Well, hello everyone and welcome and we're going to go ahead and get started. So first of all, a few housekeeping things. So I want to make sure we'll just like at a conference that you're in the right room. This is a webinar for what you're interested in. So this is a webinar to prepare an application for the North Central Region SAERS Research and Education grant program. And this is the pre-proposal process. The North Central Region are the upper 12 Midwestern states of the United States. So if you are looking to do sustainable agriculture research in that primarily affects those upper 12 Midwest states, you are in the right spot. And this is for 2023 research and education funding. And this research and education grant program is a competitive grant program that funds collaborative teams of scientists, farmers, institutions and educators exploring sustainable agriculture through research projects or education demonstration projects. And I'm just going to start off with a few housekeeping items. So I am Beth Nelson. I am the regional coordinator for the North Central SAERS region. And I also coordinate specifically the research and education grant program. Shannon Osborn has also joined us today. She's one of our administrative council members, and she is the technical committee chair. So she oversees the process of review of the full proposals. And as you'll see, is involved as well with the pre-proposal review process. And then helping out today, Marie Flanagan is hosting along with Erin Schneider. So they're going to help get questions answered. We have quite a few people signed up for this webinar today. And so I am going to ask you to put your questions in the chat. You can also unmute and ask them at the end. We're going to hold questions till I run through this first set of slides. You can enter your questions in the chat and then Marie will funnel those to me at the end or you can unmute at the end. But let's hold them till the end, if possible. So first I'm going to go through some overview slides about the SAERS program, kind of give you an idea of what our philosophy is to see if your idea might fit well with our program and with our goals and objectives. And then I get through those and I'm going to race through those pretty quickly because the same, the same presentation is also on the website with the notes as a PDF. And that's in the same spot where you'll download the call for proposals for this grant program. So I am going to kind of race through the slides. Marie is also recording this webinar so you can go back and look at that as well. So I'm going to go through those overview slides. Shannon is going to join, is going to give you maybe some tips and ideas of things that she has seen over the years, as she's looked at pre-proposals and full proposals. And then we'll answer questions, the general questions about applying, and then for those of you who aren't familiar with the online proposal application system, I'll have Marie pull that up at the end. Those of you who are familiar can end, but the rest of you who want to see what the application online actually looks like, we can open that up for you. So that is the plan and with that I am just going to go ahead and dive dive in. So Marie, if you can move to the next slide. So Sarah is the Sustainable Ag Research and Education grant program. We've been around for over 30 years and we are funded by the USDA. We are part of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NFA. Next slide. So our mission statement for Sarah is that we provide grants and outreach to advance sustainable innovations to the whole of American agriculture. So right off the bat, you see that we cover a whole lot of topics. That's a very broad charge. You can move on to the next one Marie. We are a different kind of a grant program in some ways. We are decentralized and that means that the North Central region so again those 12 upper Midwestern states are governed by an administrative council that decides what our priorities are going to be within the scope of overall research that we have there. We are science based but we are also very strongly a grassroots funding group and we fund farmer driven research. So that means that we look at problem solving practical applications of the research, and I'll just add that while we know basic research is critical. with this grant program funds. So we really are looking for solutions to problems that farmers have brought up that could be implemented in the field within the next few years. So those are the kinds of things that fit the SAR grant program. You can go to the next slide. So I did want to just briefly mention that we're not just a grant funding program, although that is our main purpose. National SAR puts out bulletins which are free as well as some really great publications that are low-cost books that you can order online. You can look for that by going to SAR.org. And I will just say about the bulletins that if you teach classes or do workshops that those technical those bulletins can be ordered. You can order multiple copies of those so that you could use them in your classroom. So I just wanted to make you aware of those resources. Go ahead, Marie. So all SAR projects need to address three aspects of sustainability. And I know you're all familiar with those. So people, profit, and protection of the nation's land and water. So you'll see in that even at the pre-proposal level, one of the first things you have to do is consider how your project will address our outcomes for social, environmental, and economic aspects of sustainability. You can go on to the next slide, Marie. I will say that for scientists, we are sometimes challenged by the social sustainability aspect. And so National SAR has put some effort lately into trying to think through and develop resources to help both applicants and reviewers think about what does it mean? What are the impacts of social sustainability? What kind of outcomes would we have? And maybe even how do we measure those? So we have a new resource online. There's a link to that. And this is just the graphic for it. It actually goes through some of those a little bit more. And so if you're having trouble thinking about social outcomes for the work you're doing, that might be a good resource for you to look at. Next slide. I mentioned that we have a broad charge. And so we fund proposals in a broad range of topics. So integrated or sustainable pest and weed management, water quality, crop diversification, marketing, urban agriculture, we cover a lot of territory. Next slide. We are the north central region. And so we're that part that's marked in kind of that yellow gold color there. That's the north central region of SAR. Thanks for the graphic help, there. Great. So if you are in one of those 12 upper Midwest states, you can apply to this program. We do accept applications within the United States outside of our region, as long as they primarily affect the north sustainable agriculture in the north central region. If you have questions about that, please call me. I did also want to mention that we have other grants. And in fact, four of our grant programs are open right now. The farmer rancher program goes directly to fund innovative ideas on someone's farm or ranch. It goes directly to farmers and ranchers. The youth educator one supports youth educators who are giving sustainable egg information to young adults or youth. And then our professional, sorry, our partnership grant program is also open. And I'm going to say a little bit more at the end, because I think that program in particular might be of interest to the same group of people who are considering applying for the research and education grant program. So you can go on to the next slide. So I'm going to talk a little bit now about the specifics for the research and education grant program. So this is our largest grant program. We have grants for up to $250,000. We do allow 10% indirect costs. They can go for up to 36 months. There is often an opportunity to get a no cost extension for an additional year. But the application can't be for longer than 36 months. We do have, it's not quite so new anymore. I think this is our third year of offering our long term funding option. I'll say a little bit more about that later. That's basically for projects that cannot be completed within that typical three or four timeline. And the funding is a little complicated. I'll talk about that a little bit later. But if you're interested in that aspect, I'd suggest you call me and we can talk about whether your project fits that or not. The projects that you apply for here can be research or education projects or demonstration projects. The proposals are due October 13th at four o'clock central daylight time. So note that earlier time. So that is when the proposal system closes. We don't have technical support after that, so it needs to be in by four o'clock central time on Thursday, October 13th. We invite 30 to 35 preproposals and we have funding for 15 to 16. We typically get about 150 preproposals in this program. So it is a pretty tough cut. The funds from this program are a bit because it's a preproposal process. It takes a little while. So the funds are available for this mid fall 2023. You can go to the next slide, Marie. So these preproposals are reviewed by mostly by members of our administrative council. We have a few other people that help us to review, partly because we get so many in and they also fill out our expertise and topic needs. They are scored on relevance to sustainable agriculture in our region. We look at the methods and approach, but we don't really expect great detail at this point. You'll see in the word limits that you don't have space to put in great detail. Mostly the reviewers are looking to see if they think your method or your approach will lead to the results you want to get in the project if it's an appropriate approach. And then they also look at farmer engagement and farmer engagement is not just giving, you know, giving a talk to farmers. It's actually bringing them into research. It doesn't have to be on farm research, but it should be engaging them and talking about the research. Maybe you have an advisory committee or something like that. We divide them into these groups based loosely on expertise and topic and then the administrative, the groups will recommend ones to move forward and invite for full proposals. And I'll talk a little bit more about the timeline for that in a later slide. Go ahead, Marie. So successful pre-proposals demonstrate relevance to the north central region. So, you know, how does this apply to the work that is happening in these upper 12 mid-western states? They address NCR stairs three broad based outcomes and you'll see those are written in the call for proposals, but as you can imagine, again, those affect profit people and planet or environmental outcomes. And really importantly, they involve farmers and ranchers in the project. And I say that over and over again, because that's what's maybe a little bit different about SAR. You must have farmers and ranchers involved in your project. You can go to the next slide. They have clear outcomes and I'll talk a little bit about what outcomes are and give some examples later. So outcomes are not necessarily the scientific results you're going to get from your proposal, but it's what you expect to happen as a result of your proposal.  