Audrey Tang became Taiwan's digital minister almost to the day two years ago, first digital minister in Taiwan, one of the few anywhere in the world, and we believe the only transgender minister or at least the first one anywhere on the planet, Audrey Tang led Taiwan's first e-rulemaking project. Here we get into the things I don't understand so well. Well this I do. Here's on the Taiwan National Development Council's open data committee and she is its K-12 curriculum committee leader. If you're wondering what sort of background is required to become a digital minister somewhere, Audrey Tang's road has taken her via Apple, although not physically, we just learned she was actually never in Cupertino but worked for Apple anyhow on computational linguistics. She was at the Oxford University Press where her work was on crowd lexicography and at social text where she did social interaction design. All impressive stuff and then one other interesting piece from the bio that's not in your program's junior high school dropout, so go figure. Audrey Tang will give a brief presentation here and then be joined by Danny Russell who members and visitors here will know, vice president for international security and diplomacy here at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Danny Russell served most recently in government as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. He also served at the White House as special assistant to the president during the Obama administration and national security council, council senior director for Asian affairs. We are on the record. Again welcome to those watching via the webcast. The Twitter hashtag if you are so inclined is Asia Society Live. Please a warm welcome to the Asia Society here from Taipei, digital minister Audrey Tang. Hello everyone, very, very happy to be here and let's see if this clicker thing works. Oh it does, that's great. So yeah, so thank you for the excellent introduction. I worked with Apple, not for Apple, this is a very important distinction as I currently work with the Taiwan government but not for the Taiwan government and you will see why in a few slides. In any case, so my talk today is about digital social innovation. So unlike many people today who work in Asia on democracy, on furthering democracy, I'm an optimist and this strange condition began when I was 15 years old and that was 1996 and I discovered that the future of human knowledge is being created on the web and my textbooks were all of date. So I told my teachers I want to drop out of high school and start my education on the web and surprisingly all my teachers agreed with it. And then on the web, I discovered this wonderful community called the Internet Society that has a very strange idea of governance. It's called rough consensus radical transparency where anyone can join is an open multi-stakeholder system and that's the first democratic governance system that I know. It will be another six years before I get my first voting right. So that is my tribe and what I'm doing now is to take the lessons I learned when I was 15 years old to the governance system and this corresponds very neatly to the Sustainable Development Goals because in 1718, 1717 and 1716 we talk about the idea of people working on common goals that are pre-agreed but not so much on the pathways on how to get to the goals. So of utmost importance is that people understand available data, the evidence, what their actions influence the environmental and social spillovers and things like that in order to encourage trustworthy and effective partnership and in fact that is what the digital ministry in Taiwan, my mandate is to do is through open government and social innovation and youth engagement to make sure that people can have a meaningful input. And the values of Taiwan, the plural part is the important part, comes from the inauguration speech our president gave two and a half years ago. She said before democracy was often understood as clash between two opposing values but now Taiwan's democracy must become a conversation between diverse plurality of values and that we took as our guiding idea, guiding philosophy. So in the previous century, governance systems were often thought of as people who organize among, for example, people interested in environment and people interested in development through different agencies, different councils and among this organization kind of arbitrate through them and into some sort of compromise in the middle position. But that governance structure, that system is kind of bankrupt after the advent of social media and of a hyper-connected world because people don't need the government to organize themselves anymore with the right hashtag tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people just organized out of nowhere and it is impossible for the government or indeed the legislation to set up new committees for each and every emerging issue. So we'll find ourselves kind of in a lot of tension if we still want to govern the old fashioned way and so digital governance or collaborative governance learns from the Internet Society and ask a different set of questions instead of how should we organize people and what is fair between those organized people. We now ask, so we have different positions. What are some of our common values that we can agree with? And if we can agree on some common values, can we deliver innovations that works for everyone? If the government keeps asking these two questions, various other interests that seem to be in opposition with each other will soon come into consensus. And I will use one particular example that I personally participated in and that some legislators here have participated in as well. So four years ago in Taiwan there was a demonstration, is a demonstration in a sense of a demo of showing how to do something not in violent protest. It was around the MPs at the time refusing to deliberate substantially across straight service and trade act or the CSSTA and since the MPs were kind of on strike, the people just went and occupied the parliament and did MPs work for them. That's the legitimacy theory. And basically we experimented how to use civic technology to enable anyone working with over 20 NGOs each tackling the CSSTA from a different angle to just typing their company name or the trade they're doing and know exactly how they will be impacted by CSSTA and have real substantial dialogue around it. And it's called the sunflower movement. It is a quiet, silent, nonviolent revolution that nevertheless shaped how Taiwan people perceive politics as something that people can substantially contribute without waiting for the government to organize. And supporting the sunflower occupy was this movement called Gov Zero or G0V that started two years before the occupy in 2012. And a Gov Zero movement which I'm a part of is this radical new idea called forking the government. Forking in computer science means taking something that's already there that's going into one direction and going off to another direction while relinquishing, abandoning the copyright so that it could be merged back into the original branch. And so Gov Zero systematically look at each and every government services, like our legislation is ly.gov.tw, right? Like our executive union is y.gov.tw. Every website ends in gov.tw. And the movement says, if there's something in the public service that you don't like, well, you can go off and make your own version by changing O to a zero. So the Gov Zero shadow government version of the legislation is ly.gov.tw and so on. And so basically you don't have to Google for our work. You just go to any government website, change O to a zero and get into the shadow government. It's all open source, open data, interactive, and so on. And this is the inaugural project of Gov Zero budget G zero VTW because back then people found budgets, the national administration's budget, 500 pages PDF, very difficult to understand. So the Gov Zero people using the same data build a visualization where you can zoom in to the keywords to the topic areas you care about and have a real conversation amount of people interested in the same areas. And because they abandoned the copyright, so this year we merged all this work into the national administration so that for more than 1300 ministerial projects, you can see the KPIs, the procurements, the research proposals, anything associated with those 13 different projects. And ask any questions and have a career public servant have a real dialogue on that particular budget item as a social object. So this demonstrates one of the ways that the civil society can just fork of a public sector service and have the public service merge back their contributions. And so the Gov Zero communities using this ethos supported the occupiers back then and based on this idea of free software. And in Taiwan when we say free software