of founder and CEO of Creative Experts and our product named Torango.com. Are you in the journey where your, no path seems to be deserted. It doesn't mean that you're in a wrong path. You're actually in the path where your ambitions dominate your comfort. Welcome to the world of entrepreneurship. Today, we're gonna talk about how we bring clarity to complexity, yeah. Can anybody solve this mathematical problem? Unless you have one thing called knowledge about sine-thetas and cos-thetas of the world, you cannot even imagine to solve this problem. The first key word that I want to talk about is knowledge, the next segue. Can anybody think about the workflow? This is a classic workflow from an enterprise system. So unless you think from a process-driven angle, you cannot even think about solving that puzzle of workflow system. So the second keyword that we're gonna talk about today is process, chip designing. The most important thing in solving the chip design or adding something to the chip is science. So the third thing that we want to talk about is science. So there's three keywords. Why am I talking on a UX conference like this? It is because user experience is no more an art. It's a science, it's a process. It is a knowledge that you need to infer from the your surroundings to design something better for the industry. Let me walk into this. Let us take a classic example of enterprise mobility, which is as complex as it can be in the world because that's most complex systems. The reason why I've selected this is if somebody can solve this enterprise mobility gamut of things with the user experience, then it is a use case that we can set to. So that's the reason I've selected this. And we'll see how this knowledge, process, and science apply together, solve this biggest thing called user experience, enterprise mobility. To introduce myself, I worked in the companies like Symantec and Motorola earlier solving their enterprise mobility problems and helping Walmart or the world get their enterprise mobility products. With that knowledge, we started Storango. Why is this enterprise mobility complex? The reason why it is complex is because this fellow takes three different things into picture, people, complex to handle, process, again next big complex things to handle, and finally should not reduce the impact of technology in this world. Enterprise mobility works on all these three. It requires impact, I mean it requires all these things to work together. Let's go deep into it. Each individual block has its own problem statements to carry with people. Here if you see people are workers, the employees in the team, the team and the individual, they have to work as individuals and also collaborate to the team, so it becomes a complex network by itself.  So enough complexity involved there. Process, when you say process, information, tasks, it follows a certain process to close it, you was talking about a priority one, priority two and priority three, there is a process attached to all the priority activities and non-priority activities, everything takes a process, not reducing the business operations and business ecosystem process which makes more complex because as a business, if I'm ecosystem partner with somebody else, complexity increases. Now we come to the technology. Technology is equally problematic because the infrastructural options in the real world now, say for example, mobiles are getting, every month you get a new set of devices and these days bring out your own device concept which most of the enterprises take up is adding more complexity to it with two major keywords like compatibility and security. So looking at all these things and our most important problem like user interfaces. So all these things make the enterprise mobility complex. And what we have attempted like from a company called store on go, what we have attempted is to solve this enterprise mobility as an issue for not for the big boys but bring this enterprise mobility closer to small and medium businesses.  We wanted a small boutique should get the entire enterprise mobility needed for them with a very click. So this itself is an interesting story to talk about today. At the same time, what if we want to add more masala to it? There are more than 10,300 plus categories identified in the small and medium business segment which needs enterprise mobility. That's because a better story today. So let us, this is a journey that we made like we're a wage old company. We started in 2009, but ideation and everything triggered and conceptualized in 2011. It took five years to us to build the entire story. I told you why. We wanted to bring visible simplicity to cognitive simplicity. Okay, I'll walk you through that. Just quick glance through our product, business listings on on-go, store on-go generates. Your mobile presence needed, it generates your mobile apps and everything needed without coding effort.  So this is what we built on the fly. With a very simple model, in few simple steps that you add Google, give Facebook, you know, give your website and that's it. We pull all the information that you have and we create a mobile application out of it which is promotional in nature, which is HTML5, which is loyal for loyal customers. We give Android native applications and iOS native applications automatically generated without any line of code written. Transactional, Facebook business pages becomes transactional with our model now. So this is a platform that we developed, but I'll give you the why, how we developed it. Because I talked about the complexity in enterprise mobility creations. Now I say five steps, you get your mobile applications ready. The way we did it is we strictly adhered to the process, visible simplicity to cognitive simplicity. Art is basically interpreted, but the design is basically understood. So that's our concept. We believe that we are the customers for our product. We say we are the users. So for my daughter's school, I'm a user. So I need to experience that first. So that's how we say self design, genius design. We say because with our experience from enterprise mobility, with our experience in workflow management system, with our experience in ERPs, CRMs, we build something and this can be inherent to anything. So genius design, we need to have knowledge. User centric design, which is primarily focuses towards the behavior of the user. This is why I said cognitive model. So first two are knowledge. The third one is basically the understanding about the customer's behavior. How customers feel about a particular thing right now. What is that they're inferring out of the entire UI that you're presenting. All these things that you need to take care of. That's where we call it as user centric design. And the user experience design process starts with understanding the problem instead of defining the solution. We wanted to understand the problem first. That's where you get knowledge. The process of the entire user experience that we have is to first understand what is the problem. The problem here is what industry needs. The second problem is what consumers expect. And the third problem is what is the workflow and CRM behavior of a particular industry. So with these three things in process set, we started experimenting about our knowledge or improving our knowledge base. This is the most important slide or interesting slide for us. We made a lot of research in understanding what would the customer need for taking it forward. If you see in the consumers are looking for, if you see restaurants and dining, 47% of the people actually look for this for map, distance, and direction. When they want to go for a restaurant, 47% of the people look for that particular aspect of it. You go to the retail, 38% hours of operation. They wanted to go for a mall and they want to understand is it a mall open or not. So our behavioral aspect of understanding the application or opening application is to understand these things. So if you are building a retail mobile application, your hours of operation should be very much relevant and positioned on the top. So people, when they open the application, they see hours of operation right on the top. When you see for the restaurants and dining, because 47% of the people understand or need to understand what is the direction to it, so it has to be positioned on the top. It has to be elevated. Like this, there is statistical analysis done on the user behavior about each and every particular element that we need to position in the mobile application. So that's how we started our knowledge grabbing. That is where we started understanding about the product. And when I'm talking about bringing enterprise mobility, Walmart, we have 70 people, so we know how to code. But bringing down that to a non-coding environment, it has to be automatic. So we followed something called artificial intelligence-based UI. I'll go back to the previous slide again to show this is the artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence now, the feed of artificial intelligence talks about, you know, interest rate 47% map is high, so that has to be positioned at the higher level. So based on the knowledge that we have acquired, our positioning of is higher. So let me walk you through, because now the second problem is in the company itself, there are multiple roles.  When as a patient I walk into the clinic, first thing I talk about is admin. I take appointment of doctor to the admin, and admin has all the rights to give a particular slot for me. So for him, he's only worried about slots of a doctor, not about anything else. So what he sees is what he has to do. We should not see anything other than that. We should not clutter his mobile application with all the data lying out there. So when he logs in as admin, he will see only the appointment scheduling, that's it. Second role in the system is nurse. Nurse, when you go, she takes my vitals and she feeds it in the form, that's all she will do, and position it for me to the doctor. Doctor prescribes me medicines. That's all his role is. So based on the role, our UI, user interface, should be very much positioned. So few things visible, few things not visible. What you see is what you want. Hide everything else. Let us bring simplicity or clarity to the complex environments. You know consumers are more brilliant in this. We again have to go back to the slide to understand what is that consumer used looking, and make informed decisions of based on your industry vertical knowledge. That's what I was trying to show you. Content added or content received. I'll give you a classic example here. Say some of the restaurants do have chef specials today. Some of the restaurants have Friday specials. If that particular content is added by a restaurant that has to be positioned on top because that is one thing, business as them I want to promote in their applications. So it's a business intent. That business intent has to be positioned on the top of the application. So it has to be informed decision based on the content added or retrieved from the social media or anywhere else to position our user interface. Category based on artificial entities. I'll give you an example of each one of them. So based on a category you have to position your user interface. What happens with this is find, get discovered. I was listening to the, you know, get discovered, search engine optimized, and discovery platform friendly apps. When we generate application, it has to be found somewhere, right? So it has to be found on Google now, Spotlight or Keypoint Solutions. It has to be positioned. It has to be discovered by third parties. So our applications, till now when you talk about websites, you talk about SEOs. You talk about mobile applications. It has to be discovery friendly. Reach, position information needed in not more than three steps. Any, see now there's a lot of information available. Say if I don't find in an application in next to two steps, immediate thing I'll do, I shift from Uber to Ola. I shift from something to something else. So the attention span of your customer today is very much narrowed down. So you cannot, as a user experience designers, you cannot think about taking the fourth step. So your application, the content delivery should happen in less than two steps or three steps. Most important thing, engage your customers, usability aspects of it, push relevant information at the real time. And this is where you need to draw a clear line between content, content delivered, information respected, functionality, platform, user interface, usability, and more importantly, centric towards the users that if you can clear lines, if you draw clear lines between all of this, you are perfect. That's what we call it as user experience. With store on go, we generate automatic, we built a entire auto building UI exercise and that's where we are generating applications for it. Thank you. It's me Ramak.


