Can everybody hear me okay? Yes? Awesome. So thanks for coming to this very first talk about AI Ops. And I think the first thing that I'd like to do before diving into the details is to set the stage what AI Ops means, because nowadays it's often confused with ML Ops. So where ML Ops, which is machine learning operations, focuses on how we operate machine learning workloads with operations and in the cloud native works world. AI Ops more focuses on how we can use AI to improve and augment operations. So although AI and ML are like similar and synonym and used, those two terms should be differentiated. So this is how I look like on the internet. I'm very close to Denmark, and there's still the old logo unfortunately. This big nose avatar, that's me. Close to Denmark, close to the Baltic Sea. Usually we only get like 20 degrees Celsius. We only ship passengers. No containers yet. Not cloud native, unfortunately, but we're working on it. This is the logo I'm working for Red Hat. It's a stealth startup to be to doing its exit soon. Oh no, we already did our exit. And I'm working in the office of the CTO, also known as Octo. And we do a lot of funny things, making sure that things don't implode play around with new technologies. And it looks dangerous, but actually it's a lot of fun. Also, like the level said, how Red Hat sees AI because Red Hat is usually an infrastructure provider.  So first and foremost, we also want to make sure that I workloads run really well on top of the infrastructure and the platform that we provide. And yeah, so one of the projects here is Project Toth. That colleague of mine is working on where we look into optimizing AI stacks. And one of the cool things that he did is that they are doing is recompiling TensorFlow just for your individual machine. And by just recompiling with the correct flags, we can squeeze out 10 to 15 percent more performance just by recompiling TensorFlow. And another side note, I love talks where you get some pointers where to follow up after the talk. So I put these sticky notes on top of the slides. You can take pictures whenever you see them or at the end of the presentation, I'm going to show up all those sticky notes. Then another thing that our team works on is the broadly wearing a shirt. This is a reference architecture of a platform to manage AI and machine learning workloads on top of OpenShift or Kubernetes. So it's not a product per se that you can buy, but it's a community. And this talk is about using some AI technology to be more intelligent, but also at the same time, we are trying to make our own products more intelligent and augment some AI capabilities in those products. And if we're talking about OpenShift and Kubernetes, most of the time we're dealing with time series data, which is metrics.  So we use some AI to make you a bit smarter with this. So I'm going to talk about Prometheus, what it is, then how to store it for long term, because, as you know, without data, nothing. Then we look at the anatomy of an anomaly. And finally, how to integrate all that into your monitoring setup. This talk is not about a shiny product and the holy grail of monitoring. So that's not what I'm going to give you. And I'm not going to show you how we turned our messy, messy monitoring solution into this old school spider demon. And I'm also not going to show you a success story, how we applied some of these things. It's more like, we've investigated how we can use AI and machine learning on top of Prometheus data. And I'll point you to some tools and scripts to get started on that journey. I'll have some questions that you might ask yourself and maybe also some answers to those questions. And the good thing it's all open source. So what is Prometheus? Maybe some of you folks can raise your hand to know what Prometheus is. It's great. So the knowledgeable folks are in the front. And to those folks in the background, I have this great Prometheus architecture slide, right? So everybody loves architecture slides. So now you know what Prometheus is, right? And we can go to the bottom of it. No, let's back up a little bit. So Prometheus in a simplistic worldview is a Greek guy. And as we're in the Kubernetes world, everything has to be named after Greek people that did some stuff. And Prometheus was what was the guy that returned fire back from the gods to the humans and hence the torch. So now you know the story why Prometheus has this torch symbol. And Prometheus looks at targets. That's how they call them. And as we want to monitor things, Prometheus monitors those targets by pulling data from those targets. And that's really important. So every target, like you have a web application, you have a database service or a pod or anything, exposes its metrics via normal HTTP route slash metrics. And Prometheus is the one that pulls the current state of the target and stores it in this database. It's a very optimized time series database written in Go, especially for these kind of operations. And without any alerting, you probably can't do monitoring. So it also has the capability to write some rules how it went to trigger alert, and then it pushes out these alerts to an alert manager to get you notified. So in essence, in its core, Prometheus is made for monitoring and alerting based on a very capable time series DB. So the question, what do we need for machine learning? Any idea? Any from you guys? Just say one word. Exactly. So what's the data in Prometheus going to look like? But before I go into how the data actually looks like, I'm a bit confused of my slides here. So I'm going to talk about how to store the data for long term, because if you just have a short time window, you probably can't do any long term predictions. And as I said earlier, Prometheus is made for monitoring and alerting. It doesn't give you capabilities to store your metrics for a very long time. It usually has a retention of like two days or something like this, but it's not for giving you the data back from your last Black Friday sales from last year. So we needed to look for some solutions how to store it for long term. At that time, when we started this project, like one year ago, we looked at a project called Thanos, which I thought was also a Greek god, but apparently is just some marble character. It's based on a large part of the Prometheus code base. What it does is takes the time series blob that we saw earlier that is stored on disk and puts it into some object storage and does some optimization like downscaling and preprocessing of the internal queries, internal metrics for some so that your queries can run faster and then provides a global view on your installed Prometheus instance plus the metrics that you offloaded to your object storage. And in essence, it gives you unlimited storage for your Prometheus metrics data. But at that time, we had some problems installing it. So we looked at some other solutions to that. And one thing for a time series, always also pops up to your mind is influx DB, which is also written in go, which is integrates very nice to Prometheus because you can just point your Prometheus instance to write with the remote write API, write its time series metrics to another database, which happens to be influx. And it integrates very nice with Prometheus, just just install influx to one configuration setting in Prometheus and off you go. But unfortunately, influx tries to hold all the information in its memory. So if we look at two months or four months of data, the memory spikes really, really high. And the solution that influx gives is you go to a cluster environments, you spin up a cluster of influx nodes. Unfortunately, this solution didn't work out for us because it's, it's the paid model of influx. So if you're running it in your data center and you already have influx, it's a very good product and you're happy to use it. But for, for us, it's just in work because yeah, RAM. So what we did, we created a Prometheus scraper pod. This thing still exists out there. We scraped Prometheus, the Prometheus API and the returned JSON metrics, what we store on our self object storage, which is just an S3 compatible object storage. So we had these JSON flops lying there for days or hours worth of data. The good thing about this is you don't need to talk to your ops people. So they don't need to reconfigure their Prometheus instances. I only need access to that instance, which is something that you get easier than a new configuration setting that writes the TSDB blob somewhere or something else. So it's less intrusive. And the good thing is that it can be queried by Spark SQL. So Spark, as some of you might know, is a good for map reduce kind of workload, batch processing, etc. So if you have large data sets that span terabytes of data, and you want to query them just like a database, then Spark SQL, is it called Spark SQL? No, Spark SQL to the rescue. You point it at the S3 backend where your JSON flops are stored and they load into memory or into distributed memory. And you can do some simple analysis like the median of other variants or whatever of these metrics, of these data sets. And also here we have some notebooks that connect to this kind of data. But then, till then, things have changed. TANOS is now a very good integrated solution and it's running in production in our team. And we're collecting from the OpenShift for clusters, thousands of metrics in production to a TANOS cluster running in our servers. So nowadays, if you want to store data, Prometheus data for the long term, TANOS is I think the right way to go. And the integration is really, really, really easy and straightforward because querying TANOS feels exactly like querying Prometheus. So what do we really need for machine learning? Consistent data. Going back to how our data looks like. Prometheus metrics, metric types can be of four types. First is a gauge which is basically a time series. And we have counters which are special time series. They are monotonically increasing so gauge can go up and down and a counter probably hopefully just goes up until something is being reset. Then we have histograms which are cumulative histograms of values and summaries which are snapshot of values in a certain time value. And to cross the difference between a histogram and a summary, you probably need to read the documentation a couple of times. But basically, if you only want to know the distribution of your values in buckets, then use a histogram. But if you want to know some actual values like a sample, how long your longest query took, then you probably want to use a summary. So here in picture again, gauge goes up and down, counter goes up. And a histogram and a summary and a metric. So metrics is easier to say and okay, I know than to actually understand. So if I'm saying a metric to you, you think of a, well, it's a time series, but in Prometheus having a metric called like load one or some like latency of your web service, that's just the name of the metric. But an actual time series is composed of the metric name and its labels. So every unique combination of the metric name plus its labels and the values for those labels make up a time series. So choose very wisely what you put in those labels, because if you have an infinite amount of values for those labels, you probably have an infinite amount of metrics, which is not so good. So monitoring is hard. If you remember that Prometheus just pulls from those targets, we see that slash metrics, the target can expose anything to you. So I'm not in control what metrics I'm getting. If I'm installing OpenShift or Kubernetes, I get 1000 metric names, which is not 1000 metrics, because you have this combination with the labels. So you have a lot of time series is being thrown at you. And with every iteration of that, this web service, the parts that are being installed in your cluster, you can get other metrics. So we don't have a schema that is being enforced, which is hard for a data scientist. And as we know, it's 80% of your time is understanding those names and throwing away the bad stuff, where just some developer changed some metric name, and you don't understand, you