or we always mean free as in freedom, not as in beer. Because we know that freedom is never free, our parents' generation, paid dearly for the freedom of association, of assembly, of speech. And we have to keep using the free software to keep it free, which is why we always only use the free and open software for this kind of endeavor. And so during the Occupy, the main way that we did the deliberation on the street and also recording it online is called the focus conversation method. It's invented in Canada about 12 years ago. It separates a discussion into four stages. The facts or objective stage where people gather around evidence that are not disputed by any party. And very importantly, the feeling stage where for a while we talk about nothing but each other's feelings. And checking in on each other's feelings and make sure that the feelings are properly resonating within the people who attended the Occupy or the discussion before we move on to ideas. And the best ideas are the ideas that takes care of the most people's feelings. And so the decisions then is easy just to take the ideas that are self-coherent and check with the stakeholders and then we can make it into law. And this is called crowd law. There's hundreds of events that we did, the crowd law campaign and things like that. And you can just Google for crowd law and find a catalog of the hundreds of attempts that we did in conjunction with communities around the world. And because of time, I don't have time to show all the four steps. I would just show the feelings part. So for example, back in 2015, we used AI-powered conversation called Polis, it's an open software to talk about this idea of UberX or people without a professional driver's license carrying passengers and charging them for it. Just on this neutral description we spent three months with all the stakeholders to make sure it doesn't offend anyone and everybody is welcome to join. And so we send this link to everybody on their mobile phone and just in one glance, they can see what their friends and families, their Twitter friends, their Facebook friends stunt on this issue of UberX. And so to express their feelings, basically they look at their friends and families and other people's citizens' feelings. Like I feel that passenger liability insurance should be mandatory for riders of UberX private vehicles and they can agree or disagree to resonate or not on this statement. And as they press agree or disagree, their avatar, the blue circle, moves in the crowd to identify the tribe or the cluster that they identify with. We don't look at the numbers here, we're just measuring the diversity of possible feelings and reactions. And the magical thing is that because we don't jump to solutions, we just check in with each other's feelings. And there is no reply button. So there's no room for trolls to perform. Right, it's impossible to troll this system. All you can do is to propose more nuanced, more eclectic feelings for other people to resonate with. And so after three weeks, we always find the participation, something like this. To the right are the divisive statements that people generally agree to disagree. But people spend far more time and far more energy on the left, which are the consensus statements that the ministries hold themselves to account. We agree to respond point by point to anything that resonates across the aisle, across the population. And so people compete still, but they compete for resonance. They compete for feelings that represents the most people's feelings. And then we meet with each stakeholders one by one in a live stream session, checking with them. Here are the common feelings of people. Do you agree? If you do, is there something that you can do to help further in these feelings? If not, why? So on this way, the interpretation or ideas become very feasible because it's based on common goals and common feelings. And so we set up the public digital innovation space as part of my mandate in 2016 to scale this conversation. We both scale out as in teaching the municipalities internationally on how to run the system. We scale up by giving it more binding power through e-petition and so on, which I'll talk about. And deeply, by having in our K-12 education and our high education, this kind of consensus making as capstone projects for people to focus on environmental and social issues as part of their basic and higher education. And so I'm a radically transparent digital minister. So all the meetings that I hold, that I chair, I publish a full transcript after editing for professionalism and taking out some in-jokes. And then we publish online, two weeks to the day after each meeting. So you can see hundreds of meetings. And anyone can ask me questions, including journalists, but they don't get exclusive answers. The answers need to be shared with everybody. And also, this is Mr. David Ploof speaking for Uber at a time. So lobbyists are subject to the same standards. And it's not just on the record, it's on 360 recording record. So any one of you can just put on a VR and relive the conversation. And I think this is very important so that the other stakeholders see Uber not as a nameless, faceless thing. But we actually regulated Uber. You can now call Uber legally, and it can call taxis through the apps and so on. They're in a symbiotic relationship now. So people can have their feelings checked also by the stakeholders' feelings as captured by the radical transparency records. And so to make sure that all the career public service is in line with this kind of work to reduce their fear, uncertainty, and doubt, we introduced the idea of PO's or participation office. They're a team of people in each and every ministry's binational regulation that their job is just to engage with people with emerging views online before they take to the street. And their job very simply put is to meet monthly and talk about the emerging issues that we should proactively engage the civil society with. And because it's a virtual team, it's literally like 60, 70 people now, but we share the same virtual workplace. And so people generally consider each ministry's reliable partner in cases like this, so there's no style of effect just by the virtue of going through 40 or so cases. And so for each petition, for example, the one on the right is the petitioner last May, who petitioned saying the tax filing system is explosively hostile to the users. And so it's purely negative energy. There is no useful information in his petition. And basically we look at the people who commented and 80% of which are just saying the Ministry of Finance should resign or something like that. It's not very helpful. But because of the participation office and our work, we just send an invitation to everyone who complained publicly saying so two weeks from now, everybody who complained just by the virtue of you posting a complaint are cordially invited to the Ministry of Finance to co-create with the participation offices the next year's tax filing experience. And just like that, the wind has changed. And everybody afterwards, it's 80% of it are constructive criticisms. They are actually offering their professional help. And so we had very successful for co-creation workshops that together with people who complained on the right hand side, they just get invited into the kitchen and become chefs or co-chefs and totally redesign our tax filing system this year, which has a 96% approval rating. And the other 4% of course still understand that their input will be taken into consideration in a fully radically transparent way for next year's tax filing experience. And so these are some of the ways that we're trying to get people who commit to different sides of the SDG into the center, which is innovation to the common values to the good of everyone. And the place we hold collaboration workshops, I must show it to you, is my office in Taipei City. It's called the Social Innovation Lab within the Taipei Contemporary Culture Lab or C Lab. And this is collaboratively designed by hundreds of social innovators that soccer field was drawn by people with Down's syndrome. And it turns out they're brilliant artists. And so I'm here like every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. anyone can come to talk to me long as they agree to have the conversation published on the internet. So rough sleepers, social workers, people working on social impact, they can just come to me. And it's not just they come to me, I also come to them. So every other Tuesday or so I tour around Taiwan, going to rural places, indigenous places and so on to the left. And then people can dial in through video conference. But anytime I go there to do this kind of investigative journalist or ethnographic research, the 12 ministries related to social innovation are standing right there on the Social Innovation Lab to the right. So that anyone on