island or in East Asia. Many other ministers tell me they will not wait for the citizen scientists to organize themselves to be 2,000 strong. If it’s 100 people, they will get the leader to join the government. If they don’t join the government and if organized to 1,000 people, maybe they get disappeared.

The reason why is that this really challenge the legitimacy of the central government. If you have two numbers, one measured by the government and one measured by this participatory network, of course people are going to trust this number that’s participated by the citizen, even if those two disagree, and even if this one is more precise.

Because of that, it’s seen as a threat to the governmental authority for many economies and jurisdictions in our region. In Taiwan, we take a different approach. We say we can’t beat the civil society. We join the civil society.

What the government does is manufacture low-cost sensors for people to use, to put new spots on the ones that are indigenous or less digitally inclined. We have broadband as human right, and we listen to those citizen scientists who say they really want to have a AirBox here in the Taiwan Strait, which is partly an answer to the question about the Taiwan Strait.

People really care about the air pollution quality here, because people can then tell whether the air quality is because of domestic causes or whether it’s because of air quality from the other side of the Taiwan Strait.

Of course, no citizen scientist will be able to support an AirBox in that point, because there’s literally nothing there. Even if some of them fly drones, they can’t really do 24-hour drone operations in that particular place. The government can because we have wind turbines, power plants, that we’re setting up in that region.

We say, "We just installed those wind power plants." On the top of each of them, we set up AirBoxes that transmits the air quality back to the civil society-operated network. The most important thing here is cross-sectoral collaboration.

The many people who are environmentalists here don’t necessarily trust the government with their numbers. When we say we’re building a national system that aggregates everybody’s numbers on meteorology, on air quality, water quality, and so on, some of them say, "You guys may be changing our numbers the day before the election. How do we know that you will not do that?"

It’s a hot topic in our mayoral election.

Of course, the national high-speed computing center would never do such a thing, but it is people’s right to distrust the government, and it’s the government’s duty to find ways to trust the people. We innovated and find a few people who are very well-versed in this new technology called distributed ledger technology, or DLT, commonly known as blockchain.

The distributed ledger, simply put, is a way for people to add new numbers to a common ledger. Everybody can write to a ledger book, and it appears automatically to everybody else’s books. You cannot ever erase anything on it. You can only add to it. You cannot change the numbers. Any attempt to change the numbers will be detected by everybody else holding the same distributed ledger.

This is a new technology that’s invented by someone that doesn’t even have a identity, [laughs] the Bitcoin creator. That is a hip technology the past few years. We use DLT, the distributed ledger, to make sure that when the numbers are uploaded to the national supercomputing center, it’s got a snapshot, it’s storing the DLT.

People can see if that we want to change the numbers, everybody will get notified of it, so we’ll never change the numbers. That enables a cross-sectoral trust. Because it’s all open source, meaning we relinquish the copyrights, people around the world can just download the code, put it into open hardware like Arduino or Raspberry Pi, and then just start their own AirBoxes.

If they don’t change the code, the code, by default, uploads to the Taiwan network. [laughs] Of course, they can choose other networks, but that means that, by default, we now have a international network that we can contribute to climate science and things like that.

For that, we have one, single entry point, the website, collectiveintelligence.taiwan.gov.tw, that collectively measures the planet and let the climate speak through wind turbines on the Taiwan Strait and other places.

This is our position, basically. We solve our local social and environmental problems through technology and innovation. It’s good business, also. Then we export that idea through open innovation to all over the world.

You can find our national strategies on AI just by going to ai.taiwan.gov.tw, and social innovation by going to si.taiwan.gov.tw, smart cities by going to smart.taiwan.gov.tw, and biomedical industries by going to bio.taiwan.gov.tw. It’s all very short and very easy to remember.

The medical industry tells us bio and medical are two things. Authoring them under bio.taiwan, they are not so comfortable with it. If you type biomed.taiwan.gov.tw, it goes to the same website.

The domain name is free of cost. It doesn’t cost anything. Whatever you want to call it, just call it that. [laughs] I hope that answers the question because it is actually improved by digital technologies. The people who are in other jurisdictions that may face social pressure by publishing those numbers has in their ally, Taiwan.

Which is why Reporter Without Borders and other international NGOs set up their headquarters in Taiwan. They know if you put your numbers on a distributed ledger and Taiwan receive it, we will never censor your reporting, we will never censor your data.

Yes, there’s follow-up questions.

I know that there’s a lot of dependency on new digital technologies. That implies the backbone of the Internet and Taiwan being sovereign or something like that. I’m wondering what’s the cybersecurity posture of Taiwan? How does that interact with politics in the region with other powers? You have a vested interested in protecting cyber power and that sort of thing.

Our cybersecurity strategy. Just like Estonia, we’re on the front line. Around the year 2000, I personally worked on the advocacy and translation of a project called Freenet, which is a early version of something like Pour or Shadowsocks, and things like that.

Because the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield was still in its nascent stages, it was relatively easy to break at the time. In any case, I personally worked on these technologies. I believe that secure communication is a human right. Because of that, our Snowden moment came way before the Western world.

We understand how is it like to use the Internet technologies for intranet purposes. When we say freedom, it’s not just freedom to create, assemble, and things like that, but also negative freedoms -- freedom from surveillance, freedom from coercion, freedom from all those different state-controlled powers. This is our real situation.

When I became the digital minister, our internal workspace is powered by this software called Sandstorm that I personally contributed. The first act I did as digital minister is to recompile the Linux kernel [laughs] to secure it, to harden it against cybersecurity attacks. Sandstorm, very simply put -- and I can open our Sandstorm instance at any time -- is a what we call productivity software suite.

It has the same functionality as Slack, which is a popular app for people to communicate, as Dropbox, which is a popular app for people to share some files. To Trello, which is how people manage their work in a structured fashion. To Google Doc and Google Spreadsheet, which is a way for people to do writing and calculating collaboratively. I personally maintain the spreadsheet part.

