Yeah. The city council people in Madrid, Barcelona, and also Paris City. There is a team in New York recently, Ontario recently, that’s pretty much it. The Singapore people also, we have some conversation, the GDS from Singapore, and also Etalab.
People faces many of the same challenges as we do, and I was, before joined the cabinet, in 6 of the 12 months, I was in Paris. I was literally based in Paris, discussing this with the city government, and so we still have a strong connection with them.
Of course. Just drop me a line.
We got more requests when it appear on things like the "MIT Technology Review."
Not the usual government channels, but the tech channels and the AI channels.
That’s a great question. I’ll have to clarify a little bit of our methodology. Our methodology is designed with the balance between security and privacy at one hand, and openness. We’re not sacrificing one for the other.
For example, the virtual workplace that we use, Sandstorm, it’s entirely free software. It’s open source, but then it’s also got professional cyber security audit, and we actually hired as our cyber security department the elite teams, the one who placed the second in the Capture the Flag of Defcon to attack the system and try to find its vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
Because it’s a open source it’s not the simple reverse engineering. They went line by line to look at the loopholes.
Once we have this secure underpinning, then we open this innovation for any public servant to write their own software to run on this secure sandbox system. They would write a system to let people order lunchbox together. People in our office us it every week to order lunch together.
It’s a simple JavaScript application. The person who wrote this doesn’t even have to care about cyber security because it’s running under a sandbox that’s already hardened.
This a layered approach that we’re using. A lot of innovation, transparency, openness on the upper layer, but with utmost importance on cyber security and the guarantee of secure communication on the lower level.
Also, as to your second part of your question, many people in this kind of internal meetings, they will be reluctant if I just set up a 360 live streaming that I post to everybody, to everywhere in the world. It’s forceful. It’s violent.
If it’s made into a transcription by AI, and then everybody get to correct, because AI still makes mistakes, together for 10 days, and then we publish it. We listen to each other again during the editing process.
We also can edit away the parts that we think are mistakes or are better not published. We do get people who get paragraphs and paragraphs out of their transcript after a meeting, which is fine. Then we publish the part that people think are good for the people to see.
This also protects the privacy of the public service, because the public service sometimes, after 10 days, decide maybe it’s not a good idea at all, so let’s forget we even had this discussion. The fact that we had this discussion is still important, but maybe not some utterances between the meetings.
There is still a compromise in order to get the public service to get into the habit of radical transparency.
It’s good.
There’s some talks and some materials. I’ll send them to you.
I’m very happy for the introduction from Ray Chen.
If you are OK with it, we will post this chat transcript for you to edit, and then we’ll publish this online for other interested stakeholders to see, if it’s OK with you.
That’s great. The basic structure, the GSG structure, as well as Japan’s National Advisory Board draft, we have read the materials and we’re pretty interested. This a extension with the G8 network, as far as I understand.
That’s great. We get to join the GSG as a country?
If this is truly multi stakeholder, then of course everybody chooses their own names, but if this multilateral, then as far as I understand there’s some concerns about One China Policy. You’re not restricted by the One China Policy?
So if we were interested in joining the executive board, then we get to join it with one representative from each market? That’s the idea?
What’s GSG’s relationship with AVPN? Are you alliances or partners?
That’s great. In Taiwan impact investing is what people very much care for, but because of regulatory and legislative lagging behind it’s not growing as fast as other Asian countries. Now we’re just cleared the most important, the Company Act. It’s not blocking the impact investing anymore, then we’re adding to it a impact investing friendly SME related law, as well as other laws in that ballpark.
Now we have the regulatory vehicles. Now what we need is the know how of how to operate those vehicles from our international counterparts. We’re naturally very much interested. We’re also having an Asia Pacific forum about social enterprises, including investment, next May. In May 5th and May the 6th.
I would also very much welcome the AVPN people, as well as GSG people to join us in the dialogue. We will have people from Hong Kong, from Korea, and maybe from Mainland, also, in order to shape the impact investing here.
Also, because what we saw in New Zealand, we think we must carry that conversation further. We chat with the SEWF, and they’re OK with us hosting a SEWF like event, maybe in partnership with them, next May.
I did get on a webinar along with Professor Fang. I’m very much looking forward to participating, either as a robot or in the flesh.
If it’s during the Parliamentary inquiry period it’s very difficult for me to travel in the flesh, but I look forward to participating either from afar, as a robot, or in the flesh, if it’s not the Parliamentary inquiry period.
Definitely.
That sounds like a plan. If you need any additional material, or that we’re forming a NAB, we will need a similar draft document. Of course, I’m sure Ray would help, and help us preparing for the bid. What’s most important is that everybody else in Taiwan must feel that they are also included in this dialogue. No decision about us without us.
We have a lot of interest about potential collaboration on this regard, so we will publish this transcript. By the time that you talk with the GSG further on the agenda, we will also have the people who will look at the transcript and say that they’re also interested in this conversation.
We’ll have a more truly multi stakeholder conversation, so it’s not just something that the government’s interested, but also something that the civil society and the private sector will want to participate.
Let’s both do the paperwork, then. Looking forward for the next coordination message from you. If you don’t have my email, Ray can give it to you. Feel free to include me in the further communications.
No problem at all. No problem at all. Thank you so much.
Try to be here at May. We are going to have a fabulous summit then.
Cheers.
Yes. Please do. I am Audrey, just call me Audrey. Should we just briefly introduce ourselves, and if there anything I can help with, or I can answer, feel free to ask.
Yeah, of course, please do.
A brief introduction of my role. I’m called digital minister without portfolio, meaning that there is no digital ministry.
I’m the digital minister, but I work with all the different ministries. There is 32 -- recently 31, but very soon 32 -- of ministries here in Taiwan. The idea is very simple, because we see the digital development as an issue that requires...Here, this is the architecture. The plan that we have is called DIGI⁺ 2025.
The parts that the government can do is, of course, providing a stable infrastructure. Our current president ran with a platform of broadband Internet as human right, which is actually easier to achieve here in Taiwan because of the topology to the geographic connectivity.
We’re now down to the last three or four percent of population who doesn’t have broadband Internet access. We allocated a special budget to make that happen. About three years from now we aim to have 100 percent Internet accessibility for everybody, basically. That’s the "D"evelopment in DIGI of infrastructure part that will benefit everybody.
We’re also looking to modernize our own governmental methods to be, instead of discuss a bunch of people every four years, and give power to those people for four years, we aim to have a reasonable discussion on any and all policy issues.
We have one of the most advanced e-petition systems, where literally every other week we talk about any issue that was surfaced by more than 5,000 people. They may be a redesign of the tax filing system. They may be about fishing and marine park management.
They may be about local issue. They may be about national issue, like Uber. It doesn’t really matter. As long as 5,000 people want to talk about it, we talk about in a cross-ministerial way. That’s the governance part.
Also, because our legal system is similar to the German law system, it is a more fixed code system, so we’re now also trying to make room in our law for sandboxing.
One of the ideas is the FinTech sand box, where any blockchain or other inventors can say, "OK, we’re going to set up an operation that doesn’t quite look like a bank and doesn’t quite look like any other existing financial instrument."