the field asking why is ministry, whatever, introducing something that we don't feel here, they can give a real back and forth conversation through teleconference and video conference. And the other 11 ministries then learn that oh, so this is to be resolved in this way. And because of radical transparency, people just co-create the social innovation plan that basically says the SDGs are the common index. We're going to index our work that the basic and higher education need to index this as part of their capstone and universities' social responsibility programs. And our Ministry of Foreign Affairs joined for the first time to offer this as kind of international help. So because of time, I'll just use one last example. When I was touring around Taiwan, I found many people caring a lot about the air quality in Taiwan. So they set up all those very low-cost measurement devices on PM2.5 and other air quality issues in their balcony, in their schools, in their homes. And the interesting thing is entirely grassroots is 2,000 or so points by the time I learned about it. And it's one GovZero project. And they wish the Environmental Protection Agency can complement their work. In any other place in Asia, the government will feel threatened in legitimacy. But in Taiwan, we just joined the civil society. By committing to set up the places where they don't have the measurement devices. By helping, collaborating their devices by producing more high-precision devices for them. And also developing algorithms to weed out the noise. But at the end, what we committed to is this civil IoT project at ci.taiwan.tawan.gov.tw that aggregates all the water quality, air quality, earthquake prediction, disaster relief data, everything into the same super high computing center. And for the civil society's contributions to be snapshotted and stored on distributed ledgers, so they know that the government will not change the numbers the day before the election. And so people have general trust about distributed ledgers that we can hold ourselves into account no matter where the sensor and the data came from. And this is how we can then develop the evidence-based like climate change and other action plans with other people in other communities without bilateral or multilateral parks. It's just people discovering these open source platforms and making use of it. And so finally, I would like to read you my job description. Because two years ago when I joined, I don't have a contract. I had a compact or a covenant with the government. My working conditions are voluntary association. I don't give or take command. That is radical transparency. Anything I see, I can publish. But I don't see any state secrets and location independence anywhere I am. I am in my office. And so with these three covenants, they asked me to write a job description of what I'm going to do. And so I wrote them a poem about my job description, which is kind of my vision about digital social innovation. And it goes like this. When we see internet of things, let's make it a internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. Thank you so much. Minister? Audrey, thank you so, so much. That has to rank as the world's best job description. Lone away. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today. What a great treat, and what a fun presentation. Remind you that we're on the record. The minister and I will talk for a while, and we'll open it up to questions from the room, as well as from the great beyond. Let me ask or remind you all who are brandishing phones to set them to stun, so they don't actually ring while we're talking. Now, at the beginning of your presentation, Audrey, when you said, let me see if I can get this clicker thing to work, I felt great relief wash over me and thought, OK, I can relate to that feeling. Maybe this will be at a technological level that I can handle. And in fact, your presentation was very lucid. And I thank you for that. But I wonder if I can start in keeping with your job description with the being part of it, with the human part of it, and talk a little bit about who Audrey Tang is. And you've had such an extraordinary journey, one that's marked not just by innovation, but by tremendous personal courage. And you told us at lunch, as Tom mentioned, that you had left school, junior high school. I know you went, however briefly, to California when you were only 19. You, as you alluded to, were a very active participant in the sunflower movement. You've made a huge step of coming out as a woman. And you've got a compact with the government, with the administration, that allows you to do these incredible things. Who are you? What drives you? What are some of the principles that make you, that have taken you in this fascinating and valuable direction? Well, more factoes. I live with six cuts. And I'm really a cat lover, part of reason why I voted for Dr. Tsai when she ran for president. She's a fellow cat lover. Really, she's really progressive, even in her progressive party, in terms of marriage equality, and also environmental protection, animal welfare, and animal rights, even, and things like indigenous rights, and things like that. So personally, I think my journey is going through two properties, going through a long period of living mostly with animals, and also with the indigenous language community, trying to revitalize their identity in a very unethnic, centric society, and so on. I think the overarching theme is what we call intersectionality, which is a big word, I know. But the idea is that I have some vulnerable parts that I suffered when I was being bullied, when I was eight years old, and things like that. I can relate to the part that are vulnerable in each of us who suffer social injustice. But on the other hand, I also have this empathy part, which allow me to relate more to people's living experiences and organize these into words, into movements, into poetry. And so by combining the organizational part and the vulnerable part, this intersectionality allows me to be a channel upon which the people who are suffering from environmental or social injustices can amplify their messages through me and then reaching a common understanding and with the career public service on what we can do together as a society. Well, thank you for that. So just to be clear, your six cats are all carbon-based mammals, none of them are digital. They're not crypto kittens on the Ethereum blockchain. I have some of that as well. Just checking. So I think what I'm hearing is that your own experience, your life experience and your experience as a transgender woman is germane to your focus on good governance, collaborative governance, open governance, the freedoms that you've been championing. Yeah, the word I used to describe is scalable listening or listening at scale. Because with sufficient time, two people can always kind of merge their horizons to reach some level of understanding. But the existing technologies before the internet, radio, and television makes it too easy for one person to speak to a million of people, but very difficult to listen to a million people, let alone having millions of people to listen to one another. And the internet can change that, but only in a very humble, very calm, very ambient kind of way that makes us focus on each other's life or experience more instead of this distracts us away with notifications or manufacturer addiction or things like that, which is where the digital governance thing is focused on and how Taiwan is shaping our strategy around AI and data and distributed ledgers. So could you talk a little more about how you see technology influencing and impacting on social issues in Taiwan in advancing equal rights? I know that there, for example, the law on same sex marriages still kind of percolating. Yeah, it's constitutionally recognized. It's just at the end of the year, we're going to have a few referendums about the exact wordings, like whether to use the word marriage or not, but the right, the same right has been recognized by the constitutional court. So I'm interested in your view of how technology has in fact impacted, that's one example, are there others? Yes, so in Taiwan, when Dr. Tsai talked about in her campaign broadband as a human right, many other governments say it, but Taiwan has a unique geography that let us actually deliver it, where we're well on the way there now. So anywhere in Taiwan or in any of the islands, Pescadores and so on, if you don't have broadband internet connection, it's always the government's fault. So we think it's a great equalizer if everybody have access to the same high-speed AI computing devices that I just mentioned for all the high school students be able to correlate their activities with the air and water quality around their schools, it will be a great unequalizer if only some people have access to the connectivity and the computing