All these things are essential for the government to function and all these things are essential for people to trust each other when we share this to every other ministry. Any public servant can use this system for free, and they can also write new applications to run on it for free.

This calls for what we call a defense in depth. At any time, we can see all my colleagues, what they’re working on, waiting, doing, done. This creates a new culture of more than 20 ministries working together, each other not afraid of letting every other ministry know what they are up to. Of course, if you work in Agile development, this is common sense for the past 10 years, but for the public service, it is something really new.

This, of course, needs cybersecurity so we asked our top-notch white hat hackers...white hat meaning that they attack a system and then they report the vulnerabilities, the loopholes, and file them as CVEs, which is like medals in their profession.

We work with the top white hat hackers in Taiwan, who won second place in Defcon and things like that, consistently the best hackers in the world, for half a year. Because this system is open source, it’s not just attacking from the outside. They look at it line by line and find vulnerabilities in it. They concluded after half a year that this is the most secure sandboxed system that they can find at the moment.

It’s state-of-the-art, so we’re reasonably sure that anything we develop on it, even a junior public servant who knows a little bit of JavaScript, which is a language that writes Web applications, can write an app that lets people order lunch boxes together, which turn out to be one of the more popular apps...

...in our internal app market. [laughs] We also publish them on the wide Internet, too. If you run a digital service here that wants some way to order lunch boxes together, you can totally take our contributions. We have taken photos of all the restaurants around the Taiwan central administration...

...basically digitizing their menu so that around lunch time it will...It’s single sign-on. It automatically remembers my name, my favorite food [laughs] from the last time ordering from this restaurant. Then we can just get lunch boxes together. It’s very useful. [laughs]

This app is written by someone who is not a certified cybersecurity author exactly because the app is running on a abstracted sandbox-contained layout. The defense in depth to this system is there so that anything you put on it will be secure by default. That is the answer to your question.

We make sure that for all the major government projects we allocate at least five percent of the total budget in procurement for cybersecurity. This is the norm. When we do any new project, we ask the white hackers to attack and report before the black hats do.

It creates an economy for them. They’re paid very well. They meet with the president and digital minister every now and then so that they don’t go to the dark side, which has cookies.

That’s the answer to your follow-up question. Any question from the audience? Yes?

You mentioned about Uber. In Taiwan, the situation is quite a bit different. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cheap drivers. If we are not careful about digital technology development in the future, we could have a big impact on people life.

I hope that the government policies and any planning for digital technology in the future should always keep people in mind, number one priority. Otherwise, we will see huge impact. When people are angry, they will vote in that way. Very quick, we will see that on the 24th of November how will be the numbers in Taiwan.

You’re talking about 2030. We’re skipping by in 1933, humankind, mankind, most terrible apocalypse created by Adolf Hitler, and Adolf Hitler was voted by free, democratic election. We should not bet on freedom of democracy too much. We have to defend freedom of democracy because it is so weak. If we cannot make people happy, we will see major change in the future.

Of course. Although that’s not a question, I agree with your sentiments.

How do we solve the taxi driver problem if we are going forward with stronger Uber?

Uber is already involved in Taiwan. We ratified that, just like here, two years ago. We see two branches. If the taxi are already unionized, they already have a app developed by a co-op. They actually partnered with Uber. You can now call the Crown taxi and other taxis using the Uber app. They’ve become one of the venues that the taxis get their business.

Because of that new regulation, you can now call taxis on 7-Eleven, which is a popular -- I’m not sure what they are anymore -- all-purpose store in Taiwan so that you can call a taxi easily. The taxi fleet that comes to you doesn’t have to be painted yellow.

It basically opens the door for taxi that operates in the app-based telecommunication way. The largest fleets, like Taiwan Taxi and so on, they all switched to a Uber-like model with their apps and things like that. They actually enjoy higher living quality.

It is true that if the taxis are not unionized, if they do not join an app-based fleet at the time, their work quality, their life quality, or their earnings and so on are less than before, but that has been a stable trend even before Uber joined.

Taiwan Taxi and other fleets that use a app for active engagement is able to retain customers over repeated calls. The non-unionized and non-app-enabled taxis, which mostly rely on the street hailing of taxis, they are dwindling down even before Uber enters the market. It is essential, I totally agree, that we need to find a way for those taxi drivers to find useful work with dignity in their line of work.

It is also the same actually for, for example, teachers. We are rolling out a curriculum reform next September, and it calls for teachers to be co-learners with students. They are no longer people who hand out authoritarian, standard answers. They must do critical thinking, media literacy and so on with the student.

Not all teachers are all happy with that. There are teachers who are very well-versed in the standardized-testing, East Asian teaching style for decades. When we ask them to change their teaching style, it is very difficult for them to adapt.

This is happening in all the different walks of life. We are working toward this way in two ways. First, we are asking them not to change their work style, but to be, essentially, mentors that look at existing workflow and find out which part of it can be automated. In a sense, they become designers or mentors for a newer generation of people who design digital automations.

Some of them are willing to do this work. For those people who are not that willing to do this work and mentor the younger generation, we improve our lifelong education, so that they can rejoin not just community college, but starting next year, ordinary college also, on what we call University Social Responsibility programs.

The USR programs are also about SDG. If they care about renovation or revitalization of a community, they can join the so-called demand-based transportation service, basically become tour operators and things like that for even future autonomous cars.

They can accompany people who are elders, who live in places where public transport are not that good, and basically repurpose their service to one of long-term care and things like that to accompany people with handicaps, with accessibility needs, and so on, which is at the moment not very well-served by Uber or by the other large app-based taxi fleets.

That is our main strategy. I’m not pretending that this will be an easy migration, but this is what every country in the world is facing with technology and AI. What we’re now doing is just to include everyone as possible, but everyone will take different time to adjust.

Were you ever threatened?

To?

I don’t know, your life? As you said, all of these sudden changes, there are people there, they are very angry about it. Were you personally threatened?