Tervetuloa kaikille. Ollaan tosi innoissaan, että ootte täällä. Tervetuloa kaikille myös, joka seuraa live-streamingautta. Also welcome to everybody who's following us through live stream. And we're going to talk mostly in English today because of our international guests. But if anybody has any questions in Finnish or if there's any words or anything, you don't know in English, feel free to ask in Finnish. So just quickly about our main agenda today. So we're going to first talk about something that's called democracy accelerator. Then we're going to have our main keynote speaker today, who is digital minister Otitang from Taiwan. And then after Q&A with Otitang, we're going to have our main keynote speaker today, who is digital minister Otitang from Taiwan. And then after Q&A with Otitang, we're going to have another guest from Taiwan, who is here, who has prepared a really exciting VR demo for us to try, which is related to OTI and also related to a crowdsourced open lawmaking process that's ongoing here with the Ministry of Justice. And then we're going to switch to a VR demo at the end. And my name is Tania Aitamutta. I'm assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And I'm working on this democracy accelerator project with my colleague, Julia Joosilahti, who is senior advisor at Demos Helsinki, which is a Helsinki-based think tank. And she's a wonderful partner in crime in making all these democratic innovations happen. But without further ado, let's go to our program. So let's talk about democracy accelerator a little bit. What is it? So you have seen this democracy accelerator thing coming up in our advertisements and here and there. So democracy accelerator has three main goals. The first goal is to inform all of us, you and ourselves, about democratic innovations that are happening all around the world. The second goal of ours is to inspire people to take action for a better democracy. Democracy that's more functional than the one that we have today. And over time we hope to be able to develop ourselves into a global hub for democratic innovations. And then how are we going to actually make that happen? One way, one method that we are doing that is that we are publishing case studies, like introductions about democratic innovations in different parts of the world. Here in Finland, in France, in Taiwan, everywhere. If you go to our website democraticinnovations.com you will see some of these case studies that we have been working on lately. For instance, if I just quickly introduce a couple of the case studies projects that we are working on currently. One of them is the crowdsourced open lawmaking process with the Ministry of Justice. Actually, Jurki Jaohjainen from the Ministry of Justice is here. He's a senior legal advisor or something like that. Sorry, I forgot your title. But in this process what's happening is that the Ministry of Justice is asking people's feedback in a law reform process. This law is about association acts, and it basically governs how people can self-organize themselves in associations. And just today, actually, the crowdsourcing process was launched like an hour ago, so we just got the link up. If you go to this link, you see a crowdsourcing platform where you can leave your comments and questions about the law. Also we have projects about constructive journalism. And in these projects the idea is to figure out how journalism, journalistic publications like newspapers, other type of media, take a more constructive solution-oriented role in journalism. So for instance there has been some events collecting Finnish people together to deliberate about societal values. And then similar events are going to be going to happen over the course of next year all around Finland. Also there is a really big project about participatory budgeting with the city of Helsinki, the city of Wanta and other cities in Finland, where many researchers are developing evaluation tools to figure out what type of impact participatory budgeting has on democratic values and processes. And there is many more. So if you go to our website democraticinnovations.com or in Finnish, demokratiakinryttämme.fe so you will find more information about these projects. And of course we are not doing all this work ourselves. We have a big team of researchers and professors who are working on these projects. And on our website you will find more information about that too. But of course then we are interested in your project. So if you are working on a democratic innovation, any experiment that tries to include more people, make our society more equal, we would love to hear about it. So we would ask you to consider sharing your project with the idea that you would just answer very simple questions and we have those up on our website. There is a template.  And that is the way we get some information and we can highlight your project. And the idea why we are doing it this way is that we think that the more information we have ourselves and the more we share it forward, the stronger our democracies become. Because I have seen in my work, as I have been doing research about open government and transparency and so on for about ten years, and I see that many people are trying to reinvent the wheel in different parts of the world. So somebody is doing a really interesting project in Chile for instance. Another one is doing a similar project in Norway and these people are not talking to each other and they are facing similar challenges, they are experiencing similar type of victories, but if you would share these, that would amplify our voices. I want to be that platform for all of you guys. And then if you think about democracy accelerator and its goal and think about what democratic innovations are, because that is a really relevant question. Innovation and democracy are really big word and it is not maybe easy to comprehend what they mean. But what we mean by democratic innovations is that there are any initiatives, big or small, that try to make our society more equal, more transparent, more inclusive. And these projects can be smaller, big, new or old, have been going on for a while. Also these projects that we are interested in can be done by individuals, groups or organizations. So we are really interested in your projects with a really broad spectrum. And thinking about just summarizing what democracy accelerator is, what we want to do is that we want to experiment, do different types of projects within trying to improve democracy in different ways, with new technologies, with new types of participatory methods and so on. And that's our way to develop democracy further. And then we do research, academic research and publishing based on these findings we have. And if you are interested in our work further, you can go on our website, democraticinnovations.com, in Finnish, demokratiakitettömäbistefi. Also on social media you can find our handles in multiple phases in Finnish and English. And here, especially people who are on live stream, so you see, you can leave comments and ideas there and questions on the live screen platform. So we are monitoring those throughout the live streaming and we will take your questions and present those to Shu Yang and Audrey. And also if you have questions to us, you can ask there. And also people who are here in the audience, you can also go to this live chat mode and then you can ask post your questions and comments there. So now we are going to move on to our upcoming events and a little bit more about the background of the project and Julia will talk about those. Yeah. So like said, we don't believe that only our website will do change anything, but we believe it's actually people coming together to share learnings and spar each other. So that's why we want to bring the democracy accelerator together next time in October 22nd here in Audi. So please welcome everyone who is interested in developing democracy, who maybe has a project or you have been working around this developing democracy and want to learn from others or share your tips to others. So we're really trying to make this like a really low threshold community because we think that's how ideas spread and that's how we learn from each other and that's how we eventually make democracy better. So 22nd of October, but please follow our social media sites and you will get more information of the event. And that's what you get to work in the workshop like said. So share your work on democracy, get feedback from others and resolve challenges that you may have. And this link will be posted to our channels later again. But just a few words about the background of democracy accelerator. So we are not only accelerating democracy through experiments, but also doing really high quality research on the topic. So democracy accelerator is part of a five year long research project funded by the Finnish Academy called Tackling Biasis and Bubbles in Participation. And the idea in this long research process is to examine how have globalization and the structural changes in economy changed people's political values and participation. And we ask that due to these changes are there some people who are, whose voice is not heard in political decision making, are there bubbles that, I mean this is a claim we hear a lot, that there are these bubbles where people don't communicate to other people who have different values and opinions. So are there actually, are the bubbles real? So how have the political values and participation of people changed within the last decades when many big transformations have happened in the society? So, and it's done with the top researchers from various Finnish universities and other research institutes. So please also follow Bibu. So Bibu.fi to stay up to date on the latest research on this super interesting theme of how democracy is changing. And like said, this is funded by the Finnish Academy and the strategic research. And I have to say I'm really happy, perhaps you've also been following the publication of the new government program. So there it says that the next government is or wants to promote new more varying ways of civic participation and they have mentioned for instance, participatory budgeting. So I think our timing is matching pretty nicely. So we are actually experimenting those new ways of promoting civic engagement and also doing high quality research on that. So I hope we can support the next government in their important work. And any ideas or questions or comments, please contact myself and Tania. Yeah, thanks, Julia. Okay, so now we're going to switch to our, oh first, let's take some questions or comments now from the audience. If you have any questions regarding democracy accelerator, demokratekiirittämme, what we are doing, if you have any hopes or ideas what we should be doing, we are happy to hear it now here from the live audience or from the live stream audience. We have the screening link, let's find it again. It was screen.io slash demos. Yes, okay. Or if you have any tips to us, what should be done in Finland to make democracy better? Exactly. We're happy to hear it now or then later online. Any comments or questions now? Teemu Ropponen has a question. Do we have the mic? Yeah, for the live streaming and also if you want, if you could always introduce yourself, that would be wonderful. Hi everybody, Teemu Ropponen from MyDataGlobal and Open Knowledge Finland. Maybe I missed it, but did you have a definition for democratic innovation? What's the one-liner definition of that? Yeah, we did. Basically, democratic innovations are any initiatives that try to make our democracy more equal, transparent and inclusive. We are taking on a very broad definition for