So, and I'll go into that a little bit later. Go ahead, Marie. This is the actual pre-proposal application. So it is an online submission and the link is in the call for pre-proposals. For those of you who came into the webinar later at the end, we'll go ahead, Marie's going to go ahead and open that up so you can see what that system looks like. We do suggest that you prepare a Word document first. It just helps you know what your word limits are and that type of thing. And it also will give you a change. Then you can cut and paste it into the online system. Next slide. So I just want to say something quick about the long-term funding. So there is a checkbox in the pre-proposal for indicating that you are applying under the long-term option. Those pre-proposals will be reviewed by a separate committee and they're going to look at whether this is applicable under all the other criteria, but also they'll look at whether this fits their long-term funding criteria. And you really need a very strong justification for asking for long-term funding. We get our funding allotments in five-year increments. So we cannot fund a project for longer than three or four years and then we have to write a new contract. So the idea with this is you would do a first cycle and then you'd come back and get funding for a second cycle without having to go through the application process again. So we recognize that there are some projects that take long enough to set up that you will have no results at the end of those three or four years and this long-term option is designed for those kinds of projects. We know that nearly every research project leads to more questions that could be answered with another set of funding, but those should just come through the typical system. These really are for ones that can only be done by getting funding for longer than three or four years and again I would say if you want to apply for that please contact me and we can talk about it and see whether that fits for your idea. You can go to the next slide. So there are a couple of things that I always tell people and they call me about applying for the research and education grant program. The first one I've already said several times, engage farmers and ranchers. The second one is download and read the call for proposals. We give a lot of the information in the online application but there's more information in the call for proposals so please download that. You'll see in this slide the call was not listed in the system yet. It is now there and so you can go to the website northcentralsear.org and download the call for proposals and as I said this webinar will also be in that same spot both the reported webinar as well as a PDF of these slides with the notes so you can use that as a tool as well for your application. Next slide Marie. We do have some resources for applying for a grant that you can look up as well on our northcentralsear website so be sure to check those out. Next slide. This is another main thing you should do in preparing for proposals. So all of our projects are on project all of the reports from past projects from the past 30 years are in at this website projects.serre.org. You search for projects and you can search by keywords and look at past serre projects to see how your work differs or builds on past projects and I find that reviewers really like that when you do that especially at the pre-proposal level so if you know they would tend to say well this has been done before but you've said well this was done in this region but we're you know we have much lower rainfall or something like that it really is impactful so I would suggest that you look up past serre projects to see what's been done in this area already. Next slide. And then this is another very important resource for you that you should take advantage of. So each of our states has someone who does outreach for serre each of our 12 upper midwest states I should say and if you go to the northcentralsear website click on that state coordinators one you'll you'll get the contact information for the person in your state. I will answer general questions about your proposal but your state coordinator often can do a lot of things like maybe connect you to others working in that area connect you to farmers or ranchers who are working that area and some of them will really talk through your idea even look over maybe a draft of your proposal if they have time so definitely be in touch with your state coordinator to talk about your idea and your pre-proposal as you develop it. Next slide. So I'm just going to again quickly run through the actual aspects of the online proposal application so the cover material is you know pretty general information. We do like to know whether your project is going to focus on socially disadvantaged or limited resource farmers and as you'll see there there is a spot for you to check whether you are applying for the long-term funding option. Go to the next slide Marie. And then the first set of questions I think that you asked on the application are you know how do your project outcomes align with NCRSARES outcomes so again this is where you're looking at the three aspects of sustainability. We understand that your project likely emphasizes one of those over the other two but you should still give some thought to how what the what the outcomes are for those other aspects of sustainability. And go to the next slide Marie. So the main part of it is again this is fairly typical project summary your objectives and your outcomes and again I'll give you a little bit more information about what your outcomes should look like. Relevance to sustainable agriculture in our region again a great thing to include there is what past projects have done in this area past SARE projects by going to our data our reporting system database and then again you will give brief information about method and approach. There is no specific place there's not a separate attachment there are no attachments allowed to the proposed the pre-proposal I should say. We don't expect to have literature citations here but if you do need to include some critical aspects if it's a new approach or method or if it's a revolutionary concept that you want to cite you can do that within the within the text but it is a part of the word limits. You can go to the next one Marie. I guess so what what I should have mentioned on the last one you don't need to go back Marie because what's not there is a budget. We do not require a budget at the pre-proposal level we've done that to shorten it at this point it's kind of like a long letter of intent because we get so many pre-proposal applications we wanted to make it easier for applicants to kind of vet their idea see if their concept fits without having to put together a whole budget and all of that so there is no budget we do ask you for a range of spending just so we have an idea of what you're planning to do so that is something that's a checklist on that cover page as well but you do not have to complete a budget. I just want to say a little bit about outcomes so outcomes as I've said are not necessarily the results from research but it's what you want to happen as a result of you doing your project and this mostly comes from the the training or the sharing of information that you do so if your project is an education project so that means the whole three years you're probably going to be doing workshops for example you're doing post-harvest handling workshops then you're going to do those workshops and we track learning outcomes and those can happen pretty quickly so those are things like knowledge awareness attitude or skills that have been improved and those are the things you can document at the end of a workshop did I you know how many people learned something new and then there are action outcomes so that will maybe actually be going in and checking later to see if farmers used the information you know did they make changes to their system so learning outcomes from this would maybe be farmers will learn post-harvest handling and packing techniques for sales to institutions then the action outcome would come from farmers actually increasing their sales to institutions by implementing these practices so for a research focus project you can move on to the next slide that may work a little differently because basically what you're doing for two or three years are probably collecting data to come up with research which might lead to recommendations for farmers or ranchers so really you're going to be doing your outreach mostly at the end of that project so we would expect your your learning outcomes maybe to be similar that farmers are going to learn what you've discovered through your research but because it's coming at the end of your two or three years you may not have time to track action counts outcomes from that so in this example if you're looking at how diversity affects pollinators the learning outcome might be that they learn which plants to plant or what works the best but they may not have time to implement that or you may not be able to track that in your in your work so we just kind of wanted to clarify what we're kind of looking for in terms of learning and action outcomes and what the expectation is you can go to the next slide so the other aspects of the pre-proposal again it's fairly short or just kind of listing your team members and their basic expertise farmer rancher engagement again how are farmers and ranchers involved in this research should they come up with the idea are they helping to formulate the treat you know think about the treatments are they part of an advisory committee are they engaged are they working with you on the outreach which is a you know very effective way to do outreach and then there is a section there statement regarding resubmitted ideas so if you have submitted in the past you've got review comments and you're coming back that's really a great space to take advantage of how you have addressed the reviews from last time and that's another thing that reviewers really look at and find impactful if you say well we were told this so we've done this differently or you say well we were told this but here's the reason we did it this way and we think that's a good idea and you convince them you know that's a good space for you to do that you can go to the next one okay I think this is one of my last slides so this is the timeline again they're due uh online by four o'clock central daylight time on thursday october 13th you'll be notified whether you're invited to submit a full proposal or not in february the full proposals are due in april the the technical committee reviews those full proposals the administrative council decides which ones to fund in july and the awards are you're notified in august and the award officers are sent and then the budgets get reviewed the contract gets set up and the funds are not available until november first 2023 so that's a year from now because we have a pre-proposal process it is a long time till the funding is available and then there's some reporting