don't know what it means. So I think the first thing that you want to do is some analysis of the metric of the metadata and those metrics. And that's what we did. We came up with some notebooks, looking at the distribution of the labels. Here we say, here we see for, I don't know what metric that is, but basically we're plotting the label values over some time. And we see that at one point, the amount of values just doubled. Another analysis that we did is called t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. I can barely pronounce that name. So we get an abbreviation for it. It's called t-s-n-e. I have no clue how that works. But if I take that notebook and point it at my data, even me as a simple guy can see that there are some classes in there. And there are some classes that are smaller than others. So maybe we have a problem here. And maybe we can talk with the monitoring guys, why are there some smaller classes of these labels? So using these notebooks to talk with the monitoring world or understanding the initial nature of the metrics that you're looking at can kickstart you in your discovery with Prometheus metrics. Now we're going to now many types because in the end we want to detect something anomalous in our system. Once we understood what metrics are good and what metrics we want to focus on, we want to see if there are some anomalies in our metrics. If understanding what anomaly is, we need to understand the components of a time series. So a time series can have a trend. It can go up or down. And it can have some inner trends which we would call a seasonality. Like in the morning you have a lot of people powering up their computers so you will have a spike there and then in the evening when everybody leaves the office it will go down. And this happens every day until we have a weekend and then the seasonality changes. So this is also some nature of that time series. And if we're looking at anomaly types it's basically something that doesn't happen as expected. So if usually the trend is going up and suddenly it goes down I would call it an anomaly. If the seasonality always is like really cyclic but then it somehow differs from what I'm expecting it's an anomaly. If usually I'm at a threshold of 2 and suddenly I'm seeing values at 5, 6 I would call it an anomaly. And to specify that anomaly a bit more precise I would call it a point wise anomaly, a seasonal anomaly, maybe a trend anomaly. So plotting these graphs here is very important for you to plot them over a long time to get a feeling for it. And then you can use a tool like Profit which we embedded in our systems, in our container. This is a library from Facebook, it's still actively maintained and it's pretty cool. You just give it some time series and it spits out an upper window, upper, upper, upper, why had upper and upper band and a lower band for that window and a prediction of the time series. So the black dots are my observed values and the blue line is what Profit will predict. And it also extracts a trend of your data. So here we see that it goes a little bit up on the right and it will extract a seasonality of your data. So what you probably just do is, would do is use Profit predict the value that you are observing that you would observe at time n plus x, compare it with your actually observed value. And if it differs, thrown alert, call everybody on duty, hey we have a different monitored value than we were expecting, right? Yeah, no. Because then you would always call your folks because you're just seeing one anomaly which is probably okay for a distributed system. So you would also want to find out when you are actually calling something an anomaly and wants to call somebody on page at duty. And here are also some clever things, this is just one example, how you would define an actual anomaly. In the accumulator example you would just have a counter when you have a value that is an anomaly type, you would increase that counter and the next value that you are seeing is not an anomaly, you would decrease that counter but with a higher number and then the only thing that you would set up is at what point of that increased counter you would actually call it an anomaly. And you can experiment with different kinds of these filters for anomaly types until you are happy and work with your monitoring folks to actually bring value to the table. So the architecture so far, architecture setup so far, we have some application running on top of OpenShift Kubernetes which is reporting its values, its metrics to Prometheus, we store those values in SAF or in TANOS, then we have some Jupyter notebooks where you do some initial research, some data science exploration part to understand the values and the nature of your metrics and you are also using Spark to process that larger bit of data or maybe not if you are using TANOS. Anyway, now you want to get your hands on something and you don't want to open up all those notebooks, no we are living in a container world and as we saw in the keynotes it is just a matter of reverse searching in my history and firing off that kubectl command and boom you have 10,000 containers running. And that is what we created sort of for you, so we plug its forecasted values in its attached storage somehow and then I think is the nice thing about this setup, expose by forecaster becomes just another target for Prometheus. So the only thing that I need to set up with my monitoring folks is give me access to your Prometheus environment and also scrape myself. And this container is really easy to install in your cluster to experiment with because it is just a container. It has some configuration and as we always configure our stuff with environment variables the only thing that you would set up is kubectl, docker, operations, blah blah blah, y-heads, upper, where is the y-head? Fourier or profit anomaly, so these metrics are being created out of the configuration that you give it. And you can set up some alerting rules to be alerted if you have seen application. And as everybody loves demos, let's go over here. So I have prepared something for you. I have on my laptop a mini shift cluster running where I have a Prometheus and where I have this training application. So this guy here is scraping my Prometheus and I've configured it with a metric. And as we see it's exposing these predicted node, load 1, Fourier, y-head, upper. So I'm predicting the metric name node, load 1, which is just the load of this node, obviously. And I'm not using profits for this one, but I'm using Fourier, which is another way to forecast time series. And it's giving me the upper boundary of zero, which is a number. Okay. So I can also look at this data in Prometheus, which is very nice to start with, to begin with, but as we see, everybody loves real dashboards and graphs. So we also have a Grafana graph. And in the upper graph, I'm seeing the actual value, like here the red one, versus the real value versus the Fourier prediction. And as you can see here, the blue line matches and here we see some anomalies being predicted. And unfortunately, profits didn't predict an anomaly here. Why I don't know? Maybe the accumulator wasn't tuned so far. This demo data here is a year old, so I don't remember it completely. But Fourier found an anomaly. So great. So here's the URLs that you might want to take pictures of unless you work in my team, then you should probably... Questions? Yes, please. Did you have any issues using FP Profit on second data? Or were you using seconds? Or did you use a larger time series amount? Because I know that it has trouble working on very small increments of time, because it was designed for business data, like sales or something like that, day-to-day kind of stuff. That's an interesting question. So you mean from the precision of seconds on the time precision, or you mean secondary data? Yeah, were your time stamps like seconds, like literal seconds, or were they minutes or hours? Yeah. I think we are using second sample data there. So I'm not sure if... Did we have any problems with the granularity of the data? I'm seeing noes. Apparently not. Second is much better at doing daily and weekly. It's an interesting thought. So you maybe might connect with Hema and Anand, who did the actual work of that. So I'm just showcasing stuff that Grafana is a separate tool, different from Prometheus, but it's sort of the most used graphing tool in the cloud-native world, because it is really easy to build your custom dashboards and graphs, and it's really well suited for time series data. And it's now also dipping into the space of log data. Thank you for your valuable time and listening to me. Thank you.


Hello everyone. Are you ready for a great conversation? All right Okay, I am Nancy Lynn. I help organize events for Taiwan cafe, which co-host tonight's event So I want to welcome everybody for joining us tonight. We have 150 people sign up for tonight's event So I think some of them might be coming later. So try to move to the front if you can So to leave some space for people who are coming and joining us later We also have 400 people tuning in online from around the world So it's a very exciting to have everybody gathering together to talk about something that's really important and that's democracy So thank you so much for coming here And I also want to thank Ruber for offering us such a great wonderful space And then I want to give a special thanks and shout out to Rue Flores Who have helped us yes put together the program tonight and we couldn't have done it without her Her help. So let's give her wait. I'm just like watching her like walking out I was going to say that we should just Give her a big round of applause and thanking her for all the work that she has put in. Thank you Someone in the room. Thank you Rue. All right um I wanted to say that RG Tang is probably one of the most intelligent people I ever interviewed um, if not the most um, and um, she has some really interesting And unique and even philosophical perspectives a lot of Topics or the challenges that we face right now. Um, so I want to encourage everybody here tonight To take full advantage of the Q&A session and get her take on any issues that might concerns you I think this is a perfect time to do that tonight. Um, and Before we do that, I wanted to just take a few minutes to tell you a little bit about taiwan cafe We are a meet-up group. We got started last year We want this to be a place not just for cultural exchange, but also a place where people can exchange ideas For things that are really relevant to most of us such as democracy And and we have some really interesting programs coming up Next month, for example, we have a networking event at a brewery in oakland You're gonna have some fun meeting new people, but we also get a share perspectives on empathy But using or I should say by discussing an HBO program the world between us So if you're looking for something different to do, this might be a place for you And also I want to mention that in september we're hosting a panel discussion to talk about how to bring meaning to your work How can you make your work more purposeful? So that you're not just doing it for a paycheck And I think you're going to get a lot of inspiration from our panel Which will include some corporate leaders as well as the first female baseball empire in taiwan So it's really interesting program. So check us out on media dot com or follow us on facebook Now I want to take a few minutes to introduce you Tonight's moderator Keith Minconi I can't think of better person to run tonight's program. Um, he really is the perfect Moderator for this program. Um, he actually spent five years in taiwan working as a journalist For icrt which is a very well respected english language radio station in taiwan Um, he's now back in baria Again working as a journalist as well as a producer for kcbs radio all news radio station So some of you might recognize his voice. Um, so let's give him a huge welcome. Hello, keith coming up So lucky to have you here. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Appreciate it. I'm gonna hand it over to you take it from here Sounds good. All right. I think I'm mic'd up. I got it. Thank you Thank you guys all for coming out. Great to see you Uh, one more quick thing about me that my boss is making me say I am not speaking on behalf of my employer kcbs Made me say that so I've said it. We're done all the legalities out of the way Well, uh, so we're here to talk about adri thong and uh, there is a lot to get to it's honestly a little bit difficult to know Where to start a conversation about adri thong Just running through the list of possible starting points is a little bit dizzying As you guys probably know, she is a minister without portfolio for the republic of china Described as taiwan's digital minister. This makes her the country's first transgender minister and when she first began Her role in her mid 30s. She was also the country's youngest minister ever So we've got a couple of superlatives already And that's pretty interesting in its own right But that doesn't really even scratch the surface of what adri thang is bringing to the table If we wind the clock back a little bit further We'll find some more interesting stuff She dropped out of school at a young age and went to start her own company in her teens Then she stepped away from all that and put in her early 30s So retiring in her early 30s already having a lot of Interesting work under her belt She then put her considerable talents to use developing internet projects Forwarding various social causes most notably in 2014 That work included a little bit of it support for taiwan's largest upsurge in civil unrest in a generation It's known as the sunflower movement. It was a nearly months long Occupation of the legislative yuan Pretty much the most the largest political event that we've seen in quite a long time in taiwan So very pivotal moment. She was right there on the ground floor Played a pretty interesting role in it too We can maybe hear a little bit more about that as we get further into our conversation On top of all of that adri thang is also a self-described conservative anarchist. Those are the words that she uses And we can unpack that a little bit too as well So it's easy to see that we have a lot of threads to unspool this evening A lot of different interesting things to talk about And we are hoping that through the course of this conversation It can really be driven by the audience So i'm going to be up here asking a couple of questions to get us started Planning maybe 20 25 minutes of a q&a between myself and adri But what we're really hoping is that this can be driven by your interests Whatever you guys are interested in hearing about tonight So i'm going to just kind of do a lightning round through some of the major topics that we're going to be discussing this evening What i'm hoping you'll do while we have that lightning round is think to yourself Where you might want to explore further and think about questions that you want Once we get to the audience portion of the show. So please keep that in mind I guess we should welcome on now to the stage adri thang. Can we get her on the stage? And have a very good loco time everyone And keith i was just looking at our icrt interview. It was two and a half years ago It's a very good to have a conversation again Yeah, it's great to talk to you again as well And it's kind of interesting the reason that she can read that interview that we did two and a half years ago is because She kind of turns the tables on all the reporters that talk to her She records those interviews herself and makes them public for everybody So that's another aspect of the radical transparency that she brings to government yet another topic that we can touch on In the course of this conversation now where I want to start though It's it's kind of hard to find a through line to tie it all together But where I kind of want to start minister tong is in a lot of interviews that you give A word that comes up again and again is the term empathy It seems to be kind of a core value a core component of how you engage with the world So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit why it is that empathy and this this concept of empathy is something that's Really central to what you're doing Sure, so um here in mandarin when we talk about the word listening, uh, it's also uh transcribed as Qingting now, uh, this word is very interesting because uh, ting literally just means hearing But Qing means tilt Tilting to one side. So um when I listen to to you or when I listen to anyone It's very important to tilt toward that person And step a little bit into that person's shoes in order for listening to truly happen Otherwise, it's just hearing it's not listening And so as you can see just in the mandarin word of listening itself It has this idea of being tilted to a side by the person that you're talking with And then of course, then we go back into our own identity and share what really happened during the tilting So the other person also has a way to kind of fuse the horizons and know that where you're coming from And so this culture of listening and part of democracy listening at scale. I think is the Main difference between uh tribalism the populist tribalism as well as populist democracy And so I think that is one of the keys uh to where they truly um working with the people of democracy Not just working for the people of democracy Interesting listening at scale. I think that that's a really interesting way to put at uh to put it and To put at the core of a lot of the work that you're doing Now another thing that uh another quote that comes up in a number of your interviews is the notion that This empathy may be linked to the fact that you've had two puberties That's a line that you give uh, you've given a number of times And just trying to again find a little bit of a true line here Could you tell us a little bit about how your gender identity has informed the work that you've done both inside and outside of government? certainly well, I'm post-gender right and I'm born with a condition that puts my testosterone level somewhere between Um average males and average females and so I did go through two puberty and that I think puts my mind into Places of different resolutions that I can share a little bit of different mindscapes of Different relations to the body of how the body gets Resonating with the environment and the social environment a little bit more But I think more than that, of course, I also lived with the indigenous community for a bit and I also You know learned pearl and haskel which is too very different World to be used and things like that and so others I think informed this idea of intersectionality Meaning that you can find within yourself a bit of the place that were kind of vulnerable That were kind of different But then you can put into it the differences and then make it into a strength rather than purely a weakness All right, so as promised, we're going to be jumping around a lot in the first 20 minutes or so So cleaning the slate switching gears entirely. Let's talk a little bit about Civic hacking and your role bringing hacking into government. I know that right now ongoing is the presidential social innovation hackathon and This is interesting in the sense that the there's no prize money in this hackathon The prize is not accolades or some money that you get the prize is knowing that your idea for how to make Government better is actually going to be created. It's going to be made in the world So the whole point is people coming together trying to put their best ideas forward and then very smart people in taiwan Hacking them together making them a reality So I'll turn things back to you minister tongue If you could tell us a little bit about this hackathon and maybe even highlight A couple of examples of what you're seeing this year that give us a better idea of what it's all about Nothing so just yesterday I met with international teams this time there's like 16 countries and seven teams accepted and so there's a domestic track and an international track and so Last year we called the presidential social innovation hackathon But this year we're redesigning the rules so that each of the 20 teams In the domestic cohorts need to be trilingual meaning that they have to be Public servant in it. It has to be a technical expert in and there has to be a domain expert in it And so we would have to call it the presidential public social private hackathon Which doesn't quite rhyme and so we decide to just call it the presidential hackathon now the presidential hackathon last year Chose five winning teams and exactly as Keith described there really is no prize money But what we gave is a trophy and a trophy is literally a projector When you turn it on it projects the visuals of the president herself handing the trophy to you And so this is very useful, especially if you're a public servant because then you can come up with wild ideas That with three months to prototype and no risk at all if it doesn't work But if it does work then the trophy carries the presidential promise of whatever you have demonstrated in those three months We accept in the next year to make it into part of public service and maintain it basically forever And so one of the cases last year was the water saviors because they save water using the the idea is that uh in Taiwan water cooperation, uh, they maintain one of the longest actually the longest pipe in the world and uh, it's water supply is usually through plastic lines and some places and they leak and so they hire the staff here that listens to the pipes and to determine whether the leak now This is actually a very kind of not fulfilling job because most of the time they are not leaking And so they enter presidential hackathon web with the domain expert and text experts to create a machine learning model and the chatbot That the staff here can't just wake up and receive through the chatbot the three most likely places near them So they focus their energy on the creative part of the job Which is to figure out why the leak is happening and also how to collect leaks. And so this is uh, Corresponds to the sdg the sustainable development goes the global goes six four And so after new zealand discovered that after the hackathon they invite the same team to visit wellington For three more months to also help them fix the same problem And so basically with this tri-lingual teams what we're getting at is the data collaboratives Meaning that everybody can contribute data to commons with distributed ledgers or other technology to make sure nobody can change Each other's numbers and then everybody can make something creative out of it This is itself is one of the sdgs and so this year we use quadratic voting, which is a you know playing a while We have a bordering thing That uh allocates 99 points for every citizen and they can vote on any of the 100 or so teams and one vote Costs one points, but if you want to vote some item two votes That's four point three votes nine points and so on and so we get a very balanced cohort of 20 teams that for example Use also machine learning to find illicit or financial flows or to use the water box Which is a iot device to report water Pollutions between the farmlands and the plants and so on and also we've got Machine learning that automate the chore of determining sentencing for very mechanical legal cases like drunk driving and things like that And so yeah, this year's 20 team is very balanced. I think thanks to the help of quadratic voting and pop Just popular ideas of getting the synergies out of those teams I just want to check with uh folks in the audience real quick and everybody here. Okay Nobody's having a hard time hearing. All right, perfect Uh just to linger on that point of for one second I mean when you have a hackathon would you say that the important thing going on Is the fact that you're bringing in technical experience or is it just a matter of bringing a fresh ideas? To the problems because obviously there's a lot of smart people in government. I've met a lot of people in taiwan's government There's a ton of smart people. What are the hackers bringing