power. And so basically it's all very driven by equality about respecting the local cultural needs and social needs and about making the education at least in the K-12, but also more and more in higher education to participate in what we call the open source base way of education. So they're using hardware that we call it Arduino or Raspberry Pi, that our hardware that anyone can make themselves without paying a patent or royalty fee. Same goes for software, same goes for cybersecurity, same goes for many other pieces that make technology work. And the end goal is just to disenchant or demystify technology itself so that every child can feel that they own the technology, that personal computer remains personal and not something that they have to subscribe to. Audrey, what about the other end of the spectrum, the older people, the Luddites? And the people, whether it's the rural populations or the less educated in societies who tend to be left behind by technological innovation, how do you enfranchise them with your programs? So I think we should not ask them to come to technology. We should go to them with technology. And so in the e-petition platform, for example, there's two cases where it's strictly local. There's a South Italian Taiwan popular tourist destination called Hengchun. And they petition for a helicopter to be stationed there to serve as ambulance cars because they're just too far away, 90 minutes drive from a major hospital. And so because of this strictly local issue, all the five different ministries, their participation offices, we all went to Hengchun and have a real conversation with the people there. And the technique we use very simply put is that there is a room where stakeholders have a more expert conversation. And in the town hall, which is me, we watched the live stream of the conversation that's happening on the screen, but me serving as kind of an ESPN anchor, describing in lay language in Taiwanese Halak, what this display even mean to the local people. And the local people, all they have to do is to walk to the town hall or to join you through instant messaging or whatever. And some people do protests because where I am, there's SNG, there's reporters, but because it's no live stream back to the deliberation room, it doesn't disrupt the actual discussion from happening. And whenever people make constructive criticisms or ideas or whatever, I bring it back through a kind of channeling device back to where the mind map is growing in the people there. So people perceive the people outside, not as protestors or mobs or whatever, but actually active contributors to the mind map, their mapping. So at the end of it, we agreed the common value is that people should trust their local clinicians more. And so we allocate a lot of funds to build a new hospital where we can fly doctors in instead of flying patients out. Interesting. What are some of the points of resistance that you are encountering to elements of this set of programs, whether it's join or V-Taiwan or open government? Who's pushing back? Mostly it's the career public service who initially thought it is something extra to do, something that they don't have much credit. The ministry would take all the credit, if things go well and if things go wrong, they're always to blame and so on. So when I went into the cabinet, the PDIS, my office, is deliberately one person from each ministry. I'm allowed to poach one person from each ministry. So theoretically I can have 32 staff, now I have 22, but anyway, it is a truly multi-stakeholder team. I don't give them command. So anything that PDIS does, it is to the benefit of all the 22 ministries involved. And because of that, people start to see with radical transparency. Career public service actually gets a lot of credit because previously they proposed some very good ideas, but the ministries they know to each of them, so they never see the light of day. Because in Taiwan's Freedom of Information Act, I'm sure in other countries as well, before people reach a decision in the government, we're not compelled to publish the drafting stage, the back and forth within the ministry agencies. But because I said anything I can see, I can publish. So actually the Career Public Service gets a lot of credit for communicating with civil society with innovative ideas. Because it's so radically new, if things go wrong, it's always my fault. So people in the career public service learn that they can innovate and propose ideas that even have just 5% chance of succeeding and having me absorbing most of the risk or having the president herself through presidential hackathons and things, activities like that. We have cross-sectoral collaborations that basically the Career Public Service writes the entries, give it to the civil society people who enters the competition and they say, okay, we're just here to help the civil society. But actually they wrote the cases themselves. And so every year we select five cases and there's no prize money, no reward in monetary terms. But rather the prize of winning the presidential hackathon is to be merged into the Career Public Service or annual budget to the very next year. Wow, fascinating. Well, you're sitting next to a lapsed Career Public Service so I appreciate your forbearance. And in my own career in government I found on many issues, certainly issues dealing with national security and international relations, that it was important that the internal deliberative process remain confidential. That was key to not only protecting certain national security sets of information but also creating an environment where there was the willingness to innovate, to experiment, to contradict, to challenge the conventional wisdom. How do you maintain, setting aside national security information, how do you maintain the willingness of the team to take a risk with an idea that may instantly be shown to be a bad idea or try something that runs against the grain of what's current or popular. How do you protect that space for really open and honest internal discussion? Quite a few mains. If I had to go in with radical transparency in a live camera I would get nowhere, right? So when I talk about publishing the transcript two weeks after each meeting every participant is allowed to edit and people who feel there is a power imbalance usually choose to appear as nicknames so that if things go wrong you don't know which public service a member there is. If things go right they can come to the journalist and say, hey, I proposed that. So it's best of both worlds. But still on the national security aspect my radical transparency complex says I don't look at anything that is state secret, anything that is top secret or confidential. So we don't know how that will interact with national security matters. So far it's mostly about domestic matters. So I get that you're courting off the national security sensitive information and so on. But there are other forms of cyber crime of challenges to the security of systems the integrity of an administrative process. Have you had problems? Have you had the experience of being... Yeah, I'm going to talk geek for a bit. Like my first action as a digital administrator is to recompile the Linux kernel used in the government systems. Recompiling the kernel is a technical term. That means we use the secured, peer reviewed open source operating system to harden the security of our internal communication tools because if the public service in the 14 days of editing the journalist gets most of the copy then it will destroy the trust that the career public service plays on me. So I have to personally ensure the cybersecurity of the system that we use. And aside from introducing the systems called Sandstorm, by the way, sandstorm.io, aside from introducing that we also commissioned top-notch white hat hackers, people who are expert in computer security won the second place internationally in DEF CON to attack the system. And this is not just some black box penetration testing. This whole system is open source through each line looking for vulnerabilities, looking for security holes, and it's only after half a year of this white box testing that we're reasonably sure that this is okay against all the cybersecurity threats and that it has a full audit and so on so that people can innovate on top of this platform, which is why we use the same Google app like collaborative spreadsheet, collaborative document editing, the Kanban board, chat room, you name it and this secure enclave so that Curry Public Service can just write a few pages of simple web programming to create a system for ordering lunch boxes together or something like that, giving them the freedom to innovate without worrying about cybersecurity. Thanks. Well, so you've talked about cybersecurity. You've talked about safeguarding the code and the system. What about safeguarding privacy? What are some of the