requirements on there too so one reports would be due so one of the things i'm going to mention about other grant programs so i told you you might be interested in the partnership grant program and we actually have a webinar for applying for that on monday at two o'clock i'm looking at my calendar marie can put that in the chat the registration for that if you're interested so the partnership refers to an ag professional working together with three or more farmers to solve a problem they're $50,000 so they're not as much money but if you have a scaled down version of your idea that you want to use that can be a great way to kind of get started maybe use it as a stepping stone to get an r&e grant or another larger r&e grant so i would suggest you take a look at that call as well to see if that might be something that would work for you and the success rate in that program in the last couple years has been about 35 percent so we fund about a third of the proposals that come in through the partnership grant program those are due a week after these pre-proposals are due so that's kind of the downside they're due october 20th and they are a full proposal they do require a budget so if you're you'll have they'll have to go through your grants office as well pre-proposals don't necessarily have to go through your grants office you'll need to check with them but if there's not a budget they often feel they don't need to see them so so i would just put in a little plug for thinking about the partnership grant program as well and the last slide is contact information for me and you are welcome to email me or call me to talk about your idea if you have specific questions about it again you should also contact your state coordinator and i'll just add that i am available tomorrow and i'm quite available next week after that i have a lot of travel so if you have some ideas and want to get in touch next week would be great with that i'm going to ask shannon if she wants to jump in shannon has been a valued ac member and you can tell a little bit more about your affiliations for for many years we are very lucky to have her and so she's read a lot of pre-proposals over the years and i think she'll have some ideas um for you as a reviewer thanks can you hear me okay beth yes so um my name is shannon osborne i am a research agronomist with the usda ars in brickeen south dakota and so i have been involved with ser um for a long time sure how long i was on the technical committee for the rne grants first and then um reviewing the proposals and then over the last i think six or seven years i have been on the administrative council as the ars rep and now i am the chair of the technical committee um that oversees these grants and i guess um the tips i had as i was listening to um beth's proposal was first and foremost make sure you read the all of the things that come in the call for proposal and read those instructions and there's a lot of resources on the website for seyer and um know that the people who are reviewing the information also have read the full call for proposals and they have access to those same resources and so we utilize those resources to help us gauge how we are we are reviewing those proposals so please take the time to read the instructions follow the instructions um the staff beth is a great resource um to bounce ideas off of ask questions so make sure that you utilize those things um as much as you can also make sure that your proposal is straightforward and the people who are going to be reviewing your proposal proposal might not be an expert in the area that your proposal is and so know that the administrative council and the reviewers are made up of people that have a lot of different backgrounds we have um soils people we have horticulturalists we have producers on the panel um we have people within education economics it's it's a broad group of people that you're writing these proposals to so you have to have enough detail but make sure that it's understandable by a large number of people um again make sure that you address all of those required categories um beth talked about the three legs um and we want you to specifically say how you are addressing those three legs that social sustainability website that was up on um that's on the website it is very useful you know for me I am a soils person I didn't start thinking about the social sustainability aspect until I became a part of SARE and so those resources are very beneficial in me and thinking about those types of things so utilize those when writing your proposals and then finally you know it is as Beth stated it is a grassroots grant program and so involvement of producers or the end user of the research or the education that you're doing might not necessarily be a producer but who are those end users that are going to impact sustainable ag how are they impacted by the research that you're doing and how are they involved can you get them involved in the proposal so for one example you know if you're doing some things that um with livestock that have different treatments what are some things that they utilized and how might they like to address some of the treatments those types of things so however you can get that end user producer involved within your grant I think is very beneficial for the grant but it's also beneficial for you and thinking a bigger picture about how you address these things within your career so I think those are kind of the notes that I took down the that long term make sure that if you're thinking about that long term option that before you commit to that long term option you have a conversation with Beth about what your ideas are and if we as a committee would actually consider that to be long term or just the base project that could be built upon for other projects I think that's it Beth that's great thanks Shannon yeah I think Shannon hit some really important points so uh that's really good um we can take questions now we'll take general questions uh and then have Maria Marie pull up the website for projects.sare if you're not familiar with it but first let's take some general questions Marie do you have some to pass along or yeah there's several questions in the chat did you want me to read them to you yes okay I don't have the chat up great um first question and I'm going to just use first names from people so I apologize in advance if I looked at your name quite right the first question was from alphons um wondering if they can get the documents of this meeting to help share with others yes alphons I posted a link in the chat for where you can get a copy of this slideshow downloadable as either the powerpoint or as a pdf that has all of the notes um as well as event this is going to be recorded this actual session um as a video and then posted to that website as well as probably later today hopefully um so there's there's going to be resources at that link next question is from hailey and this one's for you Beth can projects incorporate both research and education components yes thank you for asking that because I left out a critical part of the presentation so one of the things there also insists on is outreach or education so even if you are doing a research project yes you should be including outreach or education we look to share that information with the end users so yes it should include both you'll see there's a question on the cover page that says is this research focused or education focused and kind of which one you mark kind of goes to that what I was talking about with the outcomes so for research focused projects you might not have as many action outcomes from that for an education demonstration project the emphasis might be on those uh measuring those changes in behavior or those action outcomes so I hope that answers your question hailey and thank you for reminding me to say that next question is from joseph wondering um our consultant fees that work on a project a direct or indirect cost uh those are direct costs so indirect are just um and again you can call us with questions about the budgeting although uh you know you're not doing a budget for this one so but but I understand that you are still going to be sketching things out on a worksheet certainly for for the application in case you're with the hope that you will be invited for a full proposal um so indirect costs are overhead costs people call them different different organizations call them different things but that the overhead costs that the institution usually takes out and it's 10 percent so consultant fees fees for service those are all part of direct costs next question is from now run on how do you value innovation or research of an illiterate farmer how do you help substantiate his her idea into research and education so that's a good question and one we have been struggling with we have been uh thinking of first of all trying to make our working to make our materials work for low literacy groups we've talked about doing video applications not for this project but more for the farmer rancher project if you are asking this as a researcher for how you would involve those farmers in your work you know you can do video things and that that can be a part of your proposal is that you are going to produce videos for your audience either if they are english's second language or don't read or write well so I hope that answers the question that's kind of a general question certainly something that's on our minds we currently as an applicant for the research and education program we only accept proposals online so you you do have to have that literacy baseline to apply to this grant program and another question from joseph do proposals compete across their regions meaning if one project is similar to another project in another region will they compete against each other or could they both be funded they can both be funded so we don't we're pretty independent we don't see the proposals from other regions so that's all handled within our north central region um and in fact I usually get a question the other way which is two proposals that are similar that kind of want to cooperate do we have a way to see if they're both funded and and we don't we don't have a way to go across regional boundaries very easily to fund projects so we usually just recommend that people you know apply in both areas or in both regions um but not make them dependent on getting funding in the other region but uh it would be fine to apply in both regions we we know once projects are funded so pre-proposals that's all confidential um once a project is funded it becomes public information that's when we would know okay and the next question is from crystal do you have any grants that would be for international research and education we do not uh ser does not we're pretty small grant program and we don't have international don't fund international program and the next question is from vinaigrette not to sound over confident but this is more of a timeline constraint on our side we will need to be working on a full proposal draft earlier this winter I was wondering if it's possible to make the full proposal that it's available to applicants in advance of the February date on that timeline so we don't do that because it doesn't get approved