into the equation that wasn't there before? No, I think the idea is that we are making the hacker culture part of the public service culture as well It's not about bringing in the hackers. It's about turning the public service into hackers, right? So, um, I think as clay shirky Said the main thing about hackathon is not a particular project But actually social capital the trust that is built among the team members And so basically using the design of data collaboratives, which you can read all in data collaboratives.org It's brought people who previously has a reason to distrust each other But discover that despite their different positions in different sectors, they actually share the common values For example, the one case that I just mentioned It's about people from the agriculture community wanting to know that the upstreams are not polluted But it's also people from the industrial community wanting to prove that they are not polluting the farmlands And it's also the local community and the ultimate benefit is of course to the sustainable environment And so while people may seem to have different positions using these tribulators and this iot device make sure that everybody Inch tour to come on by use and that I think is the main contribution And we're kind of expanding that some hackathon usually you think of hackathon You think of two days at most three days, but this is actually three months of work And so this is more like mutual fellowship or reverse fellowship in a way All right, so sticking with that notion of transparency and collaboration Another topic that we want to touch on is closely related digital democracy You've developed a number of applications that are broadly trying to get more people into the process of making government Making policy making laws a couple of the most prominent ones would be gov zero And v taiwan a couple of platforms that are helping get people involved in how the laws are actually getting made Let's let's start with the basic basics here and tell us Why is it important to get more people involved in the process of policy making? Sure, and and what is how does technology make that more possible? Sure, so I would like to at this point quote dr. Tsai Ing-wen our president in her inauguration speech She said before we imagine democracy as a clash between opposing values But now democracy must become a conversation between diverse values I think the latest term out from the un is called koga for collaborative governance They have a work in itf or internet governance. You know, it's just a rebranding but in any case. Yes So the opposition between Different values is what you traditionally get a in a pre-internet governance system You have the people caring about environmental sustainability on one side and people caring more about maybe economic development on the other side You have people who care about emerging technologies and who care about social justice I'm sure uber is no You know stranger to this debate and the traditional way of imagining governance is that you'll find representatives if you organize yourselves And you find maybe the ministers right one on each side Maybe minister for economy on one side and minister for interior on the other side And then the public service in the middle anonymous absorb all the tensions While trying not to break and so this is basically the the battle days now I think it's important to have participatory governance exactly because there's just too too much emerging issues Next monday, we're going to talk about, you know, hoverboards and segways and things like that There was no rules about them because they frankly didn't exist when we write those rules And not to mention self-driving vehicles and so on and also of course vertical take on that landing Which is another uber contribution. So what I'm trying to get it is that there's no traditional ministries or agencies or things like that for emergent issues and it is actually Only wakes if the government knows that we have no idea and that in the very beginning an agenda setting stage Ask people what are your ideas and try to figure out that it is actually not always about hover opposites There may be like five things that are in contention that actually people Mostly agree with this other on most of things most of the time and this shape this kind of reflective shape Is why I think that it makes sense to have as much participation as possible at the very beginning at agenda setting stage When the government has still knows nothing about anything, right? And then we figure out a norm and then we make it into policy and into code and into law And I do want to turn things over to the audience questions pretty quickly But just to make things a little bit more concrete here Could you give us an example of a policy issue that has benefited During your time in government from this process the last time I spoke to you you talked to me about e-sports I imagine there's been some other policy issues since then Right. So yeah, e-sport is a really good one because there was no agency for e-sport And the ministry of culture used to say that they protect a traditional culture like weiqi like though But not e-sport and the ministry of economy says that we care take care of the equipment Not the athletes quote quote and the minister of education says this is nothing like physical education There's nothing like sport. We don't have a division for that But through radical transparency and through this kind of multi-technology meeting We're able to find a precise definition of e-sport that actually include go include weiqi because If you play go, you know, it's mostly play online now and and alpha go and alpha zero actually is a great help To the art of weiqi and so it is a e-sport now So it makes sense to give all the benefits of go players the Dose the benefits to the e-sport players and also redesign our curriculum Which starts this august actually to introduce like e-sport schools that then gradually teach people media literacy the How to become a responsible youtuber and things like that and so yeah since then we set up the social innovation lab Which is a national lab for social innovation and using this kind of multi-stakeholder meeting of the norm policy code and law Sequence you do see those self-driving tricycles just roaming around in my office And people co-create the norms around self-driving tricycles For example, some people feel that it's too much like a cyclop the shopping cut with a i And so because it's open source and open hardware and open data people just think of it for you to look More palatable to the society. We call it code domestication and through the polis system Which you briefly touch upon we ask people what their feelings are about autonomous vehicles and finally taiwan Starting next month is going to roll out the first in the world Law that creates a sandbox for multimodal self-driving vehicles that it could be something that drives and flies It could be something that swims and it goes on the land But it's all permitted to show the regulators indeed everybody for a year Whether it actually solves their local problem or not and it does then we just incorporate it into our policies And if it doesn't work Well, we think the investors for paying the tuition's right, but it's open innovation after all So whatever we do is a regulatory co-creation so that we don't have to Rule on something that we don't have percent experience of and there's tons of experiments Just just waiting to happen now for self-driving vehicles around that one All right Well, the very last topic that I want to touch on with you before we turn things over to the audience Introduce it to the audience is something to chew over Would be how to keep democracy strong and the institutions of democracy strong I know that you're a reader of the classics and Somewhat philosophically minded, so I'm sure that this is something that you've thought a fair amount about Governments democratic governments across the world are are struggling in this regard And we're all facing very similar challenges So I was not surprised to see that fake news is something that's on the mind of a lot of Folks in taiwan government and I also saw that fake news is something that you're working on to develop some kind of response to At the governmental level Although it also struck me that this is a very fraught topic whenever you bring up the term fake news And then want to bring government into the conversation a lot of people are going to be worried You know, what is the government's role in determining what is fake news and what is legitimate news? so as somebody who is a conservative anarchist and Perhaps so sometimes skeptical of the role of government. How do you think about this set of issues? sure, so first we don't use the word fake news because Perhaps unfortunately news and journalism translates to the same word in Mandarin and so xin wen, right? so if we discredit Quoting quote fake news, then we also discredit journalism, but journalism is the strongest protection against disinformation This information is totally different from journalistic work so We don't use that word because of ambiguities and because both my parents are journalists I cannot use the word out of filial piety, you know about it. So basically we say disinformation and we do have a Legal definition for disinformation. It's called intentional harmful untruth All three must match for it to be qualified as disinformation And the harm is to the public to the democratic system exactly as I've said it Not just to a minister's image, which is just good journalism, right? And so basically what we're figuring out here is that we're preserving the value of being according to civicus monitor the asias Only actually Totally free and open society in terms of that. We don't harm the freedom expression We don't absorb the power back to the state because of disinformation. So what do we do? So there's three defenses and three proactive measures and I'll go through them really quickly. So the timely response Inoculation as we call it is actually the the best way Whenever there is a disinformation that's being detected We make sure that each ministry is now equipped with sufficient personnel and authority to publish a clarification within an hour And we make the clarification very viral. I'll use an example. There was a popular rumor that says plumbing your hair Twice in a week will be subject to a one million fine And then it went not quite viral, but we detected it So the premier published this within an hour And this is the photo of the premier when he was young and he said plumbing your hair will be subject to fine It's not true. I may be bought now said premier sue, but I would not punish people like that And then there's a fine print that says what we're actually doing is that we're introducing a labeling requirement for hair products and it only takes effect 2021 and then I didn't translate this bit But what he said here the premier as he looks like now says however, if you're plumbing your hair multiple times in a week It will damage your hair. You may end up looking like me and so It is very funny. It went viral, right much viral than the disinformation and then People just find it genuinely funny and it's good humor because he makes you know fun of himself Not somebody else right and so we're we're practicing this art for you know, two years now And it's it's getting to a point where we can reliably get out clarifications. So this is not that take down It's not censorship, right? It's just making sure that people read the clarification before they read the disinformation And then we empower the social sector There's an international fact-checking network of which there's a Taiwan member as well And there's also a crowdsourced way to just look at end-to-end encrypted channels Like line, which is like whatsapp and then people just start flacking The disinformation style. So this is a lot like spun, right? You can receive an email email is private communication But if the email says, you know, I'm a princess somewhere. I have 10,000 You know dollars if you just Deposits