other concerns? Transparency, yes, but on the other hand, how do you calculate the things that could be put at risk by this radical transparency? As I said, people choose to record their utterances by voluntary association, so they only review the part of themselves or their speech that they're comfortable of revealing. So at an extreme example, I've had office hours where journalists interview me but they change their mind about the question they ask, so in the transcript you'll see me answering questions but all the questions are redacted and so in some extreme it could be like that which is funny, usually it's the other way around with journalists and ministers, but in any case we do allow people to basically edit away their speeches and utterances if they feel their privacy is at risk and I think as a general point if people have informed consent of what they put out there in a public domain we see data or private data as not an asset to anybody involved, but rather as a beginning of a real relationship. The GDPR from the European Union talks something like that. If you put data in the government's storage, the government begins a relationship with you that you can ask the government to disclose what kind of purpose it's using, is it using out of purpose, what kind of update mechanism is there, can I take it to somewhere else for storage and things like that and Taiwan is totally in line with this kind of what we call data agency you know, algorithms and attitudes. Great. Let me switch gears if I can a little bit. Sure. You talked a bit in your remarks about your own experience in the sunflower movement and I lived through that movement from the vantage point of Washington D.C. since I was working at the National Security Council at the time and the developments and the progress or lack of progress in the cross-strait relationship was then and will always be of real importance and real interest to policy makers in the United States particularly but elsewhere as well. The sunflower movement was not merely a protest about the fact that the members of the L.Y. weren't at their desks and doing what you wanted them to do. It was very much about the cross-strait trade services agreement itself. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about whether in any way there's in your view a sort of digital component to the cross-strait relationship. How, if at all, does your work, these platforms relate to the dealings and the prospects of the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland? Right. So just for the record, sunflower movement is not my idea at all. I did not know that it would happen. I was just called there to supply the communication facility of this protest that night. I had no idea that they would climb over the wall and break into it and that the communication facility I thought I would just lend for a couple of hours to end up to be 22 days. So I had no idea. But in any case, yes, I think there is a component of digital in this relationship. The example I showed, the Airbox or the G0V Air Visualization Platform, many people in, for example, Shanghai or Beijing or Shenzhen or so on really want to know what really is going on with the air quality there as well. But just as you know why the reporter with our borders chose Taiwan as their headquarter in Asia, that's because they have a safe place in which to publish the results without worrying about retaliation from the government and so on. And so there is a lot of collaboration between the civil society focusing on water and air quality and the citizen scientists, well, across Asia, but of course in those cities in PRC as well where they see Taiwan as somewhere that can safeguard their data and publish and contribute to the climate science without worrying about retaliation or revealing their identity there. And I think in that, I personally worked on the FreeNet platform back in 2000 and 2001 and it was the precursor of the Tor platform which is widely used nowadays for people in more restricted internet environments to safely voice their opinions and send their messages out to the international journalist community. And so while I don't work personally on the same technologies, now I do maintain the same ethos and support the people who work on what is really SDG-16 as well, an accountable kind of rural law system where people can safely publish their evidences that's related to their environment. Do you follow what is occurring in mainland China in terms of the harnessing in the application of AI, of technology and connection with the Communist Party's own goals for social control and social stability? They're on a very different track. Can you envisage the kinds of innovative platforms and programs that you're developing and applying being adopted or integrated even at the local level in the PRC? Yeah, so people don't usually call themselves civic hackers in the PRC for obvious reasons. Or if they do, they only get to use that once. That's right, that's right. But they operate under the umbrella, for example, of social enterprises of still social but less threatening. And we do offer through the social innovation plan basic trainings, basic know-hows of how to use these digital technologies, curriculums that we're building with the digital nations network and things like that. So all of these are available on the web and the particular thing with our technology is that it's not reliant on a so-called cloud provider, either Microsoft or Google or Amazon. It can all be run on a very cheap, simple PC and that powers, for example, the Occupy. It was powered by Intranet running just a couple of laptops. And so I think this is important so that people can learn to self-organize, maybe not in a political setting, maybe just in a socioeconomic setting, but still understand that in the digital governance approach it is possible to listen to millions of people. We talked about cybersecurity. We talked a little bit about, or we understand that you're setting aside the state secrets and the confidential information. But where have you had problems? What have been some of the issues? Does your own role as a transgender woman generate pushback and controversy? Are some of the policies that have been produced through open government or some of the issues that have surfaced through the Taiwan and other platforms, have they created problems that perhaps you hadn't foreseen? Many. There was a petition, 8,000 people, the petition Taiwan to change our time zone from plus eight to plus nine. The media loved the story like throughout the mainstream media. So immediately almost there's a petition of 8,000 people strong. That says Taiwan should remain in GMT plus eight. And so there's a lot of frenzy of buzz around this. So my methodology again is kind of when this kind of controversy happens it's just focusing on the common values as I said in the very beginning. So we did invite people who petitioned for both sides into co-creation workshops where they both after a morning of very loud conversation and also each ministry explaining exactly how much changing one hour would cost in terms of energy, in terms of tourism, in terms of everything. They had no idea the public service is very professional in every single way. And then they agreed the common value is that they want Taiwan to be seen as more unique internationally. Like we have some unique value proposition, some unique thing going on. But then even the original petition agreed that changing the time zone is perhaps not the best way to further this goal because maybe the media will report it for the day. And then, I mean, there are countries with multiple time zones. There are countries with multiple currency systems. It's not a strong enough identity. And so people just say, you know, if we're going to pay a large one-time cost and not so large but still sizable, uncrowding cost to implement this, why don't we use the same budget to make Taiwan unique in a way that's cultural, in a way that's open governance, digital governance, maybe we can export distance to system like Estonia does and things like that. And so it became the consensus of all the 16,000 people participating in the petition. So although there was controversy, but these were also people who can advocate for the rough consensus that we reached at the end. I see. Thanks. So I was guessing that maybe the debate was going to land on GMT plus eight and a half. But that's not where it went. No, it's not the compromise. Well, speaking of time, we're about at the point where we should open up the floor to questions and take some from Twitter. Before I do, I'll abuse my moderator privilege by touching on one subject that I haven't heard from you about, which is the participation, the role and the issues with private industry, the private sector. How do companies in Taiwan or abroad play in this open government innovative strategy? Yeah. So as