Unlike many people today, I'm an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the World Web, and all my textbooks were out of date. So I told my teachers, I want to quit school and begin my education on the World Web. Surprisingly, all my teachers agree with it. And I founded a few web startups after that and discovered this wonderful internet community that runs with this crazy idea, a open multi-stakeholder political system that still powers the internet today. Today, as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm bringing the lessons that I learned when I was 15 years old. That's radical transparency, voluntary association, and a commitment to location independence. Surprisingly, it's working and it's transforming the public service in our society. And first of all, I would like to show you my office. This is the Social Innovation Lab. And I'm at the moment here in the Social Innovation Lab in a recording session to produce this hologram. The lab is co-created by hundreds of social innovators. For example, the contribution from people with Down syndrome is the soccer field. You can see there's a unique geometric vision of the world. And every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. is my office hour. Everybody can come and talk to me for 40 minutes, including social workers and rough sleepers, as long as they agree to have their transcript posted publicly online. And so this combines the radical transparency methodology with the location independence, wherever I am, I am working. And in addition to those human visitors, we also have AI visitors, like those self-driving tricycles here from the MIT Media Lab. They're open hardware and they're open source, meaning that the local community can freely take it and tinker them according to our actual social needs. For example, my favorite flower market, the Jian Guo flower market, is just across the street from the lab. As I pick up flowers, those tricycles can follow me and form an assisted fleet. And I can hop on one to carry me home after several of them carry the orchid flowers that I purchased from the flower market. So as you can see, those tricycles is evolving, co-domesticating with human beings. Now they have two eyes, they make eye contact, and they can blink at you. And so to me, AI always stands for assistive intelligence, in the sense that they co-evolve with the collective intelligence into something for the social benefit for everyone. And two and a half years ago, our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, said an inspiring speech in her inauguration. She said, before democracy was a clash between two opposing values, but from now on democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values. And indeed, in conventional thinking, social benefits on one side and private sector profits on the other, for example, are often seen as opposite and often contradict each other, forcing the government to make trade-offs. However, the idea of social innovation brings a brand new way of thinking. For people working here in a social innovation lab, our core objective is to achieve by developing business models to address social environmental issues, and the government's role has changed. Instead of being the arbiter or the planner to trade between the different-sized trade-offs, we're now asking a different set of questions. We ask, what are our common values despite our different positions? And we say, once we have the common values, can we find solutions that works for everyone? And indeed, in the past couple years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked as the top country internationally with open data, an internet participation, a women's digital access, digital inclusivity, and has ranked one of the top four super innovators by the world economic forum. And to encourage social innovation, we invite everyone to challenge or to fork existing laws and regulations and through an innovative sandbox system. Any innovator can ask an experiment for one year on platform economy, on fintech, self-driving vehicles, 5G telecommunication, you name it. Anyone can prove that their new rules work better than existing rules for everyone involved in a community. If the society feels it's a good idea, then we adopt this amendment as a regulation. If it's not a good idea after a year, the entire society learns something from it and a new innovator can try a different angle. So for example, with autonomous vehicles, Taiwan is the first jurisdiction in the world to legally encourage hybrid experiments of land, sea, and air modalities. So it all needs to correspond to a local need for transportation. For example, the remote islands in Taiwan can really benefit from drone delivery and from self-driving ships. And finally, if the MPs need time to make this into a new law, they can at any time take the regulatory co-creation and consider it in the parliament. And the innovator then can continue to operate for up to three years or four years to serve people's societal needs and essentially becoming a local monopoly because everybody else is illegal. But of course, after three or four years of deliberation, the new law will pass and other providers will enter the area. Now the Ministry of Justice always reminds me, at this point, that while all the regulations from all ministries are fair game for sandbox experiments, there are two things that are outside of the scope. You cannot experiment with money laundering or funding terrorism. We know what will happen, so we don't need any experiments on those two regards. So to discover the common value in each community, I personally tour around Taiwan. So in addition to the Wednesday office hour here, I go every other Tuesday or so to the rural, indigenous, remote islands and other places to talk with the local social innovators. And all the social innovation labs in Taiwan join through telepresence. So people in Taipei, people in Taichung and so on, public servants in all the 12 different ministries involved always meet at one of the social innovation labs and they see through my eyes what the local people there sees and the local people there also sees the central government's ministries and the public servants. Because it's truly multi-stakeholder. Anything that gets asked by any innovator here, usually it's under the purview of many different ministries. And because all those people are literally sitting next to each other, it's impossible for them to say, oh, I'll have to consult with the minister of interior because they're sitting right next to them. And so they have to brainstorm among themselves. And usually just in a couple weeks, they have to either say, okay, we have a new idea and this will interpret the law and regulations so the social innovation can happen or say, oh, we really don't have an idea so let's experiment for one year and see what