then I wire you one billion dollars or something like that and then people would just flag it as fun That's how the swans are solved, right? People voluntarily flag things as fun. It goes to a spam house to the dbl and so on And so the next time somebody spawns it lands to the junk mail folder, not the inbox Again, it's not strictly speaking take down, right? But it just doesn't consume our attention as much And so people who flag on co-facts can get the robotic clarification immediately in their end-to-end encrypted channels There's tens of thousand people joining and then the journalists at the IFC and at the talent fact-check center Then goes to a journalistic kind of fact-check due diligence on that and publish the entire report publicly And then facebook bows down the virality of those things that are fact-checked as false And line agrees to put out a clarification message on their line today, which is like their social media And all in all just to make sure the loop is maintained by the industry and the social sector Not the government sector, but the public sector the ministries are just one of the new sources in this equation So we're not encroaching, you know freedom expression expression, but of course for democracy itself We're saying, you know, if you can vote you must be a citizen So in taiwan, we have the world's most uh transparent campaign donation laws And everything is actually published as csv as excel spreadsheets So anyone can analyze campaign donors profiles very easily However, we didn't have that same law for political advertisements. And so we Are changing the the law and facebook and so on have all agreed That they have to review both the precision targeting criteria as well as who are making those advertisement And it's just like anti-money laundering everybody has to disclose where the money come from If it ultimately come from a non-citizen source, then it's up for a very large fine like, um, you know, a million dollars or more And so I think those are the defenses, but for the Pro proactive measures we're taking we're just making sure that everybody can meet me Every wednesday from 10 a.m. To 10 p.m. And so the face-to-face connection The immediate response. I think that is uh, the most crucial and 5 000 people doing E-petitions can get a response from the government very easily and then the flagging and clarification also extends to all like our president Who was visiting line at a time? and enables us to Listen to all the different stakeholders and roll out very high quality tv series That doubles as media literacy curriculum and for the k-12 people to adapt into their classrooms Where I think I think the asias first to introduce media literacy part of creative and critical thinking not as a class but as a Core competency to be introduced in all the classes. And so one of the premier Curriculum material we're using is actually the tv series the words between us now on hbo asia critically acclaimed So i'm very happy to hear that you're going to also watch it sometime soon Alrighty so uh, that was all just by way of setting the table for you guys Now we're going to open up to the audience hoping that there might be some folks out there Ready to ask a question or two. Uh, there's a microphone right there that you can walk up to if anybody Has the courage or the questions to match anybody But there's one slido question I see somebody walking up. Yeah, come on. Come on. Go ahead. Yes claps for bravery Will that be on camera if she goes up? Yes It will be yes. All right, great Oh, yeah, all right, uh Could you say your name and uh, just a little bit of and then your question can everyone hear me? My name is Chanel. Um, thank you for Being here with us today. Oh, yeah, um, really appreciate that Um, so my background is policy. I have decreasing policy So I really admire your doing because I um what you are doing through um technologies it's really in body Excuse me in body textbooks contacts like through civic engagement Or people can just vote and voice and also transparency. So Um, this is really inspiring. Thank you for doing this. I'm kind of fangirl right now Yeah, um, so my question is How did you educate? I mean, how did you get this knowledge around? policy making The democracy Where did you get? um inspired Ration Okay, thank you my roots. Yes. So as I mentioned, um, I Think this uh, Koga this collaborative governance is just a rebranding of internet governance Um, when I was 14 years old, I dropped out of high school And telling the principle of my junior high that I found that the human knowledge is being created on the web And all my textbooks are out of date. Uh, and so she actually looked at my exchange with Professors on archive.org And discovered that oh really it is the case that you can now directly access to cutting edge research rather than relying on the textbooks So she said okay, and then I quit school and then start some startups And then I discovered this policy making community. Um, that's itf. That's uh, w3c That's um, you know, I can and later on wikipedia the debian constitution and so on and nowadays, of course, uh, italic and french And so all this is that lineage of people experimenting with democracy that are more symmetrical That are less about providing three bits every four years, which we call voting, you know, um to the Ruling apparatus the rather real-time democracy that you can participate anytime just by way of having an email Sending to a working group anywhere in itf and I joined the atom working groups and so on back then and so um And remember that I was just 15 or 16 at the time. So I don't have even the right to vote So that's my kind of tribe. That's the first democratic system the first democratic institution that I'm introduced to And then after that after maybe five years I finally started to to vote and to me representative democracy just like everybody else in my generation in taiwan Comes with the wire web. We don't have a pre wire web representative democracy So internet democracy came roughly on the same here and it's very deeply interlinked and so when we think about the democratic institutions in taiwan a little bit like Estonia, I guess we don't have as much legacy to think about and so we always have representatives democracy, but with participatory Sides in it and so I'm also inspired by an early FAQ online called the anarchist Frequently asked questions and it collects all the different anarchistic thoughts across the ages and I was also a early participant in the Free net community part of the cypherpunk movement and the cypherpunk while being very individualistic eventually turned social and Eventually, a lot of people are starting to think of mechanism design market design things that are more soft Than violence that is to say state violence and that can nevertheless shapes people's behavior to be more pro-social So that's roughly speaking my roots All right, anybody else want to jump in with a question This is yep, come on Come on ahead Hi there. I've been asked to relay a couple of questions from some people that prefer not to be on the camera minister So I'll do that first They would like to ask What is your chinese name and how did you get your english name? How did you use your english name? Okay So that's the two questions all right so my Traditional chinese name is as written here. So it's called Tang Feng and Feng meaning phoenix And but specifically male phoenix, but it's in recent Yes being repurposed to mean female phoenix, but in any case, so it's it's a post-gender word I chose this word to represent the fact that I'm post-gender that any pronoun my official pronoun is whatever So call me whatever but in any case there there really is a kind of correspondence to the english name Audrey Which used to be a neutral name until Audrey Hepburn started using the name And so that's the my my chinese name. And so my english name Nowadays my colleagues just call me a you which is a kind of both the prefix of outrageous which was my Previous english name and Audrey, which is my current english name and this came from at re you Which is the never-ending stories protagonist It's a great source material for names yet. Was there is another part to that question? And then I have a completely different question for myself So I thought it was really interesting at the beginning of the the discussion you were talking about Populist democracies versus populist sort of tribalism I used to work at change.org which is a popular e-petition site And I think one of my observations some sort of government stuff in the u.s. Is that In many ways change.org enables people to have a voice where they don't have one But mostly it's by kind of creating a very loud voice And I love the work that they do and I love the work where they support but often Increasingly politicians simply don't read the email Because the sort of barrier to entry on e-petitions is so low That they have decided in many cases that You know the sort of the the information they're receiving from constituents that way Isn't sufficiently interesting to kind of To be used on the flip side of this in in the states We saw a massive effort by the the american republican party To use large data to sort of figure out how to redistrict In america and kind of change the political landscape By using data in a way that I would I would say is very anti-democratic For my own perspective Because they're using it to kind of restrict in a way that that meant that party would win A majority of seats with with a minority of votes So how would you sort of Approach these new technologies such that inevitably having lower friction communication with decision makers doesn't necessarily enable You know minority communities or You know sort of underrepresented peoples to have a larger voice is simply allows More communication and at the same time You know sort of detailed data analysis helps You know sort of us have much better information to inform policy If we want to but it also enables Really bad sort of Policy decisions if people choose to use it that way. So what are the things that you think of to kind of fight this? Yeah, so it is Indeed true That whatever we're seeing Um, it has a divisive side sometime very loudly But also a slap side with consensus or rough consensus We prefer to call it in internet governance. The thing is that The mainstream media and social media at this current generation Really over focus on maybe just one thing or maybe three things that are divisive And it's our job to make sure that everybody sees the commonalities the common values despite the different positions And one of the powerful way for interaction design to intervene is actually just to take away the replete button In the policy system, there is no replete button because when we have found also in slide out There's no reply button. Um, whenever there is a reply button, whether it's on e petition or slide or polis People with the most time wins by default. They can just keep trolling and uh, you know now that we have talked to a transformer You know, it's entirely automated And so it's basically a loss cause if you have the traditional kind of bulletin board system Conversation but rather by having only info in download and visualizing The appos and downloads in a way that lets people find their commonalities. We can highlight both the wrong slide, sorry We can but that's maybe also relevant We can highlight both The commonalities that people want to care about in this case radical transparency around budgets around regulations and e petitions But uh, which makes the state Completely transparent to the people when you make the state completely transparent to the people when you publish data as soon as you collect that is public not privacy data and Publish the decision making process not just the results of decision making Everybody becomes a decision maker Everybody who read my transcripts actually just freely email me saying that a minister will get something wrong This should be like that and so on and I wouldn't ever have that input if I don't make all my early Discussions and drafts and interviews like this public