practical purposes. In academic research there are many schools who define democratic innovations in different ways, but basically it can be an innovation within the existing institution. Yrkki, behind you, is doing the Ministry of Justice, so he's reforming, doing democratic innovations within the established practices and systems. That's one way to do democratic innovations. Other ways to be, for instance, a non-profit or just a group of individuals who are then doing something that includes more people, tries to include more diverse people, make, for instance, create more accessible services for a certain type of groups who represent minorities and so on. So it's very, very broad definition, and hopefully it serves the purposes we have. That was a good question. Thanks. Any other questions? If not, let's move on to Audrey Tang, who is on standby all the way in Taiwan. I don't even know what the time difference is. Shu Yang probably knows. Five hours. Anyway, so digital minister Audrey Tang, she's going to talk about democratic innovations in Taiwan, and that's a very super exciting topic because I'm really impressed by the work that Audrey and her team, including Shu Yang, has been doing in the past years in Taiwan. So much going on that the 20 or 30 minutes we have with Audrey will not be able to cover all the fantastic work that's being done there. And Audrey just arrived from, returned back to Taiwan from Canada, where she was participating in the annual Open Government Partnership event, which is a global event for all people working on Open Government projects. So maybe in the Q&A we can hear the latest news about the OGP community too, which would be super exciting. And I got to see, I was lucky to see Audrey's talk a couple of years ago, I think it was in Paris in an Open Government event, and I was really impressed and fascinated by her work, and then we were lucky to have her to dedicate some time to do this talk here, so we are super excited about it. And a little bit about Audrey's background. Before she came, assumed the position of digital minister, first in that type of kind, in that post new minister position in Taiwan, she was a hacker, or how would I call, programmer, developer, did some work in Silicon Valley, so we could call her as a veteran of democratic innovations, even before assuming the job as a digital minister. So with this, Audrey, are you ready to start your talk and take it away? Yeah, sure. Thank you, and we are super excited to have you here. Alright, thank you for the great introduction. And I hope the sound is getting through it, because we spent a lot of time testing. So I'm really happy to be here virtually to talk about democratic innovations. And just as Tanya has introduced, I've been working on technologies, web technologies to facilitate this kind of collective decision making, since I was 15 years old. That was 1996, 1996. And I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the web, and all my textbooks were out of date. So at that time, I told my teachers I want to quit school and start my education on the web. And surprisingly, all my junior high school teachers agreed with it. And so I quit school and founded startups working on web technologies, and I get to join this fabulous internet community that runs this crazy idea. It's an open multi-stakeholder political system that still powers the internet to the state. And so today as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm putting into practice the idea that I learned when I was 15 years old, and there's rough consensus, civic participation, and radical transparency. And so let's try out a democratic innovation right now. It's called the QR code, which is very mundane technology. But if you have a QR code scanner, I would encourage you to scan this QR code that's being projected on the screen. And if it works, you should get into this anonymous forum where you can just not just ask me questions, but also like each other's questions. And so during my talk, anyone can just type in questions for other people to like, so it's like a way to vote. And if you cannot scan the QR code, you can also go to slido.com and enter the numbers 00603. And somebody has figured it out. That's great. And so my talk will be entirely crowdsourced, meaning that the content of my talk will be driven by whatever the question is posted on Slido. And so for example, this person said, hello, this is so cool. And I will be like, yeah, it's cool, isn't it? And then I'll just close it. And then someone said Taiwan number one and so on. And so please just keep the questions coming and that will determine the content of my talk. There's one person that said they want to hear about my alternative schooling. I'm very happy to share with that. So just as a background, let me show you my office. So this is literally my office. It's social innovation lab in Taiwan. It's in the Taipei city. And the reason why I drop out of junior high school is not that I want to study at home. It's rather I want to study at places like this. And at a time there's many different co-ops, there are different movements springing around Taiwan. Collectively we call it the social sector. And the social sector in Taiwan is responsible for social innovation, just like the private sector focuses on industrial or economic innovation. And social innovation basically in Taiwan means that any innovation from the social sector that everyone can participate and is to the benefit of everyone. So public participation, public benefit. For example, I made friends during my alternative schooling with a group of people called the Keras Foundation or the Children R.S. Foundation. And the Keras Foundation is responsible today for this public art in the social innovation lab here. So if you see this soccer field, it is the work of people with Down's Syndrome or with Trismid differences. We may see the world through the lens of text and numbers, but people with Down's Syndrome see the world through the lens of geometry. So it turns out that if they paint the world that they see, we can make them into public art that is just like art from Van Gogh or other artists that inspire people to be very creative whenever they step into this place. So my main learning when I was alternative to school is just I seek out those places where it's called open spaces where everybody can contribute but has a way to just include more people and their contributions. And so I brought this habit even as a digital minister. Every Wednesday everybody can find me in the social innovation lab from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and they get to talk to me for 40 minutes, not just interviews, it's also open to everybody to see. And this is important because as a democracy if we just publish the work that we do without explaining the why or more importantly if we just publish the thing we do without explaining the alternatives that we have evaluated and decided not to do, it is impossible for the people to follow the work that we do. And so as a digital minister, I made sure that everything in the draft stage that I publish including people's visits in the social innovation lab is published online. And so this is like a virtual school for everybody to be a virtual digital minister that can participate in my daily work. And so we get a lot of very interesting visits from people, for example from the MIT media lab to bring their self-driving vehicles. These are self-driving, but they are tricycles and they are very slow, meaning that they don't harm people if they run into people. And importantly, this is social innovation because it's open source and open hardware, meaning that if you don't like the way that it looks or how it integrates to the society, you can fork it, meaning that you can take it and change it to some other different way. And so basically people just hacked locally for you to have two eyes, it can wink at you, it can have a different norm integrating with the society and things like that. And this is how we spread the idea of social innovation so it reaches more people. And again, because as a junior high school dropout, I depend heavily on the open source projects online, for example the Gutenberg project and later on the archive project and later on the Wikipedia project to fuel the education and make sure that everything, all the transcripts, all the work we publish online is under an open source license or creative common license. And so I think that is the kind of education that they received from the open source community and this is the lessons that apply the same things so that the other junior high school dropouts in Taiwan or not necessarily dropouts can participate meaningfully in the democratic process and it's really working. For example, we have an e-petition platform and the most impactful petitions online. We have 23 million people in Taiwan, about 5 million participate in that e-petition platform and we see the most active petitioners are people who are around 15 years old and people around 65 years old. So these two age groups think more about public benefit and less about private benefit and the 15 years old came up with, for example, petitions to ban plastic straws from drinks and that is concerning the environment because naturally they are younger so they are at a business end of climate change, of environmental pollution and things like that and the beauty about e-petition is that a 15 years old doesn't even have to go age to vote or to get into the referendum. They can still meaningfully participate and indeed this year in Taiwan we banned the use of plastic straws for indoor drinking just because the petition of 15 years old so that they don't have to, you know, abandon school on their Fridays as they do in Europe anyway. So that is a public participation as a form of schooling. Timu would like to know if the radical transparency and let me just, yes. Have you thought about being transparent? How the government used personal data of citizens? For example, transparency in daily actions. This is an excellent question and a short question. I think it lies over a lot of important nuances so I will just show you one concrete example of how we're handling this. So in Taiwan, when we think about data, we don't think about oil. We don't think about assets. We don't see data as anything like a physical asset. Think about it, it doesn't make sense, right? Oil can only be extracted by a few places and everybody can just set up an air quality sensor in Taiwan. 