Threatened?

Menaced.

Well, it’s not like assassinating me would stop the digital innovations.

No, I wasn’t personally threatened. People did focus a lot of anger on me personally, but it’s not a personal threat to remove me from the game because...

...it won’t work. [laughs] We do have people, and I will just use one simple example because it’s such an interesting example that illustrate how we deal with the idea that everybody is free to raise e-petitions. That makes everybody’s anger very apparent. Let me just find this somewhere, somehow. I think it’s this one. Last May, not to me personally, but to the Minister of Finance, there was a petition.

We have a e-petition system where anyone who raised 5,000 e-signatures, verified by SMS and email, can ask a ministry to come forward and respond to that person. This person, 卓志遠, says that the tax filing system is explosively hostile to use.

I think that’s a accurate translation. His petition is full of negative energy. I will spare you the content. It went viral. A lot of people called for the Minister of Finance to resign because their experience using Mac, Linux, and iPad to file taxes is really explosively hostile.

If you use Safari, which is the default browser on iPad and Mac, to open our tax filing system page last year, it will say, "Please wait for a few moments for the app to be installed. The Java applet will take some time to start." Because Safari blocks pop-up windows like advertisements, one of our MP waited for four hours and nothing happens.

Filing tax is not a happy experience for most people. If you ask things like that along the way, people are just going to explode.

80 percent of people online who posted on our forum asked the Minister of Finance to resign. They accused the vendor who make this software of collusion, bribery, or whatever. There’s many not quite death threats, but very angry satires and parodies made of the central administration. Not to me personally, but something that...

The person might have wanted to divert business towards his business.

Maybe. It could be.

"I can file your taxes."

Exactly. We don’t know because it’s pseudonymous. We don’t know this person.

How we handle it, very simply, is that in every ministry we have a team of participation officers or POs. This is a new installment as of last year.

It’s a national regulation that says, in every ministry, in addition to the media officers that talks to the mainstream journalists and the parliamentary officer that talk to the MPs, we now have the third kind of people, the participation officer that talks to people who raise e-petitions, that talks to people who are on the street, that talks to people who are very angry maybe at the government, maybe at each other. [laughs]

The Ministry of Finance PO, Yang Chin-Heng at the time, is very quick to respond. Within 36 hours, he posted a public invitation to all the people who complained, saying, "By virtue of your complaining, we cordially invite you two weeks in the future to join our co-design workshop to make a better tax filing experience. Your entry ticket is your complaint.

"If you don’t live in Taipei, feel free to dial into our YouTube live stream and answer and input your ideas over with Slido." It’s also not Taipei-only. After he posted this invitation, it’s changed the sentiment. More than 80 percent of people start offering useful criticism, start offering what they have to input. Less 20 percent are still saying the minister must resign.

Just simple invitation changes things. Finally, we meet this person. He is actually a professional user experience designer. The one who cares suffers. That’s his profession, and his profession has been increasing its standards, led by Apple, for the past 10 years. What’s working pretty well 10 years ago, stays unchanged for 10 years, are now unacceptable by Apple users’ standards.

Basically, he contributed to all these ideas, co-creation workshops, by channeling what people have said online, on Slido, and on our e-petition platform. For people who learn design thinking, this is called user journey mapping. This is one of the very standard, basic tool you learn in your first year in design thinking.

We divided the experience from before the tax filing, during the tax filing, after the tax filing, and into what the user actions are, what their needs are, what their problems are, and what their emotions are.

The important thing here is that during the co-creation workshop we worked with the trolls and worked with the people on the Internet in a way that doesn’t count the numbers of sentiments. If 5,000 people have the same sentiment, it’s just one Post-It note. It doesn’t matter if you mobilize or not. This measures diversity, not counting of heads or showing of hands.

The other thing that we promise is that, unlike other jurisdictions, we will never harmonize your comments. Basically, if the people on the Internet says that this is volatile, the words are just explosively overwhelming, we just post that. If it’s a [Chinese] , it’s just...

...so over-decorated that I feel confused, we just post that. We never harmonize people’s sentiments. We show them on the overview map and check on each other’s feelings. That’s our core principle. We even allow people’s sentiment to challenge our own assumptions, out-of-scope challenges.

Like last year, when people were filing for the tax, at around the end of it, a mascot from the Ministry of Finance will jump up and down and say, "Thank you for your contribution to the country," in a attempt to make people feel better.

Someone from the Internet pointed out, quite brilliantly, "When I think about filing taxes, I don’t feel better at all, so just shorten the experience. Don’t even bother one second to make me feel good. It’s not possible."

Which is, I think, one of the most insightful contributions.

We re-oriented our design based on that and co-created the tax filing system. It used to look like that, and now it looks like this. This year, it’s 96 percent approval rating. The other 4 percent know that their input will be taken into account in the next year’s tax filing system.

Sorry, you had a question?

My name is Gloria Fung. I’m the president of Canada Hong Kong Link...

Hi.

...which is a Canadian community organization supporting the movement in Hong Kong as well as Taiwan. I have a question regarding your innovative technology. Before, I had this idea in the civic engagement perspective. However, there’s always a downside in technology.

My question is, in the face of the common hacking into technology, by creating a fake public opinion, or even like the red hacking into your system, or maybe by inserting a chip in some of the social media devices by foreign powers, such as CCP, in the joint venture in developing 5G technology.

"Joint venture".

Exactly. What would be your strategy and tactics in preventing all those kind of shock power, manipulation, infiltration from happening in Taiwan?

Yes, sorry?

I have a similar question just like what she said.

Go ahead.

How to fight for all these kind of situation, especially the intervention of election in November in Taiwan and how, since Taiwanese government has major international events, that means that China are charged with intervention or they hack Taiwan’s election by using...

They did that in every single election so far.

...that fake news, and how Taiwanese government, using open data, open government, or citizen technology to protect Taiwanese election or Taiwanese democracy.