So making the state public to the citizen is my first answer I think radical transparency really is the key to share the agenda setting power This is unlike some other systems which make the citizens transparent to the state Which I would not get into to too much detail But in any case, um, the other thing that you said, which is very important is the signal noise ratio a public participation and Again, what we're offering to the public service is essentially having the crowd crowd moderate Their ideas so that the entire picture is seen in a kind of overview effect not just being kept by those, you know patrols or things that just flood the forum as you may very well know and so basically if you get 5 000 people Voting exactly the same way on polis. It's just one dot here It doesn't change the land state because we measure plurality diversity. We don't measure the head counts And so even this number says You know 2000 it doesn't change the shape at all And so it makes sure that the minorities people to hold very strong views But are different from everybody else get a fair representation It's not a representation because you know representatives, right? But there's a representation of their ideas even though they may number in the lower Hundreds or even less and so having the system designed in such a way that visualizes the minority and making the minority Also see that they have actually something in common with the majority I think that can break us free from this You know half of the population loses every four years cycle because everything is real time. You can start this conversation literally every day I want to go to some of the questions that we're getting online But uh really briefly kind of on this topic I I found uh another interesting thing that you sometimes say in interviews that you think that we should do more Troll hugging on this topic and that there there is a better way to engage with trolls How do you engage with people that are spewing negativity in these forums? Sure?  I'm talking about human trolls not bot trolls, which is a different You know species altogether, but in any case what I'm trying to get at is that whenever trolls troll people Basically, they keep craved for attentions long-term attentions that they cannot get from the social setting and so they get attention But those attentions are transactional. They're not relational and I'm saying I'm not saying it's not creative Just look at fortune. They could be very creative, but then it's transactional So it doesn't sustain. It's like junk food. So the next morning they wake up They still feeling very empty and troll somebody else, right? And so that's the basic psychology of troll formation And so my my counterpoint to this very simply is that if there's a 300 width post that address me personally on social media or any other places I do a keyboard search If you're recognized this name, you're really old But basically anyone who mentions me by name and trolls me I only respond to maybe the five words that can be construed as Constructive and I ignore totally everything else. And so it teaches people that you can actually gather relational attention if you Contribute your own authentic experience to it and only pay attention to these things And first people are really toxic in the use of their words if I feel hurt by their words Then I just make sure that I Enjoy some new music enjoy some new coffee or tea and associate this You know visual stimuli with a non visual stimuli that is That is pleasant. It's called cognitive behavior therapy And so basically the next time that I wake up if I sleep sufficiently that night And then I wake up with a new association form in my brain. So the next time I see this word I think of something very pleasant. So now I look at trolls and feel pleasant all the time So so just make sure to publicly only respond to the part that are authentic And sometimes they just come and visit me in the social information lab on Wednesdays. This is my office Fantastic. Well, I think that these are some words for all of us to live by not just a good advice for digital ministers We have some questions online, but we've also got some folks lining up right now So we'll try to get to the physical people first. We'll try to get to you folks online as well Gentlemen right there. Go ahead. Thank you. Uh, hi everybody. My name is James Chang. I'm from Berkeley, California I just want to start off by saying um A sense of presidents. I got elected uh and thanks to her leadership and also her utilizing leadership Such as yourself minister Tang. I've never been more proud to be Taiwanese American and thank you so much for that Um, and I just also just want to say that someone who works in public service Um, you know with the recent passage of marriage marriage equality, especially with the leadership of presidents high and the DPP Um, I really just want to say that um as a public service person myself It's politics is often about courage and doing what's right and protecting the vulnerable Not necessarily about what is popular. Um, really so and and I'm not sure exactly how much you can talk about Politics, but I wanted to know how exactly we can support this current administration and president's high In regards to a political opposition on issues such as marriage equality And in terms of technology, I noticed that uh president's high has been doing amazing jobs On twitter on facebook and especially on youtube y'all should subscribe to your page. It's really amazing Uh, uh, but I also know that uh, we chat is a great not great but a really big influential Uh, um medium of social media in taiwan and we know that in a lot of closed spaces There is a lot of disinformation. I was just wondering what uh president's high and administration plans on doing and tackling those type of spaces Sure. Well, it is we chat is great. It's just evolving in a different direction Um, so in any case what we're looking at is is two things First Exactly, as you said, um, the social media Campaigns that dr. Tsai and also premier su with the great humor is rolling out. I think really Speaks to the younger generation to the internet generation But I also think that it is essential that we spend more time with the elderly with people of a Elder generation because they have a very different sake marriage Actually before 2007 taiwan was a social Marriage law, right? It's a marriage by ceremony law. You don't have to register You just hold a big wedding and it's a thing between two families But after 2008 it's just marriage by registration So younger people think of marriages that purely just like filing or tax Maybe not like filing or tax but an administrative act But in any case, uh, what is important is that when people go to Debates they look at marriage but think of drastically different things And so I think it's also very creative that we invented this idea of uh,結婚不結 in which means Legalizing marriage equality of all the bylaws but none of the in-laws I think that's a right translation or an Approximation of it. So basically in the civil code the section about in-laws about the family relationships doesn't quite apply Because we have 16 words from aunts and uncles But uh, then those words doesn't apply But all the bylaws all the rights and obligations do apply and so with this Eclectic solution We now have a much better way to communicate with the elderly of the part of the marriage that they care the kinship The filial piety the the 16 words for aunts and uncles. They they're not Haunt By the marriage equality. And so that's I think the Message that we need to repeat to rebuild intergenerational solidarity And the second thing you mentioned about into any encrypted channels. Um, I would like to also to point out it's not just Government that can do clarifications if you go to cofacts Uh cofacts that g0v that tw it's actually everybody can participate in the fact checking process Everybody is just like flagging spot anybody can flag something as disinformation and everybody can participate in the clarification Effort and so if you're a professional journalist consider joining the international fact checking network But if you're just a enthusiast still feel free to contribute to the cofacts And none of these two projects is sponsoring in any way by the government They're entirely in the social sector is by empowering the social sector that can we avoid the zero sum gain Between the private sector platforms and the public sector governance All right, let's take the next question from gentlemen in the leather jacket. Go ahead Hello, my name is elan. I just moved from taiwan and thanks for your speech Yeah, so I have two question one is like big data is very powerful tool But how can we make sure when they do lay the data? It's pure It's like not changed by other people. Maybe other party. They have their personal interests Based on like before the selection. We always have like a lot of like ashram pool results Like I mean they are very ridiculous. They said no, they have a different purpose So how can we make sure like when they collect data? It's like pure It's not if they buy any personal or the party's interests and second one Let's we'll give you a chance to ask the second one. Let's take that one first So, yeah, how do we keep our sources of data pure and not corrupted? Well posts are by definition not big data, right? It's a sample if it's into a computer. So it's not big data But so so I'll treat this as two questions So if you have big data meaning that it's not a sample, it's just data as it happens It's collected on site The best way to keep I would say immutability if you want immutability use of blockchain But that the accountability of data is very important This is why data governance is the primary product of our presidential hackathon. So look again at this shape Everybody in Taiwan can set up measurements of air pollution anywhere Actually more than 2000 people already do sometime in primary schools as education materials And if you have a shape that looks like this That is entirely in the social sector Everybody can set up those air boxes and keep each other honest It's not even blockchain or that they use distributed legends But it's just by way of having people who can verify and participate in data stewardship that you can have big data that is partially Owned and entirely governed by the collaborative And we have this shape for air box and very soon for water box and the state's Position here is always we can't be them. We must join them, right? So we asked the data stewards sometime primary school Children to to say, you know, where would you like air boxes? But you really cannot set up one and they tell us maybe in industrial parks because they're private property Well, it turns out we own the lamps in in those industrial parks So we just hang some air boxes there or people say, you know, we want to tell domestic versus over the street Pollution so we want a spot here, but it's in the middle of water, right? If you can fly drones, it runs out of battery But it turns out we're building renewable energy wind turbines there So we can also change the contract to say, oh, you have to hang an air box there What i'm trying to get it is that accountability is a social construct It is not something that can purely be mathematically proven So if you build a collaborative like this, what you own is trust From the different sectors participating in the collection in the use of big data And it's only through this that you can have a partnership that ensures trust Otherwise, if you have the best mathematics, if you have NKE, you know, proofs and things like that People can still challenge you just not because of the math, but because that you they they're not part of the players They have no way to participate and verify that it's true by participation So I would argue still participation in collaborative relationship is the only way that I know of to ensure the accountability of big data And finally, polls. Yeah, polls are Just really gained in in Taiwan, right? So, um, I don't think polls with a fixed set of questions can ever represent the true