Fantastic. Thank you so much, and have a good day.

If you can communicate for the transcript then…

Thank you so much. It was a great pleasure. Thank you so much

Fantastic. I could go on for hours, but that is exactly the amount of text that we can publish. I’m very happy and excited about it, of course. It’s really great. I hope we can continue the conversation at some point in Taiwan. I would love to come and maybe ...

It’s fantastic. One last question. When we talk about education, what was your digital education? You talked about this at one point, but how did your education to what you are now happen?

Server farms are treated as goldmines, highly protected. No one knows where they are. That adds to the impression that this is something secretive. Is there any idea about that?

A bigger problem today is that many people do not understand the technical foundations of that process. Do you think it would be important to have a building where people could actually learn that? There is not a central Pompidou for the digital age or a public server farm where ...

I always wondered why there is no tour, why there’s no public server farm where school classes can be toured, but also where politicians can go and understand what does it mean if I agree in giving away a certain amount of data somewhere.

I always ask myself if you want to educate a new generation that understands technically what’s going on, what hacking means, what digitalization means. It’s not only the Internet that is a place of information on what digitalization means, but you can also imagine new spaces where you explain to ...

When we talk about public life in cities or in the countryside, if we talk about public buildings, it comes always to theaters and museums, etc., and all these new typologies where our data is stored and managed, like the server farms, are hidden somewhere in towers or in the ...

As an architect, I have an interest in what you said about public buildings, and museums, and other cultural facilities.

That must be maybe also an annoying question to you. It works so well in Taiwan. It’s interesting to hear what would be your advice for the EU, for example, how to manage that situation with corona apps? Is there anything where you would say this works in Taiwan so ...

An inevitable question always is what would be an advice to countries like Germany in the situation there now with the digitalization but also with digital public tools like health apps and corona apps?

Again, maybe you can put that in a nutshell. What is Taiwan’s third way between an idea of a society that is depicted in a smart city run by private companies and, on the other side, by a state driven surveillance system? How would …Taiwan’s position in that?

I’m interested if you have a dystopic view of the world to see, on the one hand, a dis enablement of public governance through private companies lodged in America, which is sold as a smart city concept, and you see in other states a very authoritarian, state driven idea of ...

If you look into these plans for Europe, digitalization in Europe also means turning cities into so called smart cities. It’s quite disturbing to see what is proposed under the banner of comfort and security, and how certain ideas of liberty and self determination are wiped out from the map ...

Are you using the term smart city in Taiwan or is that a weird western concept?

Is there any reaction to it? Do you see a backdraft of people from cities to the countryside, or is it too early to…?

We saw dramatic shifts of local populations into larger agglomerations everywhere in the world. Japan has a problem to maintain rural populations, also the elderly people there. Is, in Taiwan, anything happening where you could describe that already the relation between city and countryside is changing with the help of ...

Could you already measure an effect of that policy?

These Hackathon awards are just open for every branch, every idea presented?

That’s also a chance to think in a new way of the relation of cities and countryside. The countryside, when it comes to digitalization, always had been disconnected from certain technical requisites to enable people to stay there and still have a good Internet connection in the countryside. Is there ...

I think you cannot disconnect that anymore if you don’t have a public square and then you have the digital…but one is in front of the other. Is there any…?

I’m very interested also, Minister, your office is part of that change. In your country, also town planners and architects are designing a new form of public life together with people who…digitalization.

That is amazing because digitalization has such a huge impact on the way how we live our lives, how we organize what we call work and what we call private life. I think that…potential to that.

Public sphere has always had, let’s say, a physical component. People would meet in marketplaces. The city was, of course, a construct of rooms and of spaces where people could meet and gather. Also, Taiwan has, in many fields, a big appetite of creating new forms of social spaces in ...

That is amazing. Another question I have is dealing with the question of the idea of the public sphere.

Is there anything in planning in Taiwan that enables people to use their electronic devices to comment on governmental decision and to …proposals? How is that working? How is this… ?

I’m interested in the idea that these devices could also be used for different forms of governance where the people have a much more direct way to comment and be involved in political…

What is your experience in using that model too?

I remember the discussion that we had in Barcelona when…tried to interface the…who controlled data flow back to telecommunication companies, they were not happy. It has been a fight to convince companies that they still work profitably, in a profitable way. People have more chances to control what is done ...

Have you encountered resistance by private partners? This sounds very harmonic. I think the model is absolutely right.

What is Taiwan’s position in that discussion? How do you reconcile these ambitions of private companies to use the data of activists, and politicians, and the civic society to keep in position or, practically speaking, to reclaim data? What is the endpoint in the discussion on the reclaimed data movement?

…data ownership. Also, the things that we saw in Australia in recent times show that there is rising tensions between state organisms, the people, and private data collectors.

In many countries, the pandemic is seen also as a test model for much far fetched ambitions in the digitization of a society. At the same time, we have a rising preoccupation with the fact that data is generated by the people and should be owned by the people.

I want to come back to that point. You said when it comes to privacy issues, you say you track the area, the block, but not the room. That is a remarkable decision. It’s not a natural given. Somebody must have decided that. What was the process to say, “This ...

Are you working with a team of coders who organize this reuse of data that you described? How do you choose them? Where have they been studying? Can you talk a little bit about your thoughts in terms of coders?

How is the Taiwanese state dealing with the situation that many private companies are trying to take over the health sector? What is, to your view, the future of health care in the situation of when it comes to the question what is private and what is public? How do ...

We’re still doing OK, but we could be much better if the state had been much more in charge of the care system. This became obvious also in other European countries where the system collapsed.

Hospitals, if you want to say informatic way, have been turned into asset machines and privatized. Now, in some cases, the German health system is overwhelmed because it cannot offer that supply that’s needed to fight the pandemic. We see a shortage of certain material, of doctors. Care workers have ...

When it comes to health care in Germany, we have a problem that many services have been privatized over the last 20 years. Formerly state owned hospitals have been privatized. The services have been adopted more to ideas of efficiency than ideas of caring for the people and ideas of ...

Is there any form of cooperation when it comes to private public partnerships? How is that managed? In Germany, many people are fearing that — this is a broader topic — that the public sector is more and more vampirized by private companies and their interests.

It’s also communication used by doctors, for example.

I see. Basically, someone who has no phone is given a phone and is …to other control calls.

Or is it a tracking device? I don’t know if this still exists in Taiwan, but if somebody says, “I don’t want to use the mobile phone.”

This works via the mobile phone?

No, perfect. Has there been a change in the attitude of the Taiwanese population towards these digital measures? I recently read there was also some criticism about data collection in Taiwan.

I know it’s hard to put that in a sentence, but if you would have to describe your efforts in fighting the pandemic, how would you describe the moment that you started the strategy that apparently seem to work now for Taiwan? What was the moment…?

If you look at the German app, it says to everybody since months, “No risk. Everything is OK. No risky encounters.” No one believes it anymore, and so, in a way, we’re trapped.

In Germany, we are, of course, very envious how Taiwan handled the situation. At the same time, there’s a large discussion in Germany now on the question of digitalization and digital rights. And our app hasn’t worked that well.