the digital administrator, I'm semi-development to the civil, sovereign multinational entities such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and France. And it's very interesting because they're also struggling with their own legitimacy theory. They, just like the Internet itself, certainly doesn't have a Navy or army, but they found themselves being arbiter and organizer of people's movements just as we in the public sectors do. And so I think in many concrete cases, like in Taiwan, we see the use of AI of bots to spread this information. We're in the front line of it. We see using bots to, for example, calm people into buying counterfeit goods, which they pay upon delivery and found that it's broken and there's nothing to return to. But I'm still an optimist in doing those semi-diplomatic missions because early 2000, I went through the spam war, which is not a real war in a real battlefield, but it is a very complicated issue back then because people thought email was being destroyed by people who abuse the fact that you can send an email for zero dollars. And so finally, the solution during the spam war was not from we, the technologists, who implement strong cryptographic measures, nor from large email posters like Gmail, nor from governments which passed the laws on unsolicited emails, nor from the consumer protection authorities, nor from the educators. It's everybody doing a little bit of it, in accordionated action to reduce the cost of spam a little bit along the way, and so it reached a point where it doesn't, you know, earn anyone anything to send spams, and then we don't see much spams anymore after that. And so this kind of multi-stakeholder open negotiation, it does take time. It took like five years back in the spam war, but we think that it is always better than one single actor dominating the field by basically passing draconian laws that makes everybody else go into the black market without a doubt, but rather in a serious, ongoing discussion of internet governance. Great. Well, that's terrific. Thank you very much, Audrey. Okay. The floor is open. If you'd like to ask a question, I'll ask you, please briefly identify yourself. Please make sure that it's actually a question. And please keep it brief. So the gentleman in the back, please. Yes. I'd like to get it on the record. This is Jonathan from the Korea site asking you about whether you can gamify some of these initiatives. Yes. So there's this project called Holopolis. So the reflection stage technology is called Polis, and Holopolis basically used virtual reality, immersive reality technology to get people in the kind of IMAX theater state of mind and put people into each other's shoes for starting on the International Space Station. Looking at the Earth is called the Observer Effect. We know as a fact that it makes people better people. Just looking at the Earth as a single object and then zooming in into the environmental system and viewing, for example, a construction project from the viewpoint of an endangered animal. Or, for example, I had this conversation with young school children by shrinking my avatar into the size the same as those first graders so in virtual reality it's much easier to make empathy, convey empathy in a way that is not just a game, but it's still fun, of course, but really it is an immersive engagement tool that put people really in the place and give voice to like a river or a history or indigenous nation that perhaps have no voice to speak on their own but could be done with the Holopolis project with the virtual immersive reality three people from my team is going very soon to Spain, to Madrid to prototype the next step of this gamifying system in Mediala Prado, so if you're interested feel free to join the Holopolis project. Great, do you have a cat avatar that you can use at home? Yes, I actually do. Okay, yes, the gentleman in the very back. Earl Carr representing Momentum Advisors and also an adjunct professor at NYU, thank you Minister Tom, I really enjoyed your presentation. I had the privilege of taking a group of graduate students to Taiwan this summer for the first time and they absolutely loved Taiwan. I had a question last year, 2017, there was a large-scale ATM theft case in Taiwan where a network of criminals used malware to essentially rob, I think it was like 41 ATM machines throughout Taiwan and stole something like 2.6 million. What are some of the, how are you dealing, what kinds of projects are you doing to prevent these types of things from happening again? Well, they're an international network so the fact they're discovering Taiwan says something about our cybersecurity capabilities. I mean, they've been operating everywhere. So there is the Cybersecurity Act which is the cornerstone of this and we thank the legislature for a very difficult conversation and finally passing the Cybersecurity Act. It lists as critical infrastructure the essential services like banks that keeps the society functioning and it basically says the cybersecurity industry, the cybersecurity community in Taiwan, people who are white hat hackers should have every incentive to remain white hat hackers and contribute to society and occasionally gets a meeting with the president, for example, and gets cherished as useful and productive members of the society instead of going into the criminal route. And so the pride, the self-esteem of the cybersecurity community in Taiwan is now at the highest point in history and we make sure that there's sufficient HR like human power in each critical infrastructure as well as the ministries that manage these critical infrastructures. We make sure that they're paid well. They have very good career advancement strategies and they participate in the international cert in other communities and provide their contributions. So just a team of hackers who audited my Sandstorm system filed like three CVEs which is like medals of honor for their work and so just making sure they're respected and we have sufficient training in the college level for people who are interested in defending the reality of the cyber plus physical world now. And I think this is really the cornerstone because upon which radical transparency can be built without this foundation, it's impossible. Thanks. Ambassador Elliott. Yes. There's a microphone coming. Hi, I'm Susan Elliott and I'm with the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. My question is this is a really interesting and innovative endeavor of the Taiwan government and yourself. Are there other governments who are interested in doing similar things and have you had collaboration with other countries and looking forward to seeing more kinds of digital ministers in countries like the U.S. and others? Yes. We have a lot of collaborations. The year before I become digital minister of the 12 months, I spent five of which in Europe. I work very closely with for example the Etelab, the state lab of the French government who actually trained activists using this methodology and then they went off and did Nudibu. And so it is very interesting relationship with state lab and civil society people. And we also take inspiration from Iceland, from Estonia, from Madrid after the 15M and so on. So there's this coalition of democratic cities. There's a EU program called Descent for Decentralized Policymaking and it's called Decode that brings data in and so on. So we maintain a very strong connection with both the academic and also the practitioners in municipalities. It's mostly municipalities because it's the right amount of people and political willpower to make it happen. That's it. And this June we also held a workshop in NYC with people from 18F, from USDS, from the New York City government to introduce this methodology. And we're bringing it to Ottawa I think this November and we're making a curriculum together. Yeah. Thank you. Let me take a question from Twitter. This is from Denali Paquin. From the beyond. Can established entrenched power truly concede to emergent changes? Won't established budgets, careers, fiefdoms, reinforce, resist and deny self-organized solutions? Yeah. I mean internet itself was like that. I mean there was a lot of established interest. I'm sure that here there's AT&T and friends who I think oppose the very idea of installing a plug-in to your phone system. And so had that not been allowed, this whole idea of modem would not be possible and without a modem there is no internet. So there's some preconditions upon which that established system need to see that this emergent system is complimenting but not reinforcing their hierarchical power. But on the other hand I'm my philosophy of voluntary association says before the career public service is ready for any of it I certainly don't go to the Ministry of Defense and say starting tomorrow you're going to do things my way and that's not my philosophy. So they only come