happens. Almost always 90% of the time they choose reinterpreting their regulations and that gives the social innovators a lot more room to pursue their innovations. And if they do enter the sandbox, of course, they have the demo field for the people to experience its first hunt too. So starting this March, anyone can see the self-driving tricycles and vehicles and buses and whatever running around in the Shaolin Smart Energy Green City and the city is called the Taiwan Car Lab. The Taiwan Car Lab lets people like visiting a zoo see how they react to real-world situations and share how they feel about it. And to listen to people's feelings, we often create an interactive survey called POLIS. And on POLIS, we ask people how they feel about, for example, autonomous driving or about FinTech sandbox system or about social enterprises in the law or about platform economy in general. And instead of a pre-written poll, any citizen can contribute their policy suggestions in a multi-week conversation moderated by an AI and anyone in our national e-participating platform, the join platform, can collect 5,000 signatures and summon me anywhere to run this kind of consultations. So we choose the focus conversation method or the ORID method invented in Canada that involves four stages. The first stage is called FACTS where we collect evidence, first-hand experience, objective data that anyone can contribute. And then after data is confirmed by all the stakeholders, we send them out as a handbook and collect everybody's feelings about the same facts. You may feel angry, I may feel happy, and it's all okay. And after a few weeks, people eventually converge on their feelings that resonate strongly with everybody. Then we talk about ideas. The best ideas are the one that can answer a common how-my-wee question that addressed the most people's feelings. And finally, we hand them to the Premier, to the ministers who integrate this into legalese and sign them into collective decisions. The main innovation in the Polis system is that they show each group how their shared sentiments are received by other groups. And because it lowers people's antagonism because they can see that the people on different sides are actually your social media friends. You just didn't maybe talk about this thing over dinner, you just didn't talk about enemies. And also, because we take away the reply button, it's impossible to make a personal attack to some other person. If you see a few sentiments that doesn't resonate with you, you're then motivated to propose more eclectic, more nuanced sentiments for other people to vote about. So instead of distracting over time, we attract consensus over time. And after we get a set of feelings that resonate practically everybody will always see this particular shape. That is to say, most of the people agree with most of their neighbors, most of the time, about most of the things. While the social media and the popular media may focus on the five things that are divisive, actually on the 95% of things, people do have a rough consensus. And so then it makes it much easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders and check with them on the rough consensus one by one. And so by collaborating with the civic sector, we're building a robust environment suitable for social entrepreneurship to grow with the power of the civil society brought into the full play by giving the people the power to set the agenda. And in fact, Taiwan is home to one of the world's largest civic technology communities called GovZero, which started in late 2012. In the very beginning, GovZero was just a domain name, g0v.tw. And whenever the civic tech community sees anything that the government does and they want to do something that's better, that's more open, more inclusive, more collaborative, instead of protesting, they can just tell people to change the website address which is always something that gov.tw into something that g0v.tw. And by changing the O to a zero, you get into the shadow government. So in the last six years, not only the GovZero communities created hundreds of alternatives or forks of public services, but all of them is open source, meaning that if citizens think it's a good idea, then in the next procurement cycle, the government would just merge it back. And because GovZero is the logo of the domain name, it has no pattern or trademarks. We see g0v.it for Italy, and we see the g0v chapters coming all over the world. The inaugural object of GovZero was budget that g0v.tw, that shows the national budget. There used to be hundreds of pages of PDF files, but showing them in a way in the GovZero version that's interactive, that's fun, and understandable. Anyone can click on 119 and drill down to exactly the part of the budget that they care about and start a real-time conversation around that particular budget item and the spending and the procurement and the KPIs around it. And today, in the government website, join.gov.tw, we actually merge back the civic innovation. So you can see all the hundreds of the ministry's projects, all their KPIs, all their procurements, and anything that you make a public commentary will be met with real-time response from the career public service. And so in this way, when we talk about open data, we're not just talking about open government data, we're talking also about citizen science, open data contributions, and data collaboratives around the entire society. So in addition to turning budget items into social objects that everybody can talk about, people also make their own data to talk about. For example, this is the GovZero Air Pollution Observation Network. This project links the simple air quality sensors called Airbox, which is becoming very popular. More than 3,000, those 100 euro or so devices is applied on all the different schools and so on in balconies in Taiwan, so that all the interested people can provide real-time air quality information on their own places. And an exceptional advantage in Taiwan is the full support, not rejection, of the government. As part of the forward-looking infrastructure plan, we launched the CIVO IoT program with a four-year budget of around 150 million US dollars. And the program all we do is making this enormous amount of environmental data on air products, meteorology, water resource, earthquake, disaster relief, and integrate them into a high-speed computing environment. So everybody can collaboratively discover the correlation between social activity and environmental phenomena. And we use distributed ledgers, for example, to make sure that nobody can change each other's numbers. And previously, establishing effective dialogue about public policies around environments was difficult around the world. And so we're committed to disclose all the factors related to air quality, to the whole society, and indeed to climate change academic