until January actually but the call for proposals does not change drastically I can't remember if we have a sample call for proposals if you'll contact me I can send you the last years as a sample knowing that that may not be exactly what the call will be when it's approved in January I'm not sure that we post it because it is by invitation only so I don't we don't have a sample up either do we have a sample of the pre-proposal but not a call for full proposal yeah um John asked me asked if we can repost a link I'm not sure which link you needed John um if I didn't get the link in the chat that you needed can you just put in the chat which link you're referring to and I'll repost it um question from Keith are there specific topics for research of high interest for sarah north central uh we do not have priorities for research generally and that is a discussion every year by our administrative council um they feel that the good ideas come from the grassroots so I would just say in turn we are a USDA program if you've looked at the USDA's priorities you know that they are looking for things like climate resilience those types of things I think are of interest but we do not have priorities and every year we fund a broad spectrum of projects I don't know Shannon do you I'll catch you off guard a little bit do you have anything to add to that um no I guess you know what you said we really try not to constraint what it is that people propose because it is such a broad group and you know um innovative ideas that solve problems um yeah I don't think there is certain high priority areas it's just really the target of solving solutions or solving problems with solutions you know that are that are applied thanks next question is from sarah for the methods section are you looking for a timeline of when activities will take place for more of a high level summary of how pieces will fit together um more that high level not a timeline at the pre-proposal level so at the full proposal level a timeline would be helpful and it kind of depends I guess if you're doing an education only proposal and that is part of your method and approach is kind of what's going to follow from one other thing you could include the sequence of events I don't know if that answers your question again if it's more specific than that um you can please contact me and we can talk about it from Keith any limitation on submitting one topic under research and another topic appropriate for farmer partnership during the same year so do you so I'm not sure if you're asking if you can submit two within the RNA pre-proposal process which you actually can do that um it's a little tricky but you can do that you can talk to me or but if you're talking about submitting both an RNA pre-proposal and a partnership grant program proposal yes you can and I sometimes encourage people to do that um for one thing that again I forgot to mention the research and education proposals the funding is available November 1st 2023 partnership proposal funding is available April 1st 2023 so you you get a start ahead of the growing season so yes you can apply for both the 2023 partnership and the RNA pre-proposal you find out at the same time so you'll find out if your proposal for partnership is funded and you'll find out if your pre-proposal is being invited for a full proposal uh in early fe- mid February to late February question from Joseph if we have partners is it best to put letters of intent in the pre-proposal or in the proposal process in the proposal no attachments in the pre-proposal it's a very simple pre-proposal we don't even ask for a CV we just ask for CVs for the PIs we just ask for I think a short bio that's within the proposal itself um from Gabriel can small businesses that partner with farmers are improved approved for government contracts through SAM and are conducting fundamental applied research apply for this grant yes probably call me so it can go to private entities so yes I would just say the one thing we sometimes run into with that is we don't do product testing so if you're testing one specific product that could be an issue and then Gabriel's follow-up question was additionally is it encouraged to orient research towards long-term projects if they can be or not um again call me so it is the only thing I'll say about the long-term projects and Shannon is smiling it's a tough cut so this is basically our administrative council uh you know promising future money to go to this research so they're tough on them so certainly if you have a project that qualifies for that and can go you know get additional funding without having to go through the application process that's a great thing but they are really tough on it we do have at the pre-proposal level the ability to change your mind like they can look at it and say this is a good pre-proposal but it is not a long-term proposal and then you could if we invite you you could come back as a short-term proposal if you apply at the full proposal level for long-term you're either funded long-term or you're not funded so it's a little complex we've been working it out as we go along we think we've settled on this as the way it works best and you just touched on this a little bit Steven asked when you look at long-term funding can the proposal go beyond $250,000 and what would you consider long-term? So the way the long-term works and and I think we sort of spell this we do spell it out in the call for proposals is you get funding for the first cycle for $250,000 for the first three years and then we'll do a review we were talking about doing site visits kind of a pretty rigorous review to make sure you're making progress as you'd hoped and then we'll give you a new contract for another three years so you write out a new work plan for the rest of the work for the next three years for an additional $250,000 and we talked about that being it could either be two cycles or it could be three cycles so it could be six to nine years and you would get $250,000 for each of those three-year cycles. Haley asks if we have data that needs further analysis to allow us to best conduct the education component does that further data analysis count as a research component? Maybe it could I mean it could be part of the work you put in I would still say it's an education focus proposal and I will say that education focus does not have to have research in it so yeah you would just kind of explain that I think in your in your pre-proposal. And a question from Jen, do we need a formal commitment from each of the farmers to be a part of the project proposed in the grant for the Farmer Rancher Involvement Section or just a list of potentially interested farmers based on past partnerships? So I'm going to answer in between those two so you don't need a formal letter because we don't have attached but you will at the full proposal level you will need those letters verifying participation. At the pre-proposal level you can list we we do like to have you list them and maybe have spoken with them at least and and have an idea that they'd like to be involved so we know who they are and also because sometimes you think you'll get farmers involved and then they're really busy and you're unable to so we do want to have them identified I think what we say in the call for proposals is identified or tell us why you can't identify them at this time but you don't need letters from them you will at the full proposal level. And that is the end of the questions in the chat Beth. That's the thank yous. Well does anyone else have any questions before we move on to like this next section we still have about 60 participants on the on the zoom right now. Okay. One last question came straggling in in the chat from Mitchell can you talk about the youth educator grants? So I could but so I'll just say that they're small grants they're $6,000 and they are to go to someone who is teaching sustainable ag concepts but there is a webinar scheduled for the youth educator program and I don't know Marie do you have your calendar up can you look? Yeah I can put the link in the chat actually. Okay that'd be great so I would suggest you tune in for that and Joan Benjamin that call for proposals is also listed on our North Central Sierra website so please go pull that up. Joan's contact information is there and then also I would suggest you register for that webinar. So thank you everyone for making the time I know it's a busy time of year I appreciate it. Contact me if you have specific questions about your idea I hope we get a bunch of pre-proposals for those of you who haven't been in SARE projects or projects.sarer.org our online system and would like to just see what it looks like the next thing I'm going to do is have Marie just pull that up open it up for maybe the next five minutes and look so you see what it is but for those of you who don't need that or can navigate the online system on your own we don't use grants.gov so I will say it's our own online application system you're welcome to stay on the line but for the rest of you thank you for joining us and we look forward to getting your pre-proposals. Okay I think we've had a couple other questions sent to me in the chat which I think I addressed. Okay so I will pull up I've already logged in Beth so that's okay so when when you go to projects.sarer.org and again we have screenshots of all of this in the online PDF of my presentation so what I took out of the slide deck that I went through today were screenshots of every step of the program of applying so you will see those there as well and the first thing you do is you log in and you do an account you have to answer some demographic information and some institutional information and then you're in the system and then once you're registered so Marie has registered and she wants to start a new grant proposal and this is for the whole system so one of the things you need to make go ahead Marie so one of the things you need to do is make sure you pick our region we all have different grant application times so you want to make sure you pick the north central region and you want to pick for this one the R&E pre-proposal so now note that the rest of the ones that are open are in there so someone asked about the youth educator you can start one there you could pull down the call for proposals there as well and the partnership grant is the other one that I suggested you consider as well not as much money but higher success rate so go ahead and open the begin a new proposal uh under yep thanks Marie your internet slowed today Marie maybe because I'm hosting the zoom while that that could be it well it it will go a lot faster on your system I think so it usually doesn't take that law I don't recommend trying to fill out your proposal while you're hosting this thing there we go so this is this is what it looks like so you'll see your project title project coordinator is in there you keep scrolling down Marie so yeah you can hold it there so view draft at any time if you want to look at what you're writing and what it looks like which won't there won't be anything there now but you can use that it also gives you a link so you cannot have collaborators go in and work on your same proposal so there's just there's one law