That’s a excellent question. You asked about both cybersecurity and disinformation. Cybersecurity, I think I’ve already answered, is an early part of a strategy, basically making sure that our white hat hackers, they are not trained academically. They’re trained in the field. [laughs]

They are paid very well, they get recognized, and they have very high social status. We guarantee five percent for major government projects, six percent from municipal, and seven percent for small projects that goes to cybersecurity so they have very good living and don’t go to the dark side.

That is [laughs] the strategy that we have. We have a new Cybersecurity Act that mandates such personnel in all the critical infrastructures and all the different government and municipal government. That’s pretty much what Estonia has done. In the front line, that is what we do. We’ve been doing that for a decade or so now, so we’re pretty much there.

Disinformation, though, that’s another thing altogether. It’s not attacking the fabric of technology. It is attacking the fabric of trust so it’s a different thing, completely different thing. I gave a talk around this topic in the Taiwan US Global Cooperation Training Forum just before I fly to Canada.

I’m going to give you a very abridged version of my talk of how we tackle the problem. First, I use the term misinformation if it’s intentional or wrong, like evidently, objectively wrong, or causes harm, but not at the same time.

For example, satire, parody is intentional and it’s false, but it’s not intentional to cause harm because people know it’s parody. It’s just political commentary. For journalistic speculations, maybe they sometimes cause harm, but it’s not their intention. They have partial information and the government need to clarify it.

Sometimes, there are actors that manufacture information that is intentional and false and intend to cause harm. When those three conditions meet, we call them disinformation, and they’re no longer misinformation. We don’t use the F-word, the "fake" word to describe news in Taiwan. This is a presidential-level decision.

In her National Day speech, she used the term disinformation, instead of fake news. This is the same for the entire administration. We don’t use the words "fake news" anymore.

The reason why is that, personally, both my parents are journalists. The term "fake news" itself, to me, although you can use it to describe disinformation, it carries a connotation that somehow this has something to do with the journalistic output. This is a attack, an affront on the status of journalism in the society.

We need journalism for a democracy to thrive, so we will not mis-associate the term news with disinformation, which is why we never use now in official communications the term "fake news" in Taiwan. We just say organized disinformation, criminal disinformation, but not fake news. This is just terminology.

The second thing is that we observe that it is a global phenomenon that it reveals trust on everybody, not just public sector, but especially among the people with different feelings and thoughts. Around this region, according to the CIVICUS Monitor, we are the only jurisdiction that has a expanding civil society space in terms of freedom of assembly, speech, and so on.

We’re not saying that we’re like Scandinavia, or New Zealand, or Australia, but in our region, we’re the only expanding one and everybody is shrinking. Because of this, maybe in five generations down in the future, the freedom of speech will be seen as the instrumental value as in other jurisdictions.

Here in Taiwan today, freedom of speech is deemed as a core value because I still remember the martial law. Many people still remember martial law and nobody want to go back to the martial law era. That forces us to find innovations that attack, that fight disinformation, specifically without harming the non-disinformation content that is freedom of speech, that is satire, that is journalistic reporting.

We basically said, say you have a friend that you meet every Wednesday for dinner, or you go to movies, or you play basketball together, if you hear bad gossip about that friend, you will not spread the gossip. You would just say, "I’ll check with them the next time we meet." You would just message them and wait for the response.

On the other hand, if that friend only meets you every three months and only speak in legalese, of course, you are motivated to spread rumors about that friend because there is no useful fact-checking or clarification around.

Our government commits ourself, whenever we see disinformation that’s spreading, before it can reach a critical mass -- it’s like epidemic -- within four hours, we’re committed to provide with the evidence-based clarification. This turns the people’s mindset from a real-time strategy or tactical game to a more turn-based game like chess, or bridge, or something.

When people hear something that is disinformation or rumor in the morning, they know that by noontime there will be a clarification from the government. When they hear it on the noon news, they know that by evening news, they will get a clarification. This is our first line of defense.

Second is that if we don’t do that or we don’t do that fast enough, of course, there are room for organized, even criminal disinformation to grow. For that, we’ll have to work with the civil society upon this to reveal their attempts in a timely fashion.

Very briefly, we do two things. First, we enhance availability of the reliable data, encourage effective partnerships by partnering with educators who, as a part of the new curriculum, as I already mentioned, teach media literacy, critical thinking by asking the teacher to serve not as an authority but as a way to challenge student to think independently.

This is like we have some dam that blocks the flood a little bit, that cleans the water a little bit when it’s flooding, but ultimately, we need to teach children to swim. Children need to learn how to tell the set agenda, the framing, the things like that in the information they receive.

If the teachers are authoritarian, if we say some printed font in some voice is always standard answer, disinformation piggybacks on that. It’s like a backdoor in people’s mind. When it’s format in that way, people just spread it without even thinking.

If children are taught the art of critical thinking and media literacy, then that actually gets mitigated. For people who are, of course, still susceptible to such kind of information, we find most people are on encrypted channels. LINE is the largest one. It could be WhatsApp. It could be Telegram or whatever.

There’s a lot of people using only LINE from Taiwan, and those people think maybe LINE is the Internet because they don’t have the time or inclination to learn Google or some other way to check for the facts. If they receive some disinformation on the LINE platform, they are very amenable to just spread it without double-checking because there’s nowhere else to double-check in their Internet-using experience.

It’s very important to bring the fact-checking to the LINE end-to-end system. The LINE company said that they can’t help because it’s end-to-end encrypted. They don’t even know what is being sent in their messaging platform. They only know the stickers that you use, but that’s not very useful.

We partnered, again, with the g0v community. There is a g0v website for everything. [laughs] This is g0v’s contribution. It’s called Cofacts.

Just to make sure that people don’t think g0v is misogynic or something, every time you refresh, it’s changed to a different relationship so it’s not particularly gender-biased. [laughs]

If you go to the Cofacts website, I ask you add that bot as a LINE friend. Once you add it to a line friend -- there’s about 50K, 60K users now -- any time your family sends you something that you think is perhaps a rumor, you can send forward very simply to that bot, and that bot can get back to you.