Upload bandwidth of what people feel like because the survey is pre-selected Now if you can think of poll is a little bit, it is actually like the poll Except all the survey questions are crowdsourced Meaning that people just post whatever they feel like for other people to respond to Now if it's a weekly survey like this, then we do see that over time people evolve into a kind of rough consensus But it's like humming, right? You have to make it run long enough. So it's a continuous relational process Now that one shot transactional process if you only have transactional processes And you do publish the results then the the theory of double hermeneutics basically means that you cannot ever Just use that as a true representation of the society All right, and that we said we'd give you one more question. So go ahead So my second question is more about like disinformation So it's like, um, because now we have like internet So like a young generation or like some people use internet We have chance to gather information from not just tv channel So because in Taiwan we have problems that our tv channel they have their site So sometimes they would just know like what they were going to say. Yeah But I think I see they have like the generation like conflation like they will have like a Big war between like some people use internet and some people don't use internet And in your opinion, how do you fix this problem? Well numbers tells us that everybody used the internet actually people who are in 65 years old Use it actually more I guess because they have more time But the thing is that even though they're online, they're mostly only on line And so which is the end to an encrypted system Right. So so that's that's where that the problem is which is why we need to partner with line to have the clarifications posted online today But whatever vehicles they use because in Taiwan we do have robin as human right Anywhere in Taiwan if you don't have 10 megabits per second It's my fault. You can talk to me. And so it's also very affordable right 15 US dollars gets you a limited 4g connection anywhere in Taiwan And all this combined means that people tend to use a much more streaming video much more FaceTime or skype or or whatever OTT video conversations So there really is a lot of message that is just synchronous It's not asynchronous as we imagine from the bulletin board era, but it's all synchronous So it's better seen as a different town hall as a different kind of tribal gathering of people who share the same ideas In this case, we cannot ask them to come to our website to come to our technology Right, we have to go where people are we have to bring social technology to people and this is actually why I Make sure that every other Tuesday or so So we already said that every Wednesday you can come to visit me every other Tuesday or so I actually visit the people who are least likely to go to my office hour The rural places indigenous nations and so on but when I meet the local people The municipalities Taipei, Taichung, Gaoxiong, Taoyuan and so on and now Taidong and Huariang all join through Zoom Video presence as we are using now and all the different central ministries people are in the social innovation lab in Taiwan All the 12 ministries in Mandarin we'll have a sign Jianmian Sanfenqing you build 30% of trust just by meeting face to face and through high bandwidth video connection Maybe we build 20% of trust. So basically It makes sure that central authorities don't see those people as tribes But rather as people participating in democracy and share their Outrage their hopelessness their disempowerment their personal stories and they won't say Oh, I'm just a minister of interior. I will forward your ideas to the ministry of education Forward your idea to the minister of economic development, which invariably gets compressed into a four papers that lose all the human touch everybody here sees Immediately what the personal story is about and I serve as a facilitator Locally to make sure that they can also interpret what the central government has to say and the central government then they cannot say Okay, I will copy the minister of education because the MLE is literally sitting right next to them And everything is radically transparent published after 10 working days of co-editing. And so this is continuous democracy Not just real time, but continuous democracy that brings the central government literally into where people are and then they can spread the updated clarifications the jointly made sandbox or e petition details To the people in their community group without having to ask them to come on our website So it's vastly more important to bring tech to people than asking people to come to tech Right and we thank you for the question I'm being told that some of our friends that are messaging in from overseas are many of them need to start work soon So we're going to take a couple of their questions. We'll do our best to get to the folks in line as well so let's Look at the one that has right now two upvotes. We'll read yours because you have two upvotes The question is do you think evolution and equality are in conflict with each other? That's an interesting philosophical question, isn't it? Evolution means that you know, we adapt to best fit the environment As a group socially and equality means that within a group that we don't let one voice dominate the other voices So I think they're not strictly in conflict a group that is more equal meaning that people who care more about the common goods Actually, it has a better chance of surviving But why these may seem conflicting with each other is of the different planning horizons If you only plan for the next quarter, for example Then it would seem that people who are more caring more about economy and people who care more about long-term environments good and things like that are seemingly in opposition to each other But if you think about the stakeholder that have yet to be born If you think about capital investments that expect to return after a generation or two then suddenly they actually align very well with each other So I think this is what we are calling a post GDP imagination. It's not that GDP is bad It's just GDP is used with a very short planning horizon So when we think of the sustainable development goals, we should 10 years from now We naturally align evolution and equality better just because of the longer planning horizon Interesting. All right, we're going to take one more online question right now than ping pong back and forth a little bit I'm going to encourage folks that are online to cast your votes for which ones you want to see the most That'll help guide us in which ones we should answer because unfortunately we're not going to have time for all of them So do cast your votes to let us know what is most interesting to you Topping the list right now is how distant is the future of enabling democratic voting through blockchain technology? Well, I mean Identity technology as I prefer to call it blockchain is just one of the ways to to socially build identities outside of state Of course democratic voting is already used. The presidential hackathon used quadratic voting And colorado actually, uh, you also use quadratic voting in traditional representative democracy And uh, full disclosure. I am director one of the director of the board of the red hill exchange And we just had our type a meetup with metallic and Jennifer and friends And so yeah, I'm very optimistic about that I think the social innovation of alternate imagination of institutions doesn't have to wait to state Implement it you can implement it on a township level on a community level on the level of devolution that everybody Socially know each other and then you can collectively say hey, let's try Distribute ledgers. Let's try agrarian voting as let's try quadratic voting and and things like that And then after it works well on a community This is how time banks started right then it eventually gets noticed by the upper levels And it can get surprisingly quick if you prove to the people working in public service that it Reduced their choice. They don't have to shuffle papers around that it increases Accountability that credit goes where credit is due and then the mechanism absorb all the risk and for emergent issues like public voting on participatory budget Because there is no election law On participatory budgeting We're actually very open to experiment with i-voting and blockchain voting and all these things like that And and then for referendums we're also for electronic tallying not connecting to the internet But electronic tallying for a referendum again because it's Voting for things for issues not for people if you vote for the president or for your mayor We are much more conservative because it has exponential return You see and so basically we try things on issues But taiwan is very progressive and we are indeed looking at that for voting on issues and budgets All right, we're going to turn things back to the folks in the room who have been very patient We can get the mic to work with us. Yeah, hi, um, thank you for joining us You've emphasized how open government is important and I agree But when you first turn the mic down towards your towards yourself, there you go When you first start at a place with very little trust, how do you begin building trust? like do you see it incrementally or In a design way and when you were starting your work Was there a lot of resistance to That from people who might want to keep it opaque and how did you deal with that? So great questions all I'll answer the second part first. So my three working condition Is location independence? Meaning that anywhere i'm working i'm working And that extends to everybody on my staff So we have people working from london from madrid from Toronto and in all places and this also enables me to basically Be the digital ministry But still then also work for international nonprofits like the i don't know governance lab digital future society And ready to exchange lately and things like that And so this is very important to just keep the network making power alive Without getting constrained into a within in network power. That's the first thing. The second thing is radical transparency And I learned this of course from internet governance because internet governance, you know, the internet doesn't have a name It doesn't have a air force but I mean The the reason why I can or itf or internet society is not absorbed into any UN or multilateral arrangement is precisely because of radical transparency that it builds a different Set of legitimacy that still are more legitimate because it's more democratic than democratic states And so this kind of radical transparency went applied to the place where there's very little trust Means that I get to talk with people like david plew speaking for uber at the time In a very clearly transparent fashion and for everybody else in the different stakeholder groups Read the asynchronous transcript knowing that it's precisely what happened and then they can reformulate their theory of mind And to reflect their positions and things like that. So even asynchronously the radical transparency does build trust and finally is voluntary Association and so is it the anarchist part of conservative anarchist. So voluntary Association means that I don't ever issue orders or take orders as the minister So I always say that I work with not for the government And basically that means that my staff there's no ministry And everybody rank and scored themselves actually is entirely horizontal. And so taiwan has 32 Vertical ministries each was a vertical minister. But above which there's nine horizontal ministers I'm one of them and my office is one person poached From each ministry so they can send delegates But if they want to send another one they have to rotate and so currently I have 22 colleagues Meaning that no not all ministry have sent people like minister of defense never sent anyone. I wonder why But anyway, so basically that means that I don't force the ministry of defense to start adopting radical