2,000 of the citizen scientists do and become a data steward. So it's not like oil. We can produce data. And if somebody transfers a barrel of oil to another country, they have one less barrel of oil. So it's scarce. But if I copy data to you, we're both richer. So data is abundant. I think data is nothing like oil. The only reason why there was this metaphor in the first place was that both were difficult to extract meaning, to extract insight and things like that. But in Taiwan, we have a lot of people who have free access to the world's top 20 supercomputing facility called the Taiwania Supercomputer. And if you're a high school student, if you're in K212, you have free access so that you can do in-place computation with a lot of GPUs on all those collected data from the air quality, from the water quality, from advanced disaster management and also from earthquake prevention and things like that. And so this is people's daily contribution to the data collaboration. And as I mentioned, around 2,000 people or more in Taiwan set up those air boxes which are less than 100 euros each and they can measure very quickly their air qualities and upload it to a distributed ledger, also known as blockchain, but I prefer distributed ledger so that we can make sure nobody can change each other's numbers and we can make meaningful collaborations out of those environmental data. So this is personal. But of course, this is not private. We say personal in the sense of personal computer, meaning that everybody can be a data steward. We say private, meaning that it is not meant to be shared by default. So for private data in Taiwan, we don't see it as any kind of open data. In Taiwan, when we say private data, we say that it is a fiduciary relationship. You trust your doctor, your accountant, your psychiatrist, your nurse or whomever you trust with your private data. And it's the same thing as with the government. Data in that context is a beginning of a trust relationship and the data steward need to earn the trust from the people. And so basically we use the same framework as Europe's privacy framework in our private data law. And we are now getting really quickly, I think, the GDPR adequacy from the European Union as well. And so we're firmly on the European side when it comes to personal data. It begins a relationship where you can demand accountability, portability, explainability and things like that from the data operator. If they don't warrant your trust, you just take your data elsewhere. And as the state, we cannot really ask you to take data elsewhere. So we need to be maximally transparent when it comes to explain the use of personal data. And so if personal data is used for data collaboratives, we never publish the data. Instead we only publish the statistics. And the statistics, of course, can be improved by this way called open algorithm where people contribute better aggregate algorithms so that people can make use of better statistics. But it may never be re-identifiable even indirectly to any specific people. And so this is our general line of thinking. It is just making use of better open algorithm to make better statistics, to make better data collaboratives. I hope that this is making some sense. Okay, I see that we are. Okay, so the next question from Slido is that how can we make participation broader and more inclusive? Again, a great question. I think participation is only meaningful if we bring technology to people instead of asking people to come to technology. So using digital technology, we only augment and never replace face-to-face conversations. And so this is why our co-founder Shu Yang is with you now. So you can have more face-to-face conversations. But even for the regional innovation tools, for example, this is a case where we just tour around Taiwan, discovering more social innovations like the air box and ask them what they want out of the central government. And in this setting, just like my Wednesday office hour, it is face-to-face but amplified through digital technologies. In the regional tours, for example, in the indigenous people's region or a rural place or offshore island, we benefit from Taiwan's stance of broadband is a human right. So anywhere in Taiwan, no matter how remote it is, if you don't have 10 megabits per second, it's my fault personally. You can talk to me. And so because of that, no matter how remote the meetings are, we are guaranteed to have sufficient bandwidth to connect the local people to the ministries, the central ministries in Taipei City. And it's every other Tuesday or so that we make these tours. And so those tours bring together people in Taipei, in Kaohsiung, in Tai Zhong, and in Taoyuan so that they look at each other and at the rural places, eye-to-eye. And this is somewhat magical in that if you have a high-resolution video feed, you tend to build sympathy even if we're not on the same places. Like right now, because we have good high definition camera going both ways, I can see whether you're interested or whether you're bored and things like that. And that builds affinity between the both sides. And if we end think the camera person for just panning, as I'm saying this. So in any case, what I'm getting at is that previously the democratic participation doesn't scale across different municipal and rural levels, mostly because people were not on the same room. So they just get a synthetic document or a few pages of PowerPoint or whatever, but they cannot really feel the empathy of what really is going on in those rural places. But because I personally travel, I stay at night or two nights in that locality to do ethnographic, well just hanging out with local people. And that makes it much possible for people to have empathy with the central governments. And another good thing about this regional innovation tools is that previously, even if the Ministry of Economy or of Interior goes to a place and they discovered that they have to talk with the Ministry of Health and Welfare or the Ministry of Transportation, they often do it in a way that loses contact as it passes through the bureaucracy. But now, because all the 12 ministries are in the same room and they get into the habit of being in the same room in the innovation lab, enjoying good food, good drink, and sometimes also music, they build empathy also between the ministries. And they can just brainstorm right there toward a common value, even if they have different positions. And so this is also a way to iterate more quickly around the different values that each Ministry represents because each Ministry, of course, represents different value in the society, but if we get them into the same room, they're much easier to discover their common values and deliver on the innovation that realize those values instead of on the bad old days where each Ministry is like fighting each other and you don't see it because the rope in the middle is invisible, but because of radical transparency, the space in the middle becomes visible now and it creates a powerful initiative for the career public service to innovate because previously in the bad old days, if things go right, the Ministry take all the credit and if things go wrong, the Ministry always blame the public servants and who are anonymous and really cannot fight back. But now with radical transparency is the other way around. If things go right, we always highlight the person that actually delivers the innovations. For example, in one of the e-petitions about reinventing the text filing system, we have the participation officer, a team of people in each Ministry in charge of talking to petitioners and we have Yang Jingheng here who just volunteered to talk directly with the petitioner to make a text filing system together. And so we just highlight all the good work the career public service done because it's radically transparent and because this is very new and so if things go wrong, it is always my fault and so because I absorb the blame and they get the credit, you get much more innovation from the career public service when it comes to digital innovations like this when we can bring everybody to the same room and absorb the risk and share the credit. And let's look at... So there's five questions now. I will try to get to all of it, but I don't promise anything. Okay, so the top question at the moment says, did I understand correctly that you are the first digital minister? How has the journey been? Are there any challenges and any highlights? A great question. So I'm a horizontal minister meaning that there is no digital ministry in Taiwan every ministry need to undergo digital transformation and so my office is literally one person poached from each ministry. So this is a very new configuration Taiwan has never tried this before and I only asked for volunteers so it means that at most I can have 32 colleagues because Taiwan has 32 ministries in the central government but in reality I only have 20 colleagues or so. That means one third of the ministries are not sending people to my office with understandable reason because I asked them to work out loud to share their work with all the other ministries so we don't have the Ministry of Defense for example or the Ministry of PRC Affairs understandably and it's only after a year or so did the Ministry of Foreign Affairs send someone to my office but the offices, the ministry want to talk to people like the ministries of education of interior of communication of culture they all have people in my office because their work is to reach out maximally to people and so that is voluntary association and it's going really well and the second condition of entering the cabinet as you have seen is radical transparency and we had to negotiate constantly with the public service until the radical transparency is comfortable with them so we finally settled on any meeting that I chair we added together for two weeks, so 14 days and after two weeks we published a transcript so every public servant they sound very professional in the transcript because they have the time to take out the in-jokes to take out the unprofessional part of public service but still it takes work to edit those so by default most things are still out in the open in the policy making and the great thing about that is that I'm also a channel from the collective intelligence and using crowd-moderated tool I also bring back consensus to the people and see that it is a reflective space that I'm really bringing back the consensus from people and so this is I think very interesting that I have been able to negotiate this radical transparency and that is still running now and other ministries are now picking this up and finally I want to talk about location independence no matter where I am I can work as digital minister there is a regulation in Taiwan many public servants have their work related to internet they can work anywhere and in any time zone and so that enables us to have like 20 or so interns every year, actually 30 interns every year they are all around Taiwan some of them are even in Canada but they can still be fruitful participation with the PDIS, with our office and so I think these three conditions location independence, voluntary association and radical transparency work together to create a theory of change that makes it much easier to work across silos and to lead horizontally and so that is my highlight and the other question is asking what is the role of the government in open government this is a great question I think the idea very simply put is that where the government used to be before open government asking who are the organizers and what is the fair trade off between those organizers that was the old question the government asks it worked before the mobile internet and before the social internet because it's easier to organize in a hierarchical fashion but now with the social internet anyone can organize quickly using a hashtag alone and so if we just create one ministry or one office for each trending hashtag the government will just go out of business really quickly and so the government need to ask a different set of question we need to ask given our different positions are there common values and given common values are there innovation that works for everyone and I think it is the government's role to allow for innovations in this kind so it is the government's role that actually people have much more in common with their neighbors than the popular media has led them to think I don't know about in Finland but in many democracies the popular media and some social media only focus on the statements that are dividing the country that are dividing the population so people get into this false impression because they are neighbors but using new technologies new online platforms we discovered that we can always show people a reflection of their actual preferences and that most