unless you get them your login information so but you can share your draft with collaborators so that will also give you a link that you can send to them so they can look at it um yeah but they can't go in and make changes on your proposal unless you give them your login information so as I said there's a cover section you know that you open up and just fill out kind of that standard information that you normally fill out the impact on sustainable agriculture in the north central region you could go ahead and open that up Marie because again I told you to think about how your proposal fits those three areas and you have to come up with something so because uh you have to explain how it will affect it economically environmentally and socially and again the red asterisks means that those are required sections that you have to complete once you complete it you get a green check that lets you know you can move forward and you'll see down there in the bottom right you got you can move to the next section which would be the body of the proposal you can go back to the previous section which was your cover page your overview you can view the draft uh so a lot of nice buttons this is a system that got set up for us about I don't know maybe four or five years ago three years ago I guess now that we've just been really happy with it so I hope you'll find it easy to use as well and then again the body um which goes through those main sections that I talked about the project summary and there are word limits for most of these that are they'll be listed when you open the section but they are also listed in the call for proposals so I will say one thing to remember to do so if you type in all 250 words and forget to hit save down there at the bottom you will lose it so it's not so bad in these small preproposals but uh when you're putting a budget together we tell people just save every time if you get called away from your computer it will not have saved what you've written unless you click on save so as you can see Marie answered that and now she's got a green check when you have all those required aspects uh filled out in a certain section and you go back to the overview you'll have a green check by that part uh yeah I think you can go back to the I'm I know I'm kind of racing through this again all those screenshots are in that PDF that's available on the north central sera website along with the call for proposals so you will notice there is not a submit button here you do not get the submit button until you have green checks by all those required components um so once those are completed and you have green checks you will have a submit button there uh and then you can click on it and submit it you can also now unsubmit your application if you you know read through the draft after you've submitted and you see there's a problem before the deadline you can unsubmit just make sure you resubmit before the deadline which is again Thursday October 13th at four o'clock so that's the system it's not sometimes people get confused this is separate from our website the north central sera website this is projects.sera.org that uh that link is plastered big throughout the call for proposals so uh you hopefully won't miss that my contact information is also in the call for proposals um I think those are the main points of applying in the system uh so again if you have questions you can either contact the mcr sera office uh jean can sure help you through the application process um contact questions or proposal um application online system questions you can ask me as well um there is on the online application if you have technical problems things are loading too slowly or something like that or you think you've done something right and technically the system doesn't seem to be working you can also email projects at sera.org and that's again in the system itself and they are really good about trying to fix technical glitches um and and getting you in the system I see we I don't know if you can hear the tapping outside so we are uh our building is being re-roofed and they they've just decided right outside my office to start pounding so I think that's a good indication it's a good time to end the webinar are there any other questions yeah I know if if not uh thank you Shannon Aaron and Marie for uh helping to put this on thank all of you for attending and again we look forward to getting preproposals from you


Dear friends, a good day. I am Yoshioca Keiko, editorial staff writer of ASAHI. Welcome to ASAHI World Forum entitled Taiwan Digital and Democracy. Thank you for joining. Without further ado, let me introduce the speaker. Ms. Audrey Tan, who is the Executive Yuan and Minister without portfolio in charge of digital affairs. So we are very pleased to have you. She's participating from Taipei remotely. Tan-san, thank you very much for sharing your precious time for us today. Thank you. Thank you, really my honor to be virtually here. And I would like to express my gratitude for us to having this time to talk about global issues and hopefully with global participation. First of all, very briefly, let me introduce to you Ms. Audrey Tan. At the age of eight, she learned programming on her own. And at age 15, she became one of the co-leaders of IT company. At the age of 19, she went to Silicon Valley. She started business and she carried on advising companies. At Apple, she was involved with the project of AI Siri. In 2016, she became the youngest minister in the Executive Yuan for digital affairs in the history of Taiwan. Tan-san will join us for one hour and speaking on four themes. First point, Taiwan's response to COVID-19. Number two, digital democracy in Taiwan. Number three, relationship between AI and Mankind. And the last point is the message to the Japanese youth and children. So this is the plan. Tan-san, we'd like to begin the program. Thank you very much. Now we will go to the session. First question to Tan-san. It is about the response to a pandemic in Taiwan. Regarding COVID-19, Taiwan is regarded as one of the best examples in countering COVID-19 in the world. Taiwan is regarded as one of the most advanced examples of countering COVID-19 in many cases. What is the current situation regarding COVID-19? Today, at a day of the recording, which is October 18, 2021, we have the entire country have zero local cases, zero imported cases, and zero deaths today. So you are like an honor student. Do you have any challenges as of now regarding the pandemic? Our main challenge was the vaccination rate. When I was vaccinated in April, I had to convince not very successfully my friends and families and my colleague to get a job because at that time we've been like ten months with no local cases. So people did not feel any urgency at all. So I was kind of weird in getting a self-funded job at that time, AstraZeneca. Of course, by May, we encountered our real first wave, but because people suddenly rushed to want to get a vaccine, there wasn't sufficient supply because at a time in COVAX and other international arrangements, Taiwan was ranked very low in priority when it comes to vaccine urgency, which is why I almost will have no way to get my second job because of the interest in getting vaccinated if not for the Japanese generous dedication, donation of waves after waves of AstraZeneca shots to Taiwan. So let me begin my talk by offering my sincere gratitude to the Japanese people and the Japanese government. Japanese vaccine was put to good use. That is a very happy news for us. Regarding Taiwan, you started with mask mapping and then the vaccination, the booking system. You said that it was very hard, but contact the tracing system. You introduced advanced systems utilizing digital technology in your country. So that was the counter COVID-19 systems you introduced, IT and the digital as the minister in charge of digital affairs, Ms. Dan, you've made a great contribution. We want to learn from you. As of now, regarding the future countermeasures, how are you going to plan a digital technology in COVID-19 programs? Do you have any ideas that you have in pipeline regarding a digital technology for the pandemic? The system you are showing now, the 192 to SMS system is a app-free design where anyone can just use the built-in camera of their phone even without unlocking the phone. Just point the built-in camera to the QR code. It automatically pops up the SMS to this well-trusted number 192-2, our central epidemic command centers number. And by pressing send, it takes maybe just two seconds to finish a check-in. And it's stored not in the government, but rather in the telecommunication carrier. So whichever carrier you use, that carrier will store this check-in for 28 days. And after 28 days, well, it's gone. So unless there's a real pace where the contact tracers need to piece together from five telecoms and also from the registration database of the QR code generation, it's only then this messages will be put together that shorten the contact tracing from 24 hours to less than 24 minutes. And out of the a quarter billion SMS sent this way since May, only around a million have been used. And of those million, anyone can use the website SMS.192-2 to look up which of their messages got looked at by which contact tracers in which municipality. So it's like reverse audit that preserves anonymity and privacy. Our upcoming work is to make sure that this design far from a one-shot thing can be written into the counter-pandemic acts to work on legalizing, institutionalizing these responses much as how we institutionalize our SARS responses after the 2003 SARS incident. So institutionalization and making sure it's not used outside of the scope of contact tracing like never for wiretapping or crime investigation or things like that is our ongoing challenge. And I'm happy to report we're doing quite well on this regard. Privacy and anonymity would be secured. And at the same time, you want to have waterproof countermeasures. The idea comes one after another. Who thinks about it? Who thinks about it? Tansan, are you thinking of it alone or who is thinking of these ideas? It is a group of people called Gov Zero or G-Zero-V. You see in Taiwan, the digital services from the government is something that Gov.tw. But if people do not like these services instead of protesting, they can fork the government, meaning taking the Gov website, deploying an alternate vision of it and calling it something that G-Zero-V.tw. So by changing a O to a zero in your browser, you get into the shadow governments that's faster, more fair, and more fun. And it's always free of copyright restrictions. So when the Gov Zero people think about a better way to display mask availability in a map or if they think of a better contact tracing method using SMS, or if they think of a better way to get vaccinated by looking at available vaccination places when we then adopt it in the central government, we will face no copyright restrictions and neither party need to pay the other. So you share in the information and you proceed together, you advance together. I think that's the philosophy. Now we have some questions from the audience, from the viewers. I'd like to introduce you some of the questions. The first question. You said that