communities, and we're very proud that these related products and algorithms are applied all over the world. And so to speak, the CI project, the CIVO IoT project integrates the strengths of both the government and the public. We prove to be capable not only solving our own problems, but also providing such solutions to other countries in similar situations. And to that end, we hold an annual presidential hackathon. Last year, we chose five teams. There is no monetary price. The price is the president's promise to integrate those innovative ideas into the public service with all the political will and budget and regulations and make it happen to maximize their social impact. One of the teams last year was the Water Saviour. They used machine learning to detect water leakage, and they visited after the presidential hackathon, they visited New Zealand for three more months to co-create solutions to help solving the problem of water leakage there. So this year, we're also partnering with the TM Forum, with Open Contracting Partnership and so on, an international version of the presidential hackathon. And through this way, Taiwan contributes our innovations, our experience to the planetary civil society, focusing not only on one or two of the UN's sustainable development goals, but on partnership for all the 17 goals. Anyone working on any of the SDGs are asked to be indexed on Taiwan. It could be through a CSR reporting, through a university USR reporting, through social entrepreneurship reporting, but as long as you are reported and public accountable, all the resources in all our social innovation labs are yours to take. And so the idea is that by encouraging people to form useful partnerships and enhance availability of reliable data, we ensure that people can trust each other on the fact part before we share the reflections and the feelings. And once we have reliable data, we focus on 1717, which is to establish trust across all the sectors and also, more importantly, across countries. And then we also hold the focus of 1706, earning distrust through social innovation that involves everybody. So think back of the self-driving tricycles. What we do here is essentially evolving a new norm, like co-domesticating a new species to integrate them into the everyday life. And we do so in a way that is fully participatory instead of asking citizens to come to technology or bringing the technology to the space of citizens. And this is behind Taiwan's philosophy of not just broadband connectivity as a human right, but full participation digitally as a human right. And so to conclude this talk, I would like to share with you the job description that I wrote as Digital Minister back in October 2016. They asked me what would I do as the Digital Minister? So instead of a job description, I wrote a prayer. When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always keep in mind and always remember that the plurality is here. Thank you so much. And now let's take some Slido questions.


What's up everyone, Takedown here, welcome back to another video we are going to be talking about. It's the 2023 NHL Stanley Cup Playoff Finals. It has been exciting hockey during the whole playoffs. I'm extremely happy that the Florida Panthers just dominated the way that they have. The first round beating out the Bruins, which was the top team and they broke records this year the Bruins. They beat them in the first rounds, then they went and beat the Maple Leafs in the second rounds, which is the first time that the Maple Leafs made it to the second round in years, and then went and beat the Hurricanes in the conference finals to make it to the finals. That alone was just very exciting to see a team that everybody always bashes, but also a team that I like, make it to the finals the way that they did, was extremely awesome and a lot of fun to see. I loved seeing that they had a huge record for the longest game going into the fourth overtime for the first game against the Hurricanes, but they just clean swept the Hurricanes, which I was a huge fan of. So today, let's talk about the finals. In the finals, they are going to be facing the Vegas Golden Knights, which I am also extremely happy about. I love that since 2017, their first year, they are very dominant in making it to the finals. And finally, once again, they are in the finals and I think they are a very strong team. And I'm very excited that both the Panthers and the Golden Knights made it to the finals. For me, that is extremely awesome because that means this year it's going to be a new team that's never won the Stanley Cup before, hoisting it at the end of the playoffs, which I absolutely love when a new team that never won it before gets their final chance to do so. So that is awesome to see. This is going to be some extremely awesome games. Hopefully, we are going to see some overtime or shutouts or just some great hockey all arounds. I think both teams have a very strong players. I think they have great goalies. And I think it's going to be very exciting to see who gets the cup. But obviously, I do need to make a prediction. So my prediction is going to be the Florida Panthers winning the cup. I think that the Vegas Golden Knights are going to fight back more than any of the other teams the Panthers have faced yet. But I really think that the Panthers are going to win. So I'm going to say it's going to be 4-2. I don't think it's going to go down to game 7 like it did with the Bruins or the Maple Leafs. I don't think it's going to be clean swept like they did with the Hurricanes. But I think 4-2 is very fair to say. And I would absolutely love to see that happen. Honestly, whenever it comes to the Florida Panthers or the Vegas Golden Knights, I honestly would be okay with either one winning because it's a new team winning. But I did have to make a prediction and that's why I did choose the Florida Panthers. But I would 100% be okay with the Vegas Golden Knights winning the Stanley Cup this year. Personally, I just feel that the Florida Panthers have just dominated and proved themselves so much not only this year but also during the playoffs.  And during each of those matchups, the other team was the favorites and they still won in advance all the way to the finals. I really feel like the Panthers are going to win this series and win and be the Stanley Cup Champions in 2023. Comments down below who you think is going to win the Stanley Cup this year and why? What do you think the outcome is going to be? But regardless, I think the Finals is just going to be some extreme hockey and I think it's honestly going to be a lot of fun. But I'm really counting on the Panthers winning the Finals this year. They did amazing during the playoffs and I honestly feel it is their time. Comment down below if you guys agree and I'll see you guys in the next video. Please take care. Peace.