people actually agree with most of their neighbors on most of the things most of the time and so I think it is the government's role to be a reflect space and let people not only reflect on the public policy but make it fun to reflect on public policy and for example what you are seeing here is the real screen of the AI power conversation through Polis that we had when Uber first entered Taiwan using amateur drivers and people see that they have different social media friends their families and so on who are on different sides as them so this is their avatar and this may be their cousin or their mother or whatever but even if people have different positions they are still friends and families they are not nameless enemies they just didn't talk about Uber over dinner and so the idea of making such a deliberative space is that people can share the same facts and have a safe place to share their feelings about the same facts and there is no right or wrong about feelings and then ideas, the best ideas are the ones that take care of most people's feelings and finally the government can see the rough consensus and turn them into regulation so another example this time of autonomous driving the people who have some experience was for example self-driving tricycles and then they can collectively decide the norm around which regulation should there be for experimentation of self-driving vehicles so if there is only one image you can take away from my talk please keep this image in mind every time when we run a conversation like this we make sure that there is no reply button there is no reply button if you take out the reply button there is no way for trolls to influence the conversation you can only upvote or downvote each other's sentiments or post something else for other people to resonate but without the reply button there is no way to hijack the conversation or make it a personal attack and so you always end up with this shape if you don't have the reply button but if you add the reply button I guarantee you that you will end up with the mirror image of this shape and so taking out the reply button is very useful and we do this on the e-petition platform on the Polis platform and also on Slido and you will know that there is no reply button when we use Slido so I hope that answers the question somewhat let's see there's nine questions now the more I answer the more questions there are isn't it okay so I'll try to be a little bit quicker I guess in my answers otherwise I won't get to all of them the top question at the moment says from Kate says in Taiwan some elders are not interested in technology so they don't see those information what is the suggestion obviously what we do is that we bring the technology to the elders we don't ask the elders to come to technology so it is very important if the e-petition is about the local matter we always travel all the different ministries together travel to that locality to have a town hall conversation basically we augment the existing way of participation we just make sure that we amplify it we record it online and we make sure that the conversation is not go to waste that we continue the conversation but we don't force the elders to use the apps and so on but on the other hand that probably apply only to the really old people people around 65 years old in Taiwan are the most active next to the 15 years old on our e-participation platform anyway and so I think the really old people we make sure that they can participate also meaningfully near their locality and we make sure that we amplify their wisdom by attending the meeting wisdom sometime with just a 360 camera and then broadcasting the work for everybody to look at and I think we can of course improve on this but there is already a lot of experiment and Shu Yang will share some of it to you when it comes to just including people who are elders or live closer to a vicinity to a place into this kind of conversation and that is also the motivation behind Holopolis because when I showed my grandmother who is 87, 88 years old now of my work, I just use an Oculus so she doesn't need any time to learn how to operate, it feels intuitive she is just dropped into a conversation directly in virtual reality so the less intermediary she has to go through the more useful that it will be for her to share her wisdom and also because my grandpa my grandpa is 101 years old now is also more convenient for him using VR because he really cannot walk really quickly as a 101 year old but at home with Robin as human right he takes the VR and feels that he is in a place for other people to have a real conversation and I think that also enables the social inclusion for really old people the other question says do you see or accept any limitation to radical transparency? Of course as I said we are not live streaming everything that would be violent transparency radical transparency, the radical here means transparency at root meaning that we are transparent even when we have no idea even when we are just brainstorming even when we are just seeing an emerging issue in a society and just having a brainstorm session about it, we are transparent even before we deliver a policy from the government and transparency at root doesn't mean transparency we are publishing using live streaming the person holding the two-dimensional camera wields all the power and is actually very violent and so what we do instead is more nuanced sharing using transcripts using for example what we call the real-time board but it's called MIRO now a visualization of people's arguments we share things in a way that appeals to people's different modalities and even comic books but we don't share the violent two-dimensional video feed unless everybody in the room agrees to it and so this is the limit of radical transparency on the transparency side because what we are doing is just to make trust easier we're not doing transparency for transparency's sake so radical is more important than transparency how do we address the challenges in implementing radical transparency first of all I think it's always easier if you have only volunteers in the beginning people who are eager for the public to know their work instead of going straight to the Ministry of Defense and I say oh I want to publish all your security council meetings of course that will not work right and so if you only talk first to the ministries of justice, of culture, of communication and education chances are that they will be very receptive to this idea and if you offer to lower the cost of generating the transcript there are some really good AI system now that when working together with good microphones and with court reporters, thanographers they can work together and to deliver a better visibility into their work and so then after a while people will start to see it actually reduce their work and so in our e-participation platform at the beginning we only have participation from the 60 or so projects the major projects and a few ministries in this radical transparency around procurement around spending, around government contract but now we have participation from pretty much everybody in all the ministries so open contract is a very important idea because in Taiwan in the e-participation platform everybody can see which are the projects that people are caring the most people care about long term healthcare so elders actually are probably the people who ask the most questions here about water and sanitation social housing, collaboration of data food safety, disaster prevention and also the third building of our national Taoyuan airport and so in each of those government projects and you can see there's almost 2,000 of the project and initiatives, you can see what they did this quarter or this month you can see how much money it spent what procurement or research it did and you can see a discussion board here the Minister of Health and Welfare posted a summary reply saying this is why we changed this quarter thanks to all your input and at the beginning people were very resistant to this idea they were like this will massively increase our workload and so we only asked for volunteers so like only 60 projects out of 2,000 but then they all reported actually they reduced their workload because people don't call them as often previously people just call them randomly asking where is the project going, we don't see it anything on the media and they have to answer the same question even if 40 people has already asked the same question using different phone calls in the previous week but now they have to only answer once, sometimes they just ask the question themselves and then just answer it online and then it makes sure that people can very easily using search engines to find out where the project is going so they don't ask a lot of problems and questions if they can just discover itself and even if they ask follow up questions this is of a deeper and higher quality because they can always just reply saying oh you can look at this web page and then we can talk and so having this public accountable response really saves time to people who participates but you cannot really just convince this with our first-time experience so we run the first year like a sandbox that basically showed everybody that it actually saves people's time and then other ministry decide to join and that's why we have almost 2,000 budget items now on the e-participation platform Cage would like to thank me for letting Taiwan to being seen, okay? It's my pleasure. Are you ever afraid that the world and the democracy becomes too digital? This is a great question. I think the digital at the moment feels like a different place compared to the physical only because that the devices themselves are still too far away from people. When it was personal computers it felt closer to everyday life than the mainframes and when there is mobile devices it feels closer to life than the personal computers now it's the earphones and the pencil and the watch so it feels even closer so once we're close enough in our daily physical life and the digital life I don't think there will be a distinction between the digital and the physical now people worry of course about addiction to social media and so on all the time which is true because we have companies like Facebook that are exactly like tobacco or liquor companies that basically sells addiction that satisfies a proxy of a human need but that is because they don't actually satisfy the human need so it feels just like junk food or bad liquor addiction that is bad for the mental health but if we teach the children to be data stewards to run their own social media federations to be essentially connoisseurss who can taste a good wine from the bad wine then it's less likely that they will get addicted to junk social media so I think the worry of being too digital is actually the worry of being addicted to something that is not conductive to human experience and that is why we work very closely for example Robin as human right because we see if we have high quality, high definition video like we have now it is easy for us to truly understand each other but if we only have a bad bandwidth connection you can just project all your different thoughts and feelings on each other and it often leads to a more divisive population and so I think it is essential that we make the bandwidth as broad as possible and that we augment the spaces as much as possible instead of working purely asynchronous mode and if we can work in synchronous mode all the time I think in the next 10 years maybe there will be no digital ministers anymore maybe all the ministries will be digital and we just have one analog minister in the