to me when they see that the danger or the risk of not engaging is larger than the potential fear and certain of doubt that they have internally of engagement and that is the philosophy of participation offices we're certainly not saying we're replacing the existing establishment overnight. We're mostly saying like Buckminster Filler is want to do and want to say is that you don't fix or hack or patch an old system you make new systems that in some cases make the old system obsolete but it is a natural progression. It is not by fighting with the existing system. So career bureaucrats could be made obsolete but you're not going to fight with them. That's exactly right. Over time. I got out just in time. Okay, more questions. Yes, the lady right here. Now I'm a visiting scholar in New York. So I have a question for you because right now the news that Google they're playing to return to China market and they already have like a dragonfly. Yeah, because they're sensitive. Some keyword like a student protest or human rights censor the keyword and also to tracking the browsing results applied which number to research that. The sensitive concept. So what do you think as a freedom is can be training for the business or benefits for the big company like Google? Well many Googlers who are my friends are very concerned about it. They've brought it up in their internal governance mechanisms. Being their company business of course I cannot comment or review what they actually is going through but we use an example like when I started working with Apple it is a liaison with the open source community and beg a time for anything related to basic language research or even AI research or whatever. Apple doesn't publish anything and they don't actually get a lot of credibility or trust from the academic community of the things that they're producing or how they're producing in a very basic sense of the programming language they use and after quite a few years we the people who work as liaisons and the people who work within Apple eventually convinced the top management that it is actually to their benefit if they work more in the open and more to share their research results with the research community of programming languages and artificial intelligence which is kind of the direction Apple is taking now. So I think it all boils down to the individuals. So just to come back a little bit about I'm not saying the career public servants the people are mis-absolute I'm just saying the hierarchical power structure is being supplemented and a little bit rendered absolutely but people are still people and people can act in their conscience in the kind of values they want to uphold and they collectively define the company or the brand that they work with. I think one of the great mismatch of our time is that we use the words that we use on people like we say attract investment nouns that are not people our institutions, our collective fictions are brand and we treat people as if they're functional entities like human resource and things like that. So if people within a institution can think of themselves more as individual actors and organize and make their thoughts known as many friends of mine in Google is now doing I think there is every hope that their governance system still within that institution will deliberate and will change its course for the better of the common will of the people working there. Let me follow up on a good question about Google and China with a slightly philosophical question which is that for a generation there's been a conviction in the West that freedom is an essential condition for real innovation that scientific method is founded on the sanctity of facts the sharing of data the integrity of the data, et cetera and that led to a widespread assumption that for example in China in mainland China that only with political openness and reform could innovation, science, development and even business genuinely flourish that premise has been called into question and is debated now with a lot of evidence suggesting that even while the political system is becoming more controlled innovation, development research is flourishing within that political stricture where do you stand on that sort of debate and what is your experience telling you that innovation is likely to be the future? So first I think innovation means very different things to many different people I mean the common dictionary definition is just it has to be new, it has to be replicable and that's it, right? So what counts as innovation I think is very different as I mentioned very different tracks in Taiwan when we talk about innovation I always say that it must be for the social good for the common good of everyone if you make innovation in one particular domain to the sacrifice of other domains like focus on one sustainable goal to the detriment of the other goals we don't call it innovation we call it a mistake Seriously, this is just common political language in Taiwan on the other hand in many other jurisdictions in many other systems we just call it linear progress, innovation and ignoring the massive externalities that it can cause to the society and the environment so what qualifies as innovation is different in the different academic and political communities I still think that open innovation the ethos that the internet itself embodies is not entirely gone in PRC for example the Great Firewall they still allow people to collaborate on GitHub which is the most important open source collaboration ground recently acquired by Microsoft so basically what it says is that if it cuts the connection to one of the greatest nexus of open innovation it is to the detriment of whatever innovation means there as well the innovators there still have a strong enough societal mandate so that they cannot actually shut GitHub off and I think so it's not as you know, polarized or dystopian at this point but of course we'll pay close attention Thank you, thank you very much for that Yes, the lady with the black address Yes Hi, my name is Leah from Marzius, I'm at Colombo University representing the student lets think tank called European Horizons, we just opened a chapter in Taipei University by the way, so what I'm really interested in is that obviously there's a certain I mean the models that you're proposing which are incredibly interesting are sort of proposing a new form of democracy a new form of participation an open form of participation but it is also known that there exists a certain digital gap with everything between the offline and online world and particularly between more developed and less developed countries although I hate to use that dichotomy there is of course a danger that why the countries that can afford the infrastructure and the knowledge and the education of society to participate in this kind of digital and more open kind of democracy where does it leave the countries that cannot afford because there is an up front investment necessary where does it leave the countries that cannot afford this and are there because of the when you mentioned the collaborative partnerships you were mentioning France and Canada which are very developed countries where does it leave the countries that are not there yet and how can that can partnerships be established to improve that That's a great question so last November I believe I spoke about this very topic in the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in UN Geneva because of certain passport issues I had to send my robotic avatar into the Internet Governance Forum so for the rule of proceeding they're just watching a video except it's recorded two seconds ago and that has a camera with it In any case, through the presence I think the panel I attended was landlocked and least developed and also small island countries which doesn't have a strong Internet exchange point where it costs a lot to exchange information to Facebook or to Google or to any of the data centers and certainly those companies are not going to set up data centers anytime soon on those small islands or landlocked countries so I think it is pretty unique that Internet is designed with these scenarios in mind originally because it's like a nuclear resilience network and so many of the tools of the early Internet like the email functions perfectly even if you're cut off from the wider Internet you only have a very thin connection that was indeed the case during the Occupy during the Occupy the entire 3G and HSDPA channel were so saturated that we have to rely on intranet technologies with very limited exchange capacity to the outside to run most of the communication network and collective decision in the occupied area around the legislative union and so which is why we think that the technologies were proposing all based on the idea of decentralized web all based on the ideas that it can run on very low cost raspberry pi level