transparency It may or may not be, you know, a few decades Before they can actually do that. But in any case, uh, I don't force it to people And so in a very dullest way people come to this way of working In the flow of work working out loud because they have messages that they want the society to resonate with So pretty much all the public facing ministries the ministry of education of culture interior Communication and so on all sent people and foreign affairs because public diplomacy All of these people agree to work out loud precessful because they want to resonate with other ministries So that I don't ever give orders, which is why I don't meet resistance against a very dullest notion All right, and we thank you for the question as well We have we're going to go back to online and then we'll go right back to you up next. So you're on deck We have one question that has four upvotes. So the most voted for question yet The question is incredible story totally inspiring. How do you expect the chinese government culture of social monitoring will unfold On the mainland and beyond. So I I suppose we're sort of returning to this Anxiety that a lot of these technologies were discussing today can be used for other purposes as well Yeah, they're your use right to reappropriate the term. So any case. Um, yeah for people on the chinese continent Um, I actually had a slide About this right while we're making the state transparent to people They're making the people transparent to the state in an accountable fashion While we're making through sandboxes and presidential hackathon to make sure that the norms Make sure the norms enter the society that informs regulation and then the state power What they're doing is setting up a party branch in every large enterprise Thereby ensuring that the state power is actually leading the enterprise so-called guo jin min tui right So in in many different cases, I think we can see that we're evolving very quickly um opposite directions and so Um, I I think the current Outward projection of the prc government is more of a projection of insecurity because they're not totally sure That this way of governance actually can can sustain and indeed nobody knows but The recent example in hong kong for example gives us some evidence That the other right here extreme being totally leaderless Being bruce lee like you know being like water being formless actually has a good chance of still coping and indeed triumph In the state's monitored state censored state intermediate environment so I'm of course all Very closely watching the evolution as we speak and I do give classes actually public classes that are well attended by Say people in hong jiu people in Sichuan people in The prc government territories and so I I have all the hope of people who work in a democratic procession Still find a way to make it grow within that currently not very fertile ground and I think thinking in long term The so-called central authorism Will eat to a way even despite social monitoring if you still allow free flow of information On the internet no matter through however many layers of vpns and tours and things like that So fundamentally you have a certain amount of faith that more eyes On these problems will make them better That's right. I mean if you look at hong kong it's the journalists and In many times foreign correspondence that are kind of on the first line and that supports the Right of communication the right for free speech and so on not unlike how people under the gup zero banner did during the samplar evolution So I think that is Really what's needed if there is no journalism if there is no people ensuring the right to communication and especially private communication Then I can see that people would feel hopeless But I do think that we can find a way even in pockets of free Conversation even within the intranet you can still set up secure communications and like personally I use sandstorm in all my You know matters within the the ministries And within the public government But the sandstorm can be also used as a way to set up Kind of private conversations even within the internet that is blocked from outside connection All right, and we're gonna turn over to the last guy in line Well, thanks for joining us. I want to ask you about the The echo chamber effect nowadays, especially Specifically to how to break the echo chamber so there are lots of situations right now in taiwan's like The dpp supporter is trying to figure out a way to reach out to the other side, which is the Han wave supporter or the national list or knt supporter How to you know have them to impress this more progressive value Sensing happened here in us like we are scratching our heads trying to know how to reach out those diehard trump fans Or would you recommend like we we should not reach out to the people at the The opposite side of the most extreme of the spectrum like we should grasp the people in the middle They don't have much idea about like who to listen to And how like if technology can play in a role, I think to fit into today's thing Like can we ask like the social media company say a hey don't give us so much so many homogeneous Post or articles give us a little bit next year and there What's your take? Okay So first of all, I would like to recommend the facebook feed eradicator to you This is what I use on all my browsers And it's very very useful It says what it says on the tin it eradicates the news feed And replace it with a quote this time from uttler, but you can also customize the quote so All right, but I'm not joking though. This this is like an ad blocker This is like a spam filter on a client's life before we have very good domain blocking lists This protects your mind from the forced perception of echo chamber and Polarization and this is important because this the feed is the only part in facebook And I think zekobot does agree that is designed to be addictive to trigger the dopamine cycle of addiction and thereby creating a little bit positive is like a little bit of liquor But when overdose creates pure negative externalities on the society So just by turning off the feed as I do I still use facebook much like a browser I search I go to a group. I go to an event. I watch my Friends livestreams and so on but they're all intentional. I do something I expect to see the result But I am freed from this symbiotic AI or it's not symbiotic parasitic AI that Just gets my attention for for no good external analyses And so that that's my first kind of personal level defense against the dark arts for for the echo chamber Now on the more social side We are actually making sure that alternate social networks in taiwan the largest one for public discussion Is actually ptt and dcard And ptt in particular is not for profit is academic is open source It's community governed and so making sure that those communities have more spotlight and also Make sure that people as you mentioned who kind of Categorizes people as kind of diehard fans of certain people You can still find more reasonable people within them that are willing to talk about common goals We held 50 or so collaboration meetings One of which that I also remember is that people who want to change the time zone of taiwan to gmt plus nine And there's another 8 000 that petitioned for it to remain GMT plus eight and so internally we call these two like 16 000 people in total 8 plus 9 which is difficult to translate Right the plus eight and plus nine petition So we invited actually both sides petitioners and it turns out that they actually after going through the scientific Rationale saving energy increasing tourism and then found out that it's actually not true We have to spend a large one-time cost and a non trivial recurring cost But we can always ask what are the most abstract thing that both sides agrees on In in this time what they both agree on is they want taiwan to be seen more unique in the world It's just one side thinks changing time zone is a great way because it forces people who travel from the prc to adjust their clock Even though I think software would do that for them. It's not very useful But then the other side points out it will only get 15 minutes of international news And the other side would just say one country two systems and and then and then you know There's many countries with different time zones, right? So it doesn't work So the implementation details differ, but both of them want someone to be seen as more unique So we can ask actually better questions by indeed asking whether What kind of implementation can make taiwan more uniquely seen in the world? And if asked this way everybody is very eager eager to contribute people says something about Integrating with the inter-pacific thinking about sharing our stories on good governance public health environmental sustainability about our tolerance of religious freedom and Diversity and indeed marriage equality and everything like that And so then people put their negative energy to positive use to constructive use and all 16 Thousand people then agreed that this is the direction that we should go So always step back and ask this by different positions already come of values And if you ask that question quick enough and sustain the questions Then you can build what we call a small world network between the different quote-unquote camps that people can see Through those mediators. We're actually caring about very similar things And so if you're interested in that kind of nonviolent communication There's of course books like dynamic facilitation and so on that can help you along that road And that is what why I constantly wear this shirt that lists all the 17 different values That is the sustainable goes to remind people that no matter which slides you are on Actually, the other 16 slides are actually working toward the same common value that is sustainability All right, and I think that that's a great last question for this evening. We thank you for it Before we say goodbye to minister tong. I want to thank the folks that put this on first of all, of course, we want to We want us to thank roof flores with uber. So let's give a round of applause to uber and the team over there And of course the guys in av that got it this all hooked up I know that this was a bit of a challenge this evening. So a round of applause to them as well And of course, thank nancy lin for putting this together and You guys know where to find out more about taiwan cafe great organization a good way to get involved As somebody who myself wants to stay connected to taiwan as much as possible I I think it's an actually an excellent resource for those of us who are a bit disconnected at the moment So nancy lin, I give a round of applause to her as well And finally, of course, we want to thank the star of the hour Digital minister adri tong. Thank you so much. It was very great talking with you I think you've got a great question and have a good local time. Thank you. I hope this was a good start to your day All right Well, it is it really is and I'm looking forward to the recording We're going to publish this on youtube and I would like to also thank journalists from the bbc clique Who is actually covering this from my office? Oh, fantastic. All right. We're getting a lot of coverage today. Well one more round of applause for everybody. Thank you all Thank you All right, and I guess we're signing off


I wanna give you guys a little insight into what it looks like on my skin when I put my leg on wrong. Cause I can feel that this is happening right now. It's very important how I actually place this on my leg because if I do it wrong, I don't know if you can see, it turns all purple and blue on the bottom. Not a cute look also, super uncomfortable. Basically when this happens, I've put it on the wrong way so it's kind of sucking everything down to the bottom. Circulation with amputated limbs is also a little bit more challenging on our bodies in general. So I gotta make sure this is right, otherwise I feel a ton of pressure and pain starting to build up. And if I don't pay attention to it for, you know, a couple minutes, that is what happens.