cabinet and I look forward to that day and so we have 15 minutes more so let's see what happens after people participate with the e-platform how does the idea proceed from there to a possible implementation that is a great question so basically every month all the participation offices look at those petitions and bring the topic that a few needed to be discussed in their interagency way so for example if an e-petition is only just about one agency and that agency is already doing the work anyway they can just have a written reply that shows how we are already doing the work thank you very much but if you really need a discussion across different ministries then all the ministries get together and we form a team an ad hoc team that anyone can add other people in but nobody can subtract themselves out so it's just like an ice bucket challenge you can always add more ministries but you cannot talk your way out of it and we then form a team that talks to the petitioner and the petitioner is facilitated through an open policy making tour kit to make sure that people's different positions are seen in a way that makes sure that everybody understand the overview of the issues so every other Friday or so we have a meeting of this kind and sometime live streamed but always fully radically transparent and every other Monday after the Friday we send the summary of this meeting to the prime minister and so the prime minister can look at the summary of the meeting and decide whether to just make it into policy or whether there is some reason we cannot make it into policy that we need to explain in full so so far all the open collaboration meetings there's about 45 of open collaborations that we have run about 50% about half of them turned into new policy or new initiatives but half of them did not and I will share with you one case where it did not actually made into policy and it is about a petition that want to change the time zone of Taiwan to the same as Japan so we are in GMT plus 8 and the petition 8000 people want to change it to GMT plus 9 and Taiwan's time zone has not been changed so you can see that the petition did not actually succeed in effecting change but that's because we also have another counter petition again 8000 people asking Taiwan's time zone to remain at GMT plus 8 internally we call it the 8 plus 9 8 plus 9 case and this is very interesting because all the 16000 people it looks like they all have different positions some of them say adopting a daylight saving time will save energy will increase tourism will increase commerce or whatever but we actually made sure that all the ministries are in this game and so they replied with factual cases of why it will not reduce energy of what cause it will incur and things like that and we invite people from both sides to the collaboration meeting and it turns out after looking at all the facts and evidences they can reveal their true feelings and it turns out the reason why they really want the time zone to be changed is that they want people coming from Beijing or from Shanghai from the PRC when they arrive to the Taoyuan airport to force them to change the time zone so they can understand where different jurisdictions but it's a very expensive way to do that and it's also not very effective because Hong Kong has its own currency and so there's many other countries that have many large time zones and so it's not very effective but then people see that it's not effective and then the cost that it will incur and then they actually collaborated both sides on possible better uses in the budget that will actually be deployed if we're going to change the time zone and so it says that we're not faking the game it is actually we find out the positives and we get to the common value and the common value is that people want Taiwan to be seen as more unique in the world and if we abstract to that shared value actually people from both sides of the petition can agree with that value and then we collaborated on how to spend a budget that would have been spent if it's actually a time zone change on more useful ways and then people brainstorm a lot of very useful ways for example we should share the story that Taiwan is the only country in Asia that legalized marriage equality we should put a lot of budget into spreading this fact we should put a lot of budget in the world sharing that we have one of the highest ratio of women in national parliament in our region of course I know it's low in your region but it's very high in our region so about how to do the different assessments on human rights, on gender and things like that and so the end result is that everybody agreed on more useful ways to spend a budget to make Taiwan be seen as more unique fulfilling the spirit of the petition if not the text of the petition and so this is very important that we actually meet eye to eye and face to face to brainstorm on the petition very early on the text of the written petition the next question is that there's no digital minister this time even though similar coordinating minister was lobbied by some organizations well Taiwan didn't have a digital minister either but we always can have allies or champions in the government it may be the prime minister, it may be the deputy prime minister it used to be that I was just a kind of the digital minister at 2015 where I coordinated a lot of the work with the Gov Zero community with VT1 and so on and so maybe we didn't need a digital minister back then because we have a shadow government at the time and we still have and I'm still part of it and the idea is very simple and I encourage you to try locally all the government services in Taiwan in Gov.tw so you have something that Gov.tw and if the civil society think that it is not digital enough for example the budget in 2012 was 500 pages of PDF files it's impossible for the crowd to make sense of so the civic hackers the people in the social sector just built exactly the same service but with an old change to a zero and so you don't have to buy any advertisement you don't have to buy precision targeting on Facebook you just build exactly the same website as your government but change an old to a zero and people by changing one letter in the URL get into the shadow government and you can have everybody serving as shadow digital ministers and this really works because this is literally the first Gov.zero project back in 2012 it's budget.g0v.tw and as you can see soon as I become the digital minister everything is just merged back to the central government you just saw the budget dashboard that's exactly the same idea and indeed shared code with the original Gov.zero prototype and before the central government adopts it actually in 2014 the Taipei City already adopted it and sometimes it's easier to just convince a mayor or a municipal officer to adopt this idea and then the central government sees it and so it cost them nothing because all the Gov.zero projects are open source it cost them nothing to merge it back and so that makes it very much possible for the civil society to innovate without a digital minister by essentially spreading out decentralizing the work of a digital minister the next question from Timu is that I can see this working with a micro nation like Liberland but very exciting to see this working in Taiwan amazing isn't it and Taiwan is actually geographically quite small if you think about the north of Taiwan Taipei to the south most high speed rail station Gaushong it's just one hour and a half and so it is actually just a larger municipality geographically with high speed rails at least on the west side we're still working on the east side but in any case it feels like just a larger municipality even if we're 23 million people and I do agree that this geographic closeness proximity is very important to introduce innovations and have it spread easier to the entire population someone asked how do you encourage citizens involved in the process our e-petition website actually recommend more petitions to you just like Amazon recommendations and we also make sure that they're involved in for example choosing the winners of the presidential hackathon so presidential hackathon is again a merge from Gov-zero it is used to be an idea that's still running Gov-zero grant and after I become digital minister we escalated from the city level to the president's level basically I talked to the president Dr. Tsai-Yng-Wen you can see Dr. Tsai-Yng-Wen here and it's always her platform to be open in her candidacy she said in her inauguration speech that democracy must move from being an opposition between two values into a conversation between diverse values so she is very endorsing this idea of plurality and innovation from the social sector so we convinced her to run the presidential hackathon and this is a hackathon unlike anything else you see here hackathon maybe you hear think about two days or three days of work but presidential hackathon is three months of work so it begins every April and the demo day is mid July every year so what is presidential hackathon it is basically the president herself asking everyone to form data collaboratives to help delivering on her presidential promise for example she promised an increasing of water resources efficiency and by the way our presidential promises are indexed using the sustainable development goals so across the world we can just say oh she promised the target 6.4 which is increasing water use efficiency and this language works internationally so last year one of the five teams that won the presidential hackathon implemented machine learning to let people detect water leakage faster than before using a chat bot it used to be that the new water leakage is only detected a few months like seven months after each leak but now with machine learning and a chat bot that interact with the repair people it's actually reduced to one tenth of the time so it's a major improvement but the Taiwan Water Corporation only has the data they don't have the algorithm and they don't have the regulatory expert to make it happen so in presidential hackathon we coach 20 teams every year to become trilingual to become teams that have the data and technology experts the domain experts and the regulatory experts usually public service and once they become trilingual they are given free roam to data and regulation and budget to try the idea for three months and every year we pick five teams that win the hackathon but how to select the 20 teams out of the hundreds or so applications every year we involve the people using a newly invented voting system called quadratic voting or QV everybody receives through the e-petition platform 99 points and you see 100 more than 100 projects if you vote for one vote you spend one point and if you vote for two votes you spend four points if you vote some projects three votes then you spend nine points four votes 16 points and so on and so given 99 points you can at most vote nine votes on a project what it does is that because this quadratic nature is actually prompting people to discover synergies between projects and that is why we have a brush west of selection instead of very narrow minded projects we have projects that maximize the impact and for the people who participate in quadratic voting it also encouraged them to form alliances to learn more about each other's projects and the five teams that wins every year receive a trophy from our president and the trophy is a projector that if you turn on the projector it shows the president handing the trophy to the team and so it is very useful in internal negotiations because if your boss don't want the budget to be allocated you can just project the president