hardware, open hardware it could also be of help to landlocked or small island countries that basically want to set up virtual town halls or about collaborative governance system by linking the campuses together without paying for a very expensive outbound link to the greater or larger Internet by basically leveraging the latest development on distributed ledger decentralized web and things like that so technologically we already have a prototype of a solution and we're of course very much willing to work with our partners in many other countries and perhaps UNDP why not to try to pilot this kind of governance systems great thank you very much the lady right in front of the former question or had a question the other lady in black I also have a finance question when either individuals or groups or countries come to you for a solution and you come up with a solution I'm concerned or wonder who pays for those quality air quality controls or the helicopters or all the solutions you come up with the air quality sensors they are done by private sector companies with their social mission I was just visiting Edinburgh so they called social enterprises there but here I mean there could be B-Corps or whatever they're basically for-profit entities with a clear social mission to make something happen to solve a sustainable development and ongoing challenge and I'm also the minister with the mandate to work with social innovators, entrepreneurs and anyone who want to make a business out of solving an environmental or social need and we SDG index their work and put it on the dashboard that I don't have time to show so basically we play matchmakers to people with environmental or social needs and build sustainable business models for the companies who are interested to thrive and also export it for example the Taiwan Water Corporation recently through the presidential HECAZON established a relationship with AI researchers to detect the water leakages early so that they don't have to wait a year and a half before repairing a new leakage point they shrunk their time to buy 10-fold because we SDG indexed this work because we built a sustainable business model out of it so the team is now in New Zealand because of climate change they now do and so the team was just there and it shows enormous trust to just share data about water pressure about water quality this way and so of course the taxpayers in New Zealand probably pay for the initial cost of producing these data but it is entirely voluntary association because there is a business to be made there as well. Thank you very much. There's a lady with a scarf right there Hi, my name is Charlie Su and I'm from Taiwan and work and live here for a little bit. I think this is an interesting platform, very transparent I think my question is what's the percentage of the citizen have involved in this platform do you think? And second of all I think Mr. Russell he asked a question about for the senior people or older people or lower educated people there you answer that question you can approach to them I guess the question I have is if it's not a specific issue it's just a general issue how can they express their opinion through your platform? Yes, so the first question the national e-participation platform or the joint platform has 5 million users in the country with 23 million people the age and activity map looks like this if you're in a college or if you're in a senior high school there's a lot of participation and if you're retired there's a lot of participation because people waste more time on their hands so we're not saying much exclusion domestically across different counties but it is true that it's mostly national issues and if it's a local issue it has to solicit national interest two local issues we dealt with are both in popular tourist destinations or in marine national parks because everybody wants to visit there and so it is to the welfare of everyone so we're now working through the second issue you mentioned through what we call the regional revitalization plan I don't actually know how to translate so just translate it with whatever so the regional revitalization plan is basically saying in each town in each county of around 50K to 100K of people they build their own self-governance system by making use of this e-participation platform we provide it for free but mostly for archival and indexing and education purposes they still run with analog tools to collect what people feel and we don't call it deliberative democracy we just call it you know with people right sitting down having a chat and so basically this idea of regional innovation is our next step of scaling out is taking the same tools basically culture the same ideas same archival and same level of automation by empowering the young people in those different townships and counties to be able to collectively determine the identity of their neighborhood and build an ecosystem out of it so that they will wish to remain and identify with that particular place and so it is an instrumental part of the regional revitalization tool but the regional revitalization plan comprises of many other ministries as well Thank you, Andre we're coming perilously close to the end of our allotted time and so I think I'm going to let the internet have the last word we get a question from online you're a champion and a trailblazer in harnessing digital technology and innovation for the benefit of society can you comment a bit on the dangers from the use of social media and other digital technologies for political disruption for political efforts that undermine democracy as we have seen in the case of the 2016 election here in the United States yeah disinformation campaigns computational propaganda precision persuasion these are a reality of our times Taiwan's concerted effort to work with disinformation is somewhat unique certainly in Asia in the sense that we don't sacrifice anyone's freedom of speech in our responses there is a rapid response system from each ministry in every agency nowadays when we our system detect that there is disinformation campaign starting within hours like 3 hours or 4 hours there is a clarification or a point to point response from the responsible ministries on the homepage of the administration and then we partner with civil society friends who are not paid by the government for sure and they can also correct the government's mistakes in independent fact-checking organizations that are not just publishing written reports but actually have bots for example that you can add as a friend on the whatsapp like setting and if you see something that you wonder whether it's disinformation or not you can just send it to the bot which does the crowdsource validated audit trail of fact-checking for you and let you know that whether this has been clarified or not so at the end what we're trying to do here is to bring the basic education system and lifelong education system to have a sense of media literacy and critical thinking in people because back in the authoritarian days it's very easy to people to accept one standard answer if it's printed in one font or spoken in some authoritarian voice and this is what disinformation is piggybacking on it is basically printing with that font with that voice just not with the same content and trying to get into people's mind kind of virus of mind and mimetic but now what we're doing now with this kind of real-time clarification and multi-stakeholder consultation it's very public is that if you sit down and listen with people with different ideas for a long enough time it builds an immune system, inoculation in a human brain so that one cannot be motivated by device PR campaigns in the future because you have considered the different positions of the stakeholders so this is the culture we're bringing to the table and we're also bringing all the different detection and evaluation systems to the table and we connect with the international fact-checking organizations and similar endeavors in an effort to make this information more like, you know, a distraction rather than a serious problem undermining the democracy Great, well Audrey Tang I can't speak for everybody I will say I feel like my IQ has gone up by several points listening to you today but I can speak for everyone in saying thank you and particularly telling you that I think we all found what you have shared with us today not only interesting and not only informative but also inspirational and I want to let you know that you have an open welcome at the Asia Society and I very much admire and appreciate both your personal courage something that we all respect but also the professional work that you're doing which is clearly on the cutting edge of where societies need to go in order to build faith in public institutions and to build for the challenges of the digital age we're living in now so please join me in thanking you