information is shared, idea is shared, and in terms of politics, implementation is actually made. That is what we feel from Tansan. The first question. Tansan, you have made an enormous contribution in controlling the pandemic in Taiwan, but you had nothing to do with the politics. What was the factor for your success in the whole affairs? What was the reason for your success, although you had nothing to do with politics before? I think to give no trust is to get no trust. That is to say, instead of like a traditional politician saying, trust me, I know the best. I do the reverse. I say, I know almost nothing and the citizens knows best. I trust the citizens with whatever data that I see. The citizens always also see. And then when the citizens think of a better idea, I trust them to develop their idea in a pro-social way, in a way that is beneficial to the entire society, which is why I'm less a politician, but more like a poetician, like I write poems, prayers to inspire people to think out of the box, to be more creative. And at the end of the day, the people themselves understand the why of policymaking, the how of science and technology, not just the what, the output of the policies. But there is no fatigue in counter-pandemic because the counter-pandemic fatigue is usually a result of a lockdown measure because it's the citizens developing their own countermeasures. There's no fatigue. You said that you are like a poet and then citizens read your poetry and that there are so many tons, I think, in the society. I'd like to go to the second question. To this situation, Japanese pandemic measures are a big failure, debacle. The reason is that there was not good communication amongst the politicians, experts and bureaucrats. They move on their own interests. There was no coherence and unity, so this person says. So in order to prevent the recurrence of the situation, what can we do? Well, objectively speaking, Japan is doing pretty well on global standards. And I believe that's also because the citizens themselves understand the science behind proper mask use, proper ventilation, things like that, washing your hands with soap. And so always focus on the pedagogy, the educational part. If you feel that your government is not conveying the science in an easy to understand way, we'll do what the Taiwanese YouTubers do, hire professional comedians, make beautiful memes, funny memes, use cute mascots like cute dogs and cats, making sure that people understand the humor over rumors. Understood. So bureaucrats, I understand that you have a very nice meme as well, which attracts a lot of attention in Japan too. Now, the next question, next topic, that is digital technology, digital democracy. How are you going to use digital technology for democracy? So let's talk about digital democracy in Taiwan. In Japan, maybe this is not widely known, but in Taiwan, we Taiwan enjoying digital participation platforms are used to capture citizens' opinions and to formulate policies. So that attempt has been underway in Taiwan, I understand. So how are you going to bring the online generations onto policymaking arena and lawmaking arena? That is a big challenge for Japan as well. As you mentioned briefly earlier, up to now, you made a lot of experiments and attempts. So I would like to know the achievements so far. And also, what is your current project? What are you trying to implement now? Thank you. Thank you. Well, my first attempt in the V-Taiwan project was to make sure that people who propose the best ideas in a crowdsourced idea box is guaranteed to set agenda for face-to-face meetings with ministers and also other stakeholders. We tackled the UberX issue. We tackled crowdfunding, teleworking, and so on using these crowdsourced idea boxes. I'm really happy to see that the Japanese Digital Ministry are also setting up idea boxes and the people who make the best suggestions also get the ministerial visits. And I hope this multi-stakeholder forum that we've been prototyping can also learn from the Japanese experience now that your Digital Ministry is also focusing on this. When I become the Digital Minister two years after the sunflower movement and the beginning of V-Taiwan, we add to that by empowering the young people, people younger than 18 years old, to make sure not only can they participate in the petitions, but they also have full participation rights within their high schools or within their universities or to propose agendas that other adults missed. For example, they discovered that sufficient sleep is very important for learning efficacy. So they propose that we begin the school hours later and we had a really rich conversation or they propose that during the pandemic years people would like to develop psychological counseling over the internet. Again, this is a hot topic and the young people as digital natives lead the entire society in discussing it. So much so that every couple of years we choose about 25, 30 young people as the cabinet's reverse mentors. They mentor our ministers in the way of the digital and sustainability. So young people become mentors. So they are digital natives. So, and how are we going to maintain digital sustainability together with young people? That was quite impressive. On the other hand, in Japan, there are people who do not have access to digital technology like the elderly because Japan is quite advanced in terms of aging society. My mother too, she doesn't know how to use smartphones perfectly. So for those people, extreme opposite of digital natives, for those elderly and other people who have difficulty in accessing digital technology, how are you trying to pick up these people's voices in Taiwan? We have this idea of the young and senior collaboration. So we pair the senior people with the young people because both age groups have more time on their hands and also are more careful of designing long-term solutions instead of the working age people who sometime focus on this quarter or the next quarter. So both sides of the age demographics share the same long horizon sort of thinking. And so in addition to the companion workshops and so on, sometime we simply just bring to the senior people our latest innovations. For example, the contact tracing system is explicitly chosen to be SMS, not email or smartphone because many elderly people understood how to send a SMS. They look at the QR code even without understanding it. Still, there is a location code like a telephone number, 15 digits printed in the same poster. So they just text to 192 to that string of number and that's still finished the contact tracing. And once they learn about it, well, they can teach other people too. And many elderly people in Taiwan they use a smartphone like a feature phone and use only one app really line which is of course as a Japanese origin. So we also work with the company line to make sure in addition to use the QR code scanner to add a contact as your friend you can also use the same QR code scanner to send to scan the SMS and send it. So again, we thank Japanese support in making sure that our SMS based solution is very friendly to the senior people. And I will also add that at no time that we mandate you have to use SMS at any given time you can still use a ink seal with your name printed and stamped on the paper or write your contact on a paper that's always accepted but many senior people after they learn how a feature phone or the smartphone can use the checking system. They're very eager to use that also and teach other people. Wow. So the government can connect people cannot government can serve as a broker or go between among people I understand according to your conversation. Now, we talked about digital digitally disadvantaged people and how you consider those people in politics I think in the economic and the political scenes how are we going to take care of the vulnerable the disadvantaged people that is a big issue for the world as well. And last year American economist Glenn Weil who spoke in this world forum last year you are involved in radical exchange movement with him I understand the system the can be used for data economy and democracy as well and you are now trying to teach that to younger generation also you are interested in Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani's views and both of these people try to explore an alternative to the current model of capitalism be it Glenn Weil or Karatani and how can you use a blend digital technology for such an endeavor for such a purpose? I learned a lot from Karatani's philosophy of the exchange mode X which means simply to share without knowing who is that you are going to share with so sharing with strangers and asking for nothing in return if they reciprocate that's great but if they don't you still share and this is really quite radical and this is only possible because it applies to certain kinds of goods called a public good in the commerce where if you share more the valuable part of the good grows as you share it for example the more people speak a language well the richer the culture of that language gets the more that people contribute to contact tracing the more people the contact tracers can save so by contributing to a commerce you lose nothing but if on the other hand contributing data to the commerce makes you receive a lot of advertiser calls or that your privacy is compromised and people who do not usually learn about your whereabouts suddenly discover your whereabouts well even though you still contribute to public good it's at your own expense it's sacrificing things that you hold dear and in many designs of the economy it is the people who are well off who can pay for service that doesn't compromise privacy but people who are not economically well off or they are vulnerable like as being less digitally competent are sometimes just scammed or spawned into things that compromise their security and privacy which is why the idea of exchange mode X is so important because it means that when we design new public services we make it easy for people to contribute without sacrificing anything and only then can we truly build something that we share openly understood wow so regarding that point we have a question from a viewer actually I want to ask you the question so sharing and also how we are going to build consensus on that matter and I think we have a contentious issues surrounding us for example energy climate change global warming issue how are we building a consensus declining birth rate and refugees all these issues are contentious issues in our society however the citizens and the public what would be the effective means to build consensus can we use digital technology, digital system to build consensus in such a contentious issues how could we use them in that case how do these digital platforms fit in the existing system like representative democracy do you see any possibility of confrontation or conflicts between digital system and existing systems in our design starting from VTEL 1 to the join platform today we say that we're not representing anyone we're representing people themselves their individual ideas, opinions, feelings that is to say when anyone posts on polis on join other VTEL 1 like platforms they're not asking anyone else to as a