The bot is literally named is it true or not, zhēn de jiă de. This is a very good first reaction to any disinformation campaign. If you just reply to every disinformation, "zhēn de jiă de, zhēn de jiă de," it turns people’s mind from a fast-thinking reaction to a slower-thinking mode where people stop and think, "Yeah, is it true or not?"

This bot helps to remind people of that, and they just reply very quickly whether this is true or not. The most important contribution of this bot, aside from the media literacy education for the elderly, [laughs] is that we see all the trending disinformation campaigns.

It used to be hidden. If it’s entering encrypted, what we found is that those organized disinformation perpetrators, they pass in different channels susceptible to conspiracy theories and test the strains, like A/B testing it, to find the most viral strain after testing them for a few weeks, before then amplifying it on all the other social media channels. This is like a breeding ground for disinformation.

Before, we don’t have any visibility to this breeding ground, but using exactly the same approach as we did around 20 years ago...I’m a veteran of the spam war. 20 years ago, people thought email will be broken and that our inbox would be taken over by Nigerian princesses, or something like that.

Our work around that time is the same. We have people to flag their junk emails, to contribute to the public awareness. We developed tools like SpamAssassin and things like that. The community organized around what’s called Spamhaus that reveals all the junk mail efforts to reveal the perpetrators and their patterns of operations.

You can see which rumors are being tested and trending here in Taiwan. As you can see, it’s now election season, so many of these are political. On the other hand, you always see, "If you eat something and something together, it will do something to your health."

This one is still trending even though is election season because people genuinely care about the health of their family or something like that. These are still trending even though it’s midterm election.

What’s important here is that it gives each rumor a URL, a website address, so that it can be talked out in the open, so you can share it on social media and ridicule on how ridiculous this is. You can do the fact-finding together. Everybody can join. Basically, it lets people have a complete overview of what kind of campaigns are currently operating in Taiwan.

Around referendum, there’s many rumors now spreading around the five referendum concerning marriage equality, and we’re pretty sure it’s not the CCP. It’s actually Taiwanese people trying to make people vote one way or another in the referendum.

There is a dedicated task force to look at rumors from both sides, and then to devise neutral responses that can convince both sides that marriage, the existing civil code, or some physiological facts and things like that, are not what the rumors are saying. This is important because then it makes people aware that there are concerted campaigns doing their work.

Finally, it feeds to the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center. Once something becomes public knowledge, that’s not in the secret encrypted channel, it becomes the purview of the Taiwan FactCheck Center. The TFCC, which is very active nowadays, they basically look at all the trending disinformation campaigns and do a real investigative reporting style report on whether this is true or not.

They hold themself to a really high standard by disclosing exactly how they’re investigative reporting, their sources, citations, everything, like true journalism work. Because of this, they are part of the International Fact-Checking Network, the IFCN, at Poynter Institute.

Because of their membership, anything that is clarified as wrong here is taken into account by popular social media algorithms such as Google and Facebook. Things that are clarified as wrong by the IFCN member, on average, I’m not just saying in Taiwan, Facebook says it reduces the exposure of these messages to one-fifth of previously, and they’re still working on that.

Having this is very important because this is totally independent. It is not pro DPP or KMT or NPP. These are all very well-respected journalists doing journalistic work. Once they find that these are actually disinformation, it can massively reduce the virality of that information on social media. This are our last line of defense in collaboration with civil society.

Just to recap, media literacy first, then timely response, and then through Cofacts and other bots, reveal those virus before they get really viral. That is how vaccines are made, anyway. Once these are revealed, the Taiwan FactCheck Center steps into that process.

The most important thing is that everything here is transparent and accountable, so everybody can join, and even government itself can be held accountable. If we make any mistake, we correct and clarify within four hours, and it’s also posted on Cofacts and other civil society partnerships.

I hope that answers at least part of your question.

Yes?

It’s excited to know there are so many website to participate as Democrat of Taiwan. Who is the one support and the managing all those, for example, the TFCC?

The funding of TFCC is entirely independent. They are not taking, neither is Cofacts, government money, for the record. If they take government money, if the majority of money is from the public sector, then it creates a conflict of interest. They will not be able to hold ourselves [laughs] to account.

There are many people in the civil society supporting their work. This is a special thing in Taiwan that we don’t find in many other places, at least in East Asia. As I mentioned, our civil society’s development starts even before our first presidential election. Our first presidential election is 1996, but the lifting of martial law is almost 10 years before that.

There’s 10 years of time before the legitimacy of democratic institution is established. The NGOs -- many of them occupied the Parliament -- established their own credibility that has a higher legitimacy even compared to the administration. Some of them continue to this day.

There’s many people who are working on organizations. It could be a co-op like the Taiwan Homemakers Union or it could be a foundation, like Care For Us. It could be a company like Leezen, working on environmental justice and things like that, that has a very high legitimacy and a good business model that’s been running for 30 years, not to mention Tzu-Chi and friends. [laughs]

They are all independently having a good, sustainable business model. When new Taiwan Fact-Checking Center starts, it leverages these old NGOs like Media Watch and Human Right and things like that. The credibility, the human force, the volunteer base and things like that is just like that. [snaps]

After just three months, they joined the International Fact-Checking Network. Usually, it takes years to prove the credentials, but because the people who bootstrapped this all have decades of public credibility, it gets recognized internationally very quickly.

This is unique in Taiwan that people in the social sector has organized even before the democratic institution, and even now has higher legitimacy in many areas of sustainable development compared to the public sector.

I thought there was...So sorry.

I’m curious. You mentioned Estonia has very similar model to Taiwan, where they have gone completely digital. Do you see, personally or through the government, any calls on studying your digital governance model and any appetite for applying something in other parts, Eastern, Western societies, Northern, Southern?