and you get the budget basically what it symbolizes is the president's promise to the winning team whatever it takes in the next nine months to make the idea that your prototype in the three months a reality in public service and we deliver on that of all the five teams that won last year and so this year it's now a national regulation that five winning teams must have their ideas written into the initiative and government programs in the next fiscal year so there is no money as a reward, the reward is to have your prototype become public policy I understand I only have one minute so very quick answers to the three questions one person said that I'm awesome and I think your questions are all awesome and Carolina says that it's very inspirational and I encourage you to talk more with Shuyang Ling, our co-founder in Peter's to get further inspired and finally Carolina are saying that even we think that the percentage of women in national government can use some improvement it is actually still very high and our number I think should be higher it should be more than 40% but I really do think that it is the reason why we get more plurality in participation it's just we have more open-minded lawmakers so that's my talk, thank you very much well thank you so much Audrey so it's mind blowing every time I hear your talk there's so many new ideas but not only ideas but new implementations so I think we have so much work to do here in Finland and your contribution is huge because now we have ways and methods how we can implement more participatory and transparent democracy final question before we move on so let's go back to the open government partnership meeting in Ottawa in Canada so what would be your main takeaway because it's a huge global meeting with all the practitioners coming from the open government sector from all over the world, hello so great question so my main takeaway is that everybody is excited because Taiwan is launching our first open government national action plan in the OJP forum because Taiwan is in a very interesting position that we're not an official member just a partner but we're also leading in the many actions and commitments so people see Taiwan as a new canvas to experiment with the NAP process so NAP is usually two years but we're talking about making it four years or three years but basically a longer commitment from the presidency and a longer period like more than half a year for the civil society to set the process making the NAP itself a good collaboration framework for everybody and we want this because if we only collaborate with people who already know about NAPs it tends to be more about transparency, open data or accountability like open procurement but this is great of course but they tend to be lacking on the inclusive participation part so by expanding the NAP so the process itself is a subject of co-creation we want to be more inclusive of people who have never heard of open government who didn't really know what a sustainable development is who don't have any idea of the national government and how it works so we want to be more inclusive of people's voice in getting into the NAP process and we have a lot of volunteers across the world who want the NAP process to be better to be willing to visit Taiwan as experts to continue to evolve the NAP process and maybe we can contribute their back Thank you so much Audrey, let's give you a round of applause Thank you It was great to have you here and thanks a lot for all your work on resolving the final technical issues too because just a couple of minutes event was about to start we couldn't hear or see anything so this is a major success in that way so thank you so much, let's stay in touch and now we are going to move into virtual reality so next what we are going to do is that we are going to learn about a really fascinating democratic innovation a series of experiments with a platform called Holopolis which Shu Yang Li has been working on and she is a co-founder of the the public digital innovation lab at the Taiwanese government so she has been working closely with Audrey on that and now actually Shu Yang has moved to Europe to UK 12 months ago and she is continuing her work there and she has done really great job in taking the Taiwanese open source unity platform for virtual reality and then customizing it for us here for the Finnish environment so we actually see some environment here from Audrey 360 video and then the Holopolis decision making platform in VR but first Shu Yang is going to talk about the background of the project and show a little bit about the context and then after that we are going to transition into the actual demo so there we go thank you so hi everybody I'm Shu Yang from Taiwan also you can probably tell it's very fun to work with Audrey just get all the fun hang out with people in the government and also outside of government facilitating workshops and making rare games so today I'm going to present one of the little demo or little experiment we are building in Taiwan it's an idea about bringing public deliberation into VR space using virtual reality this might sounds like a very futuristic idea but we actually have been using that quite a few cases in the beginning we thought online deliberation was difficult and we somehow made it and we had some examples around 40 to 50 of the case studies and after a while we got a board of websites and we thought why don't we try VR so we started this experiment I probably started from Audrey actually mentioned the civic tech community in Taiwan called GOVZERO and also she mentioned one of the big movements which is when she talked about changing a URL from O to ZERO and making a shadow government so we call that movement for the government because we are forking the entire governmental public websites into another copy of other websites that are open source, more open data on top and most of the time more beautiful and the civic hackers in Taiwan they gather every two months or so since 2000, in early 2000s and every two months they gather and just kind of brainstorm about ideas they want to change or better iterate democracy in Taiwan and one of the idea we kind of thought about and have been building for almost 5 years now it's called V-Taiwan it's a project experimenting on open consultation process which means I think the process here, which means we are citizens we can propose any kind of idea and after proposing an idea we will try to gather opinions from online and offline we will launch a website to gather people's opinion but also we will organize open events hackathons this kind of hackathon is more frequently organized so every week, actually every Wednesday evening we will organize a V-Taiwan hackathon for people who ever want to join just like the event here whoever want to join and talk about their opinions, thoughts, ideas or just want to hang on a pizza, they can just come and gather and after that we will reflect on their ideas also we will kind of reach out to people online who are more active online to come to a consultation meeting and thought about what kind of proposals we can start drafting to the parliament so V-Taiwan is a project like that drafting focusing on digital regulations and taking opinions from whoever interested and then sending that to the parliament the technology behind if you haven't thought about that many people in the beginning would assume the technology could be very difficult or complicated but it's actually very easy we simply use a lot of open source tools so like hat pad, discourse, github and we also do live streaming many times most of the time through YouTube we are just using free account so just using a lot of free tools gather all of them together V-Taiwan is actually possible to be built and one of the open source tools we use quite often it's called POLIS it's the blue icon over here POLIS it's an AI powered deliberation tool where everyone can log in online and talk about their ideas, opinions and then the AI behind will calculate a rough consensus of all these people and suggest major opinions I can go into more detail about this but I want to show you some pictures of the hackathon just now so basically the hackathon environment is very relaxing people just hang out and have pizza we always order pizza, always bring coke I think it's quite influenced by western culture we sometimes order some eastern food as well but basically people just hang out and sit around their favorite food I was very surprised in the beginning because I thought people would come and just sit around different topics but actually they just gather according to what kind of favorite food they have and from the face-to-face meeting people just talk about their feelings for example the current politics the current regulations they don't really like or current policies that they benefit from and all these feelings to talk about we also try to visualize them online as well if you talk about special design we are creating an online offline very closely linked space whoever has an opinion can log their opinion online if they don't feel like logging online other people can also help them out it's as flexible as that this interface is a policy interface it policy a lot to visualize feelings so on the top of interface you can check how other people's opinions and in the center you can type in your own opinions or feelings and the lower button lower section is the section where the AI behind is trying to help us visualize the feelings the algorithm is actually called PCA principle component analysis so many people could be very familiar with that it's just pointing out the most principle component and see that as a major opinion we also talk about this diagram but the cool thing over here is every conversation we launched on VT1 so for example we talk about say online healthcare for example one of the regulation reform is about online healthcare in the beginning people do have a lot of different decisive divisive statements but after a certain time normally in average it's around two weeks to two months people start to have more consensus statements one of the reason to be said is what Audrey also mentioned is there's no reply button on the website so we call this phenomenon from reply to rewrite that's because as a user looking at this website if you want to say something instead of replying to other people's comments the only thing you can do is actually come up with better comments so in that way instead of replying you're actually trying to rewrite a more constructive statement and contributing to the conversation after we see this kind of phenomenon we just thought okay it's great we just removed all the reply button on the website and it actually worked out so as the project go on normally two months you can see the diagram will move from from this end these all dots are these black dots are all statements you can see the statements move from one end more divisive end to a more consensus end and that's quite interesting movement as well, very small movement on its own and then after that this is the stage where we call gathering opinions after gathering opinions we simply just take those major consensus opinions and invite people behind these opinions and people kind of highly against these opinions to come to the same meeting room have that meeting room also live stream to the internet so it's also kind of focused but public meeting and in that consultation meeting we'll have them to discuss about what draft bill we can write and send it to the parliament so this process very I think it's very flexible it's not very difficult it lasts probably in average from two months to a year but you don't actually