delegate as a proxy rather what we are doing is making sure that there is a pro-social space where their feelings can resonate with one another without getting distracted into flame wars into hate speech into vengefulness into divisiveness and once this system is built in such a way that many different positions can converge into good enough consensus automatically then after three weeks or so we go back and check hey, here are the good enough consensus on the say UberX issue everybody agree insurance is important not undercutting existing meters is important taking care of local temple and church is important and so on and once these stakeholders see a reflection of the actual picture of democracy that most people agree with most of their neighbors and most of the things most of the time they changes how people think about democracy because previously democracy was conceived as a zero-sum game between political parties or candidates but this is entirely artificial it's shaped this way because we could only express a few bits of information every four years it's called voting but using digital democracy tools each and every one of us can express a far wider range of preferences and ideas literally every day and even people who don't have right to vote like the younger than 18 people I refer to well, they are now responsible for over a quarter of citizens' initiatives on the joint platform so you can have compatibility with the existing system right now, Japan is in the election mode once every four years we have the general election the last time the voter turnout was like 50-some percentage very low so we have a question from the audience what is the definition of democracy? in the case of Japan, voter turnout is very low and we can't say that the policy is decided by people's opinions that's not factual feeling people have a jettison people have abandoned the right to vote is it a part of democracy? that's a question so reading from your opinion, Tan-san democracy does not happen once every four years it happens every day, is it right? that is correct demos for the crowd kratos, the power so the power of the crowd the power of the people is a direct function of how much of the policies that affects each and every one of us can be shaped by those digital or face-to-face democratic places and I emphasize places because around the world there's many place-based experiments like participatory budgeting that are very successful and local scale town halls conversations on both the internet and face-to-face on the common issues affecting the community so this small community-oriented democracy is not some future science fiction it's something that the community builders already know very much and in Japan it powers many successful regional revitalization efforts by allowing democratic participation across generations on the economic prospect of a rural place, a town for example and so by making sure that people understand this is also democracy that democracy is seen not just as voting but as anything that can express the public preferences as social objects for people to discuss then it becomes very natural then to imagine democracy as a set of technologies that each and every one of us can use and the local budget the local regional revitalization plan and so on become like today's weather it becomes something that people can talk about all the time with digital technology you create places and digital technology helps the creation of places on the other hand we'd like to go to the next theme digital technology and AI so AI is something what is going to be the relationship with mankind that is a question that we'd like to ask you digital technology will create a place and on the other hand it can monitor it can issue instructions and orders some people have worries about that surveillance society with the AI now AI is not artificial intelligence you say assistive intelligence you are saying it's an intelligence assisting humans that's what you are saying so what is the difference where from where this difference comes well assistive intelligence is empower people and connects people as we are having this conversation we both have human assistance the interpreters professional interpreters helping us to communicate across very different languages but the assistants themselves the interpreter themselves are benefiting from assistive intelligence that empower this video conference we are benefiting from the noise cancellation I'm not wearing a earphone so the sound that you make in the speaker is automatically canceled when I send my sound over so we understand what each other is saying despite a loud speaker between us that's not possible without machine learning and assistive intelligence but this is not replacing any human there was no human beings job as a noise canceler it's simply unimaginable so by adding to the assistive chain of people and machines that help us to connect we ensure that the interpreters are empowered not replaced now I see but in China I heard that because of the face recognition and behavioral record and scoring system is being employed and the high level of surveillance society is in the making in China this uses digital technology now Tansan the AI used in this way is it going to authoritarian intelligence I think you are saying that the AI standing for authoritarian intelligence if technology is used in this way this is the quite opposite of assistive intelligence I suppose but the Chinese people are not necessarily opposed to this authoritarian intelligence it's not that the Chinese people are detesting such the happy surveillance society maybe Chinese people are accepting this society in this context authoritarian intelligence is it possible to prevent the expansion of AI in this way if it is possible what will be the means of preventing in order to bring the AI to assistive intelligence what can we do? well certainly what you are saying is that there are existing authoritarian regimes and within those regimes authoritarianism is the norm so building technologies to further this authoritarian norm feels almost natural especially for people who enjoy the authority in the authoritarianism setting this is of course true but this is not a new topic this has always been the same thing ever since democracy was practiced anywhere on earth people who develop on democracy develop this because we understand that only when there is a free range of various different ideas expressions, fashions, even cultures can we respond quickly to new and emergent phenomena in a way that is agile and in a society where the authoritarian regime knows best when they encounter something that is beyond their comprehension well there is no free journalism sector there is no whistleblowers there is no independently critical people who can't help figure out hey there is something new that is going on so I believe instead of positioning democracy as anti-authoritarianism we must just keep advancing democracy and then as new emergent phenomenon comes people who are kind of wondering whether their polity should go more authoritarian or more democratic will come to feel if they embrace the democracy especially digital democracy well then they don't have to make the compromise between privacy and freedom on one side and I don't know public health on the other in that context Tansan now about A.I. should be connected to digital democracy what should be the ways of using A.I. they are good what kind of image of a democratic society do you have of where the appropriate application is made by A.I. as I mentioned A.I. assistive intelligence connects and empowers people it's as simple as that whereas authoritarian intelligence concentrates power from people and it doesn't empower anyone rather it disempower everyone and aggregates the power into a engineering elite I guess in a authoritarian chambers of command and so I would say that even with the current digital democracy development it's not a solution to everything obviously but we are already seeing that with the open source open innovation communities even the places that were previously more authoritarian well I should know because when I was a child Taiwan was under the martial law even in the places like Taiwan when I was a child can see that obviously developing some digital democratic capabilities it's not just a good governance system it's also good for cultural expression and economic reasons now I see with digital technology there is a question from a mother who has a son began beginning to interest in digital technology junior high school kid digital is very convenient but what do you think of pitfalls and damages well she says that because of the pandemic her son is really at home and sometimes he is taken to computers and even his physical body is a nuisance to him physical things are so nuisance and it's very difficult for him to feel the joy of reality that's what this mother is worried about of course she's not negating the digital technology but she's worried about it so pitfalls and demerits of digital technology how would you respond to this question if someone is addicted to a computer function a feature of a computer then the computer is no longer a assistant right the computer becomes the boss and that person become a addicting slave to the boss is no longer a assistive relationship and so I would say just as with any addictive potentially addictive substance treated as a symptom not as a sickness itself the sickness may be that the person young or old addicted to technology actually crave for more meaningful relationships in which case spending more time with them probably help or if they're craving for acknowledgement for a sense of belonging and in which case connecting to a local purpose-based community will probably help but at no time say computers are bad or computer games are bad or things like that for they're just vehicles personally I'm very easily addicted to touch screen so I almost never touch a screen I always use a keyboard a stylus or things like that because with this intermediary I must have a intention before I interact with a screen but if I use a touch screen for a prolonged time then I confuse my brain confuse the touch screen with my finger with my body it become kind of part of my body and I develop the same kind of addiction that people develop to their body parts and that's not a healthy relationship which is why some sort of understanding and some sort of mitigation is always very important Understood I have the next question maybe it is related question that digitalization has to be promoted in a society with diversity otherwise digitalization can become a tool to manage and control people as you said so digital technology will become both you are both then if that's the case we have to avoid that then how could we respect diversity so maybe we can use digital technology to make people respect diversity so what kind of activities are required of people to move in that direction? I think diversity is just a beginning and inclusion is really what the pro-social digital spaces are for that is to say if a space is diverse in its members but a member rarely learn from each other then it may be diverse in a representational sense but it's not diverse in a re-presentational sense in