I’m just so in awe of everything that I’ve heard and learned, but just the very governance model, is there appetite? Are people calling you for stories?

Yes. As we speak now, a delegate is in South Korea for the Open Government Partnership Summit in the Asia-Pacific region. People from civil society and our National Development Council, our Gender Equality Department, and so on, are all in South Korea sharing our digital governance approaches as we speak.

As we speak, there’s a delegation from my office, three people, designers, coders, in Madrid, working with Madrid City, applying this kind of collective intelligence, but on public construction projects. We can all put down VR or mixed reality and see a new airport from the feeling of the future airports.

Which is one of the things that we cannot actually do now because not all people can view a movie or a PowerPoint and visualize a building in their head. It requires an architect’s training. If we can put people into hypothetical architect’s visions, like live in it and do deliberation within it, it’s called Holopolis. The Spain people really likes it and so we’re working with them.

The e-petition system, we took the commentary system from Better Reykjavik in Iceland. At a moment, one of my colleagues is working with the Icelandic pirates, Pirate Party, to work on this information, and port this model that we just saw to WhatsApp and other venues that makes sure that Icelandic elections are not tampered with by disinformation and things like that.

We do participate actively in both the Digital Nations working group and the Open Government Partnership events.

Yes?

With all due respect, Minister, looking forward to digital technology and the future AI, do you keep an eye constantly on Gini factor because rich people are getting much richer and poor people are getting poorer?

Yes, definitely. This is a very good time to introduce our AI network of development. This is a AI project, but it doesn’t take anyone’s job away. This is basically a playground, a sandbox for people to feel how, I don’t know, wolves and early hominid co-domesticated into dogs and human beings by learning to follow each other’s eyes, nose, gestures, and things like that.

What I’m saying is that you need to solve a real social problem and the norms need to be set by everybody, not just people in Silicon Valley or MIT. Then, these things must be open in the sense that local people must be able to tinker it.

This is actually the idea of personal computing. Back in 1980, when personal computer is known for, late ’80s, the previous thought train was of a mainframe computer, a huge computer that is maybe one-tenth as powerful as this iPad, and people connect to it as terminals. You don’t have any control of the logic that’s running on the mainframe.

The promise of personal computer and, later on, of mobile computing is that you can install the apps that fits your lifestyle and they co-evolve with you. It must be the same with AI. People need to be able to interrogate, to communicate, to change this flashing red light when it’s feeling uneasy to maybe a emoji or a dog face or whatever as they feel like. This is what personal computing means.

Which is why we make sure, first problem is human rights and AI integrated to all levels of education, so that all children can feel that AI is something that they have agency over. It’s not something they subscribe to and has agency over them. This is the utmost importance in Taiwan’s AI development philosophy.

When anyone applies for a sandbox experiment, which is a application to break laws and regulations for a year to prove that it’s good for the society...This is a new innovation system we introduced just this year.

Anything that you have in AI for banking, AI for transportation, AI for, I don’t know, parking lot allocation, you name it, you can go to sandbox.org.tw and say, "There’s a social problem or environmental problem here or economic unique to regional revitalization. I think that this regulation or law is blocking the society from progressing.

"I would like a year to prove to the people who are on the ground, the vulnerable people, the people who are the most impacted with technology, that this is a good idea." If after a year, people think is a good idea, it becomes law. It becomes regulation, but only if people who are impacted knows and agrees that it’s a good idea.

If it’s about platform economy, like sharing your parking lot space, it goes to the National Development Council. If it’s AI banking, it goes to FinTech. If it’s un-crewed vehicles, which will pass maybe early in January next year, it goes to the Ministry of Economy.

This is, again very different. In other countries, it would go to the Ministry of Transportation, which would have very different rules for ships and boats, that kind of transportation, and drones that flies, and cars. For the Ministry of Economy, they are all the same. You can have lots of hybrid that flies while it drives and are amphibious, like goes to the land after sailing for a while.

It all needs to correspond to a local need. In the remote islands, they don’t have sufficient boat to transport them. In the rural or indigenous areas, the MRT doesn’t quite go there, so they need a bus that serves as the last mile of MRT or things like that.

They can all experiment for a year, including the business model. If it’s a good idea, it becomes law or regulation. If it’s not a good idea, the entire society learns something. The data is shared for the next innovator to try a different angle, so it build upon each other.

Finally, if the MPs need time to deliberate on the law level -- we’re a continental law system so we need a real law change -- if it has to go back to the Parliament, you can continue to operate, to serve the people’s societal needs for up to four years, essentially in monopoly. [laughs] Afterwards, of course, a competitor will enter the market.

We basically tour around Taiwan. I personally, every Tuesday, tour around Taiwan. Wednesday, I’m in Taipei, in the Social Innovation Lab. Every other Tuesday, I’m...This is Hualien, and people, who are even more remote, like Taitung, can teleconference in.

Anytime I go there and talk to the local people who are the most impacted by technologies, they would tell me the real social needs and environmental needs. At the same time, 12 ministries related to social innovation gather in the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei and sees through my eyes.

I’m like a investigative reporter. They see what I see in the place that I stay for a couple of days or I meet with local indigenous assembly or things like that. All the ministries related to social innovations are there.

Previously, the people here would say, "We need our local co-op to be recognized and some procurement rules." They would say, "We have a local association that we’d really like to be a social enterprise by using impact investment programs."

Usually, in the previous bad old days, they would talk to one ministry and that ministry will say, "Oh, we’re just the Ministry of Interior where we register it. We’ll have to talk with the economic minister, who will have to talk with the minister of health and welfare." It would take five months before anything even goes back to that innovator.

Now, because all the ministers are there, it’s impossible for them to go into that bureaucratic flow. They have to, in a very relaxed mood, with a resident chef, remember...

...brainstorm to solve a local need within two weeks.

Every local issue that’s brought up need to be resolved on the record after two weeks, after each meeting. Then, I tour to another place, carry on the conversation. If they cannot be reached within two weeks, sometimes it’s resolved by another regional innovation meeting to resolve issues on the previous region. If that doesn’t happen in two weeks, we list it as a open challenge for people to work on.