have to do many things all the time it's actually like some meetings sometimes you go to hackathon sometimes try to get updated from the issues sometimes and after a while we kind of run through when the day we run through around 26 cases got 24 of them actually ratify into regulations we just thought we'll start doing something more fun and that's where holopolis came from so thinking about all the VT1 movement or VT1 experiment we have done since the past for the past five years since last year actually two years ago around the winter we started to think about what if we bring people even closer together so VT1 is a platform where people can can talk on the internet on websites sometimes in the meeting room sometimes on livestream platforms but what if we can bring people even say grandfathers or grandmothers even closer together without asking them to work for a long distance that's when we thought about VR although it sounds like very hacky, very techy sounds like people do need the device but if we imagine a future where VR hazards is just as easy to get as computers or smartphones then why don't we imagine that kind of future already and bring the public deliberation into VR so here we go we try to have lots of experiment also in the beginning just kind of little add-ons to improve VT1's experiment so we try to bring VT1's conversation not only on the website we build API and also we connect the conversation to smartphone to apps so this experiment is connecting VT1 conversation to a chatbot so you can actually add a chatbot on Skype or on Hangout and just talk to the chatbot say hey, what is the public issue undergoing right now and I want to participate and I can kind of give my opinion on it and the second experiment we tried out also I think this last year's project is imagining when everyone has a HoloLens maybe a contact lens on the streets so whenever you bump into a public deliberation kind of situated deliberation so for example if we're talking about on the metro there are some priority seats and in Taiwan there is one of the debate about whether we should keep or remove the priority seat because everyone should be respected so whenever you see it so we actually had that kind of debate and so I was thinking whenever we see something interesting on a spot we can already talk about it so we created this little demo to bring that conversation into that location on the metro and the last experiment it's called HoloPolice HiFi it's actually the demo I'm going to show here today later on if you are interested you can come have a look it's imagining a virtual commons where when everyone can all log into the share space to really gather in person and to have meaningful discussion in that space and also still feel the autonomy to discuss whenever you want wherever you want and whatever you want also because the space in VR is actually just enormous unlimited so in this demo we used the topic that Tanya professor suggested it's very related to Finland I think and we used the environment here all day and in this demo you can see the background is all the library because what I understand is we're imagining all day to be a public space where people can talk about public issues and probably later on in the future there will be some meetings around reforming policies as well so we're imagining okay if we can make one example and show you can also do that in the form of VR it will be awesome so we use this case and set the background to all this library so here on the interface in the beginning okay sorry I was trying to explain so in the interface before you basically can see other people's comments and also you can put your comments inside so in this VR experience we try to re-design the interface and we kind of bring those contents of sorry, contents of those topics onto the VR experience screen and when you enter the experience or the game you can see other people's comments so like this one and you can vote for yes, no or pass it's actually okay to say I don't know I have no idea what should I say yes or no about this question so you can vote for yes, no or pass and then afterwards your idea will be accumulated and calculated by the program behind and it's actually using polys as a back end okay so what we're trying to do here actually this demo is more interesting than it looks because it's very beginning of the implementation but what we're trying to do here is to build a recursive public which actually means collecting people's wisdom, intelligence, opinions, ideas into the shared environment where it's open and everyone can access to it so we're collecting all our feelings and thoughts around certain issue and try to use computer meaning AI or machine learning behind as the collaborative tool to help us reach as rough consensus so we can collectively thought about how we can improve our society and this experiment has been forked in different places so like Tokyo, Toronto and New York we've been trying to demo this very interesting idea and I think in this way we can try to start we can start to really co-create on very somehow sometimes very innovative very kind of seeing too much in the future ideas but somehow we can start to document all of them and start to think about okay what is the shared common value for all of us in the future so in this demo we're probably targeting on one of the SDG goals which is the SDG number seven about co-creation yeah and this is it for my presentation thank you thank you so much thank you Shiyang, thanks I think I saw an earlier version of the demo sometime in Madrid I think last summer or summer before when we gave a talk in the same conference so it's really fascinating to see now the demo localized here in Finland and that audience and with the current law reform process of the association act any questions to Shiyang at this point we can always ask questions during the demo too so I think right now let's transition to the demo so whoever is interested feel free to walk here and we'll get you set up with the headset we have seven different headsets so seven different people can try it at the same time and what do you think about the app process maybe five minutes or something per person to kind of figure it out to look around and so on and meanwhile if you're not interested in the demo or if you just want to stay in the queue for a while you can hang out here and ask questions come and talk to us or talk to Shiyang so with this I want to thank you everybody who was here and also all of the people who are following their live stream and I think the live stream will be going on for a while so we leave the cameras on for now so thank you so much, let's go to the demo so the same in Finnish, samasuomeks eli kuka on kiinnostunut demosta tulkaa vaan tänne etteemme saahan 7 ihmistä demoon yhtäikaa ja sitten muut voi odottaa tai tule juttelemme meille tai muuten vahengailla yeah maybe if you take one of the mics so everybody can hear over here maybe this one you can talk to the mic or then use the library thing so you can yeah so but you actually need some kind of okay yeah you can just grab it yeah that's a good idea it's Oculus Go because it needs yeah let's try to do it simultaneously so here's one where is this one alright I think the first person can but it needs to pair up with the controller so let's yeah it needs to go to the right controller okay so I think the first one you can actually what's your name? Thomas oh you're Thomas, okay so you can actually see kind of all the libraries seen inside and you can probably see a controller yeah and you can hold it and you can put your thumb on the touchpad and choose a great disagree or pass yeah and it actually should be connected to wifi but somehow here doesn't have access yeah we had a bad luck so the wifi is not working in this room in this room, okay today alright should we go outside? yeah we can go outside yeah because that's where it works but if you give the instructions here so then everybody knows what we are doing and if we take no those ones are broken so those ones with yellow posters are broken yeah they try to pair them with the right controller okay okay and then you try and then you come back in and you switch to the next person yeah that's a good idea alright serve the chaos so I'll try to go through what you should see inside and we can go outside we can go connect to the wifi together and I'll be with you guys to see properly okay so what you should see inside is the 360 video of Audi here and you'll see a conversation about Association Act and you can see other people's opinions and you can click on a great disagree or pass should be it after we connect to wifi it should work very well okay so this yeah and did you mention the 360 video just a quick note from our really great video crew thanks Antti and his colleagues from Bright Group so they're reminding me that maybe at this point we switch off from the live stream so thanks a lot to everybody who has been following live stream I'll see you online maybe on our Facebook site or Twitter so if you have any questions feel free to contact us at any time thank you so much let's wait for a bit so should I take this off?


Okay, so the combined authority completed a strategic outline business case for dualling the A10 or improvements to junctions on the route in 2020. In July 2021, the DFT, Department for Transport, awarded funding to the combined authority of £2 million for development work on the A10 dualling and junctions project, the Cambridge to Ealy project, up to and including the production of an outline business case, and what that outline business case needs to do technically is defining DFT's transport business case guidance. The combined authority has identified further £2 million of funding and there is potential for another £2 million to come in to support this piece of work from the DFT. So following the administration changes and review of priorities, the County Highways Transport Committee reaffirmed support for this scheme, reaffirmed support for this project and supporting the combined authority. And that was on the basis that the outline business case be considered in the policy context set by the current mayoral administration and also in the context of national and local commitments to net zero carbon budgets. We recognise that emerging national and local policy places a greater emphasis on sustainable modes on carbon and on safety and the combined authority and the County Council have been discussing the implications and opportunity of that in terms of how that manifests itself into the scope of the OBC. So the OBC will need to consider the needs of all users, it will need to have safety and sustainability as essence and consider their interaction with other proposals on the corridor such as those from the Great Cambridge partnership. The combined authority and the County Council are progressing the A10 outline business case working partnership, and we're presently discussing the most effective and appropriate way of doing this in terms of the governance structure for the project, and the financial and legal arrangements that will allow us to work in such a partnership. In parallel to that we're progressing detailed discussions about the scope of the work, and we'll provide further updates in due course as that comes together. Be happy to come back at a future meeting or provide an update to a future meeting when details of that scope are firmed up. That's great, thank you very much David.


Unique microorganisms of a fossil river Delta in the Atacama Desert unveil the current limits of life detection on Mars. This article was authored by Armando Azubustos, Alberto G. Faran, Carlos Gonzales Silva, and others.