the sense that the group doesn't present themselves as a trans-cultural polity so my suggestion is to invite people to step outside of their comfort zone a little bit and then facilitate and participate in the discussions and see their original culture from the angle of a culture that I feel strange to and this is trans-culturalism seeing our own upbringing but describing it with a different culture a different language a different lens I talk about the citizens' initiatives and when we heard cross-ministerial conversations from the people's ideas we made sure that the facilitators are public servants in an unrelated ministry so when we talk about tax filing reform the facilitator may be someone from the Ocean Affairs Council but when we're talking about the Ocean Affairs Reform maybe the finance ministry will facilitate the breakout discussions and the reason why is when the Ocean Affairs Council personnel hold the tax filing system conversation they take the position of the tax filer and when the finance participation officer hold an Ocean Affairs conversation will they take the position of an amateur feature or surfer so they are no longer identifying with any particular positions they are instead sharing their experiences serving in the public service so by building cross-functional teams both in the digital realm and in face-to-face settings we can move from an identity-based position to an experience-based common values and conversations so listening to your remarks so we have to design and create places for space that is extremely important so from this point onward I would like to ship the gear to focus on Japanese children and young people the Japanese children compared to children of other countries are often said to have lower self-esteem self-affirmation according to you I hope that we can find the clues that Japanese kids become more positive and confident about themselves so if you see children in Japan who are being bullied or who are bullying others or those who remain as silent bystanders what would you like to say to each of these types of children when you are a child I understand you are bullied as well you openly talk about your experience so could you give some message to those children? Yes, first to like yourself and then to unmute yourself to like yourself means that whatever reason that you were bullied from those are not the excuses for you to internalize those bullies negative feelings toward you rather, you can't see your unique experience as something that you can contribute because once you make this experience public that's when the community, the society can learn how to adapt so that this kind of negative behavior do not happen again or is at least lessened, reduced because people become aware of it so making yourself heard and muting yourself saves the next person that's probably going to be bullied exactly the way you were by making it a public issue, a social issue you are making unique contribution to the society that people without your experience cannot make and that's unique about your experience So by making it public they can make contribution to the society and they can be aware of the fact that they actually contribute to the society I have the next question at the age of 24 years you made public the fact that you are transgender in Japan too, there are many people who are struggling with gender identity what kind of advice would you like to give to those Japanese people who are struggling with gender identity now? Well, I'm post-identities I'm post-gender meaning that instead of saying I used to identify as this and now I identify as that I now say I had a puberty experience when I was 13 and I had another puberty experience when I was 24, 25 notice the difference if I say I identify with this and then that it's like I move from one city to another and in my mind it will be a binary difference like people used to be close to me are now away from me but when I say oh, I had this experience and then I had another experience it means that regardless of your puberty experience probably we have something in common that we can't talk about so it brings everyone closer instead of pushing half of the population away so the experience will build up you can build up your experience one after another so in such a sense education I think is very important so what is the ideal education so let's talk about that under the COVID-19 on the scene of Japanese schools digital equipments and digital technologies have been introduced more and more rapidly but on the other hand there was a case in which a device provided by school was used for bullying which resulted in a suicide of a kid that is very saddening and also some kids have become addicted to computers as was mentioned earlier also if we introduce digital textbooks digital learning materials there are education businesses who will be able to exclusively get information regarding the study history of children so there is a possibility or risk that such education business would get exclusive access to data so digital technology and equipments to be introduced in education scenes what do we have to be careful about what do we have to be aware of in introducing digital technologies in education in my job description I said when we see the virtual reality let's make it a shared reality and the difference is of course that the virtual reality narrows our possibilities until such a day that only oneself and no one else met us in a virtual reality but a shared reality is a persistent part of the world it combines part of the physical part of the cyber but always expanding in the horizon so you can spontaneously meet people who share your values your interest and so on it's an expanding reality rather than a narrowing one so when we're designing education oriented spaces we must always make sure that they are open in its possibilities limited only by the creativity of the children allowing free remixes of the work that they do instead of being made into just one single mode at the request of one single large company or large state as you just alluded to which is why we always prefer open source, open hardware in our educational facilities it should be open and shared that is why that everybody will be able to use them and share them so then in such a process teenagers young people are becoming more and more participating in digital spaces may there could be fake news how children can gain skills to distinguish fake news from genuine news what kind of teaching is necessary at home and in school what kind of guidance is needed this is again another question coming from a viewer many people have such a concern in Taiwan we don't use the F word we use this information which are intentional untruth that creates harm it's like spam but spreading at a viral speed of scam so like scamming, spam and the best way to God against that is to develop competence as journalists journalism is the art and science and practice to collaboratively discover what's really going on and contribute to a balanced understanding of the world as it changes instead of fixating on one stereo one bias and so on journalism is about the rigor of balancing different voices finding an interpreted frame that allows further investigation and reporting to happen so in Taiwan instead of media literacy we teach media competence literacy is to read and view the media competence is to be the media to create media and so fact-checking like during our presidential debate the three presidential candidates in their forums and speeches were being fact-checked in real time by many people including middle school students and students also participate in the counting process after the election and helping to upload the films that they filmed to make sure that the reported issues around the election talent process can very quickly let the clarification spread faster than the rumors and there's many cases where when people worry about air pollution for example the middle schoolers just measure the air quality themselves as part of their even primary school science curriculum and in all these examples people understand what's actually going on they have listened to the various different positions and formed their own ideas just like a journalist and once they do that they become vaccinated in their mind against the virus of the mind that is the disinformation crisis Well you stand on the side of information givers and then you are vaccinated regarding against the disinformation during the school classes do they do that or is it an extracurricular activities? How do they teach it? It is part of our it is part of our curriculum if you're interested there is the end learn portal for media learning portal that has curriculum material for basic education and also for lifelong education Well that is something that we would like to see the penetration in Japan that kind of learning in classes Now the last theme Well actually this was not included in the last theme but there were questions like this This is a question from a high school student this student is active active on environmental issues but no matter how much the student works so hard but he does not feel that he is a part of the power to move the country he or she so how can what can I do to make my country better so that was the question from a high school student can you respond to this question in order to have the actual feeling that you are really making the country what should he do or she do? The most important thing is to see yourself as just a vehicle of the ideas worth spreading if I learn of a new way of doing things to die and I shared to one or two people on average if I share to more than one people then that idea goes viral it has a basic reproduction rate of above one and if you can help improving its value even more making it even more viral by making it more funny by I don't know writing a poem about it making internet memes with cute animals or whatever and then those ideas were spreading it was spread further because of you so you don't have to do everything yourself all you need to ensure is that after practicing an idea whatever you have learned make it even more viral than the idea you originally received so you become a trigger yourself right? that's entirely correct and then the trigger will have a cascading effect and then you don't need to teach more than two or three people because each of these people will teach three or four or five more people well today thank you very much for your contribution you are minister in charge of digital affairs there are so many Japanese wanting you to become the Japanese minister in charge of digital affairs so to the Japanese viewers can you leave any message for the Japanese audience and viewers? well you already have a digital minister and I look forward to work closely with your newfound digital agency and also with the entire Japanese population and I look forward really to visit in person again thanks to your generous vaccine donation and until we meet face to face I wish you all live long and prosper well thank you very much Audrey Townsend thank you and dear viewers thank you very much for your participation so this was the ASAHI World Forum 2021 Taiwan Digital and Democracy Townsend and the viewers thank you very much