If you want to apply for a sandbox experiment or something, you can cite that as a rationale. Just by surfacing this problem and having on the record radical transparency, record of the ministers saying, "We really don’t know how to solve this problem," you get a automatic pass into the sandbox system, where you can take the try as a social entrepreneur to solve the problem.

We will adjust our regulation and interpretations for you. This is co-creation not just for the people, but with the people. That is the philosophy.

Yes?

The culture that you have and that your government has introduced is really inspiring. The question I have is let’s just say, in a hypothetical scenario, there’s a change in government. How do you make sure that this culture of collective intelligence and open government sticks beyond, say, you being in office?

I’m in this for the long haul, [laughs] for the long run. I joined as a understudy minister, as a advisor to public service, around the end of 2014. The people who invites me, Minister Jaclyn Tsai, Deputy Premier Simon Chang, Jaclyn was from IBM Asia, director of law IBM Asia, Simon Chang was director of engineering in Google.

I was at the time, of course, independent contractor and advisor at Apple. We share very similar ethos. We share this idea of rapid innovation, listening to users, and working with people as people. We are all non-partisan. I don’t have any party affiliation. I don’t even care about political parties.

People know that I’m here for the public service, who are neutral and who are here also for the long run. When the transition happened, after the election, Simon Chang transitioned to Dr. Lin Chuan. The two premiers, both independent, did something that’s never happened in Taiwanese political history.

Simon Chang asked all the ministries to publish a checkpoint document, including all the government, where things are going, including data and evidence and everything to the public Internet, and for the new premier and the new cabinet to download from the public Internet to complete the transition.

He even asked for the transition to be live-streamed, but people said, "There’s too many meetings. Maybe we just publish a summary," which they did. In any case, that benefits me because I joined a new cabinet five months after they formed. I joined October. The new cabinet was in May.

I was able to hit the road running, so to speak, because the transition was in public, and I can study the transition documents, as can any other person on Earth. This basically says anything that is institutionalized as open government in Taiwan, there’s no going back because it is the new norm. People start to feel that they’re entitled [laughs] to get this from the government.

Every cabinet must only move more forward because when we talk about, for example, the Join platform, the e-participatory regulation, and things like that, the KMT people love to say that this was passed under President Ma Ying-jeou [laughs] because that’s what they did around 2015.

President Tsai Ing-wen, of course, has open government as her main campaign. Also, the Participation Officers’, which was signed into effect by Premier Lai Ching-te, was because when he ran for mayor for the Tainan City for the second term, open government was his platform.

For a while, he has a very interesting relationship with city council. He refused to go to the city council because the head councilor was involved in some, I don’t know, criminal investigation or something like that.

Instead, he bypassed the city council and went precinct to precinct, township to township, and talked directly to people and do the regional innovation thing with the research and development office, Dr. Chen Mei-ling, taking into account the requirements of all the different precinct, being a direct democratic mayor, instead of going through this City Council and answer to a representative democracy.

Of course, that got resolved and later on he entered the city council, but then he had firsthand experience. After he became the premier, not only he signed this PO regulation, but he personally went on a tour to all the different cities and counties in Taiwan, exactly the same as he did in Tainan City, helped by the head of National Development Council, the same Dr. Chen Mei-ling in Taiwan, Tainan.

This is great because he went on a economic innovation tour, and I go on social innovation tour, but both with the idea of regional revitalization, which is our new national direction starting next year. What I’m saying is that open government on a national and municipal level, it is a culture that cannot be turned back now, but in the township, precinct level, that is just now being devolved into those government and jurisdictions.

Tainan City, for example, just adopted the Participation Officers Network and many other cities are committed to do that after the midterm election. So, yeah, I’m very optimistic. I’m non-partisan. Whichever party runs the cabinet, I’m working with the cabinet, not for the cabinet anyway. I’m here for the long run.

Shall we go back to Slido for another...

...10 minutes. I’ll answer quickly without reading out loud because the anonymous questions are often the most interesting.

The Examination Yuan is an interesting partnership in our open government work. We have a five-branch government. The Examination Yuan and the Corrective Yuan are unique inventions by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. We are in partnership with those two very unique branches. [laughs]

The Corrective Yuan, which has no counterpart -- I don’t even try to translate that -- is the one that audits the administration and makes sure that we keep ourselves honest. We enroll them into the open government platform by providing them this free platform that they can ask people for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, on each every innovation by the public sector.

Before, they were seen as people who blocked the progress. Now, they’re seen as people who further the process by looking at each new thing and ask the people, "What are your fears, uncertainties, and doubts? We will professionally collect all your doubts into nine points of new auditing questions and ask the minister in charge of social entrepreneurship." That’s me. [laughs]

I will answer with the nine point-by-point ways, which they then establish the new auditing rules so the innovation policy sector can continue, and they can answer to the Corrective Yuan bosses, saying, "We have answered all the people’s doubts. So, obviously, we have done our job."

Instead of being the enemy of both the citizens and administration, they’re now friends of both citizens and administration just by shifting to open government. We’re very envious of them. When we pose a new question for people to contribute ideas, a public consultation, if it’s obscure, like domestic, local, urban renovation, maybe 40 people came and we considered that a success.

For the same small-scale thing, when the Corrective Yuan ask, "Who has fear, uncertainty, and doubt?" as you can see, hundreds of people came. Obviously, it’s easier to put out your doubts, rather than your suggestions. That’s the Corrective Yuan.

The Examination Yuan, similarly. We have petition systems that works for the public service also. For example, there is a popular e-petition, obviously by public servants, that petitions for the new leave of absence rule. Previously, when we take a leave, it has to be at least half a day long.

Nowadays, because people really want to care for the elderly, or actually there’s a teleworking initiative going on also, they petitioned collectively. That Examination Yuan was very active in actually contributing to the open government process. They just ratified this e-petition by actively participating in the process that accurately reflects the collective will of the public servants.

They can be seen as the enlightened one. Then, the administration, because it’s still waiting for a few days to publish, the pressure is from Examination to the administration to ratify this new rule that is being petitioned by 5,000 public servants.

Again, Examination Yuan is now seen as a friend to the public service, rather than someone who holds back the public service. All this is because, as I said, the credit is shared. The credit is spread in a way that it’s due, and the risk is absorbed by participation.

Nobody needs a rationale or a signature by the upper echelon of the public service, because they can cite the political will and the consensus and say, "This is what people really want." The Examination Yuan and the Corrective Yuan are totally on board with this philosophy as well.

Do you worry that I would become a tool of neoliberal capitalism? I am a vessel of conservative anarchism, which is very different from neoliberal capitalism. Anarchism means very simply that I take no orders and I give no orders. I have not given a single order as the digital minister.

Everybody in my office volunteered to work with me. I had a agreement with the Secretary General that I can poach at most one person from each ministry who volunteer to work with me. Literally, I can have 34 staff because there’s exactly 34 ministry. At the moment I have 22. For example, this is our Foreign Affair Ministry [laughs] delegate to our office.

This creates a culture of voluntary association, of people just brainstorming any idea, anything that they want to do, printing a comic book or whatever, [laughs] print a t-shirt. People just go ahead and do it. Because every ministry is a different social or economic value, if something that is a consensus of these people, it is of no harm to any ministry.

Any innovation that we do can be done in a way without resorting to vertical power. We’re just entirely horizontal power, new power, as we call it. There’s a book about it.

Anarchism is, by default, a way for people to associate that achieve what we call Pareto improvement, that is to say improvement that leaves nobody behind, and through a conservative lens, meaning that I don’t go to the Department of Defense and say, "Tomorrow you’re going to adopt radical transparency." I’m not doing that.

People only bring to me cases that they feel are wicked problems, meaning that they’re structural problems that has hit the Nash equilibrium, meaning that nobody can act alone to solve their problem. Everybody need to coordinate, form a consensus, and move to solve the problem.

If the problem is of this shape, it’s brought to my office for deliberation and open government. If they think that they can solve it just fine with their old vertical power model, they don’t even bother me. I don’t even know about these things. This is a way that compliments but doesn’t reinforce neoliberal capitalism or any form of vertical power.

Sorry.

You talk a lot about achieving consensus. Consensus, by definition, is a consensus of the majority.

No.

No?

No.

How do you...

A vote is a vote by majority.

Yes.

A consensus is something that’s acceptable, that everybody can live with.

Can you talk more about how do you address, let’s say, a small vocal minority or if there’s some issue that’s a thorn in the side of the majority, that it needs...

No, we don’t work on majority rule. There’s a document called "The Tao of IETF," of Internet Engineering Task Force. It says, "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code," meaning that anyone who has even anything, as you said, in a minority so to speak...We don’t say that. We say plurality.

We don’t even look at those numbers. Those numbers don’t even mean anything. As you can see, these numbers of people have no correspondence to the area of diversity of their opinions. If you mobilize 5,000 people and vote exactly the same way, you will add number here, but area will not increase because this is diversity of opinion. This is not by majority rule.

We say if we are to enter to the agenda, you need to convince everybody in every group. It’s called a supermajority. Especially, you need to convince people who are diametrically opposed to you. Only then it becomes a binding agenda for the rough consensus process.

We explicitly said that any sentiment that only has local consensus we read that aloud, but it’s not entering the agenda. We respect people’s differences, but only the commonalities enter the agenda.

There’s many technical ways of achieving that. There’s the idea of overlapping consensus. There’s the idea if you abstract to the common value high enough, people can always reach a common understanding. There’s the idea of sustainability. I can’t go into details, but that is our philosophy.

We’re almost at time, like 10 minutes. Let me go back here.

Maybe the last one.

We did the disinformation one.

Some major social consensus challenges facing Taiwan. I would say that there are many people in Taiwan at the moment still believe in the authoritarian power structures. There are people who still think that a efficient authoritarian rule is sometimes better than a somewhat more deliberate one-month-long decision-making process that involves a rough consensus.

To me, one month or two months is a good time period to have a iteration, but there are still some people who believe that you really need to fast-track things by a majority rule or by just some political will, to not go through a proper conversation for two months.

For me, this is a culture of the people who are educated before the martial law gets lifted, and the people who gets educated after, especially the educational reform of the ’90s. I think the time is on our side, and also [laughs] that we do all we can through lifelong education efforts to make sure that people respect the plurality.

This, to me, is the difference between IT and digital. IT, which Taiwan is known for even before lifting of the martial law, is more like hardware, precision, low-cost, supply chain management, and so on, which Taiwan is still very strong, but we cannot use that culture for the consensus-forming, democratic culture because we’re a digital culture.

I’m going to read you a poem at the conclusion, which is my job description when they asked me for a job description two years ago, that highlights the difference between the IT way of thinking about politics and the digital way of thinking about human beings. It goes like this.

When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of Beings.

When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience.

And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always keep in mind, always remember that the plurality is here.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much Minister Tang. I was so impressed, inspired, and amazed by the presentation. I learned so much from it. I was also very impressed by the fact that the digital infrastructure in Taiwan is so tied together with the civil society in the spirit of transparency and political participation.

I’m very, very impressed. Perhaps there is, in fact, something really could be called the Taiwan Wave and the Taiwan Way. I can see your t-shirt say, "Taiwan can help."

Yes.

Please help us.

I can see many people here would be helped, many politicians in our political systems, many people in the room, whether you are social innovators, entrepreneurs, or academics. I already want to steal many ideas from this. I think Asian Institute probably could use some of these ideas as well.

I’m so glad that I steal you from the workshop that we were supposed to participate. Thank you again. Thank you.

Thank you for the great questions. Thank you.