Our ministry is very new. We just founded last August. We’re rather like a startup here. So instead of a very long presentations, we just have very brief introductions, and then most of it will be discussions.

Yes, okay.

That’s wonderful.

Okay, great. So I’ll let my colleague introduce just a little bit of the organizational thoughts of the Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda), and then we can launch into any topic of discussion as you like. Please.

Good evening, Minister and Director General and our distinguished guests. On behalf of moda, I’d like to thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to be here. In the next few minutes, I will do a short briefing of moda.

The Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) is committed to serve as the motor for speeding up Taiwan’s digital development.

Our core principle “free the future” is on the screen. Minister Tang came up with this catchphrase. It means nothing is set in stone, and all possibilities can be realized with commitment, courage, self-belief, and vision. It is also our philosophy for all our policies.

The core mission of moda is to promote digital resilience for all. And this is our logo.

Ministry of 0101.

So to achieve the goal, resilience for all, moda is responsible for promoting Taiwan’s overall digital policy, innovation, and reform by consolidating the five major fields, telecommunication, information, cybersecurity, internet, and communication.

Indeed, moda was formed during the pandemic. During the pandemic, we worked very closely with the Department of Cybersecurity, of the electronic services, including data flow and all that, spectrum allocation, SMS, for contact tracing; as well as the part of Ministry of Economy Affairs that manufactured the masks, PPEs, and distributed them. And so those four teams, we work together closely. We publish a update every Thursday. And so we come to know each other very well.

After the pandemic, we immediately faced new geopolitical issues, like the war on Ukraine, and so on. So all this let us see that the transformative technologies cannot be dealt with simply by existing four ministers each taking care of one value. That doesn’t work anymore. We have to have an integrated circuit that takes care of the resilience as the core value.

The three ministerial values that we bring to the team from one of each minister into the new team are participation, democratic participation on top; and progress, like technological advances on the left; and safety on the right. And so we have two administrations, one for industrial development, digital industries. And we have the administration for cybersecurity, but they both report to me, which is for democratic participation. Because often, especially during the pandemic, democratic participation, human rights, and so on, are the first to be sacrificed in the name of progress or safety, which is why we arrange our structure this way.

In addition to existing departments of Digital Strategy, Communication and Resilience, Resource Management — like spectrum and number allocation — we also have all-new departments. For example, instead of department for international cooperation, we have department of democracy network, which means that we also focus on people-to-people ties. Because even within authoritarian regimes, there are also people who are organizing for journalism, for democracy, for accountability, anti-corruption, and things like that. We want to work with those people, too, even though they live in autocracies, and that is the mission of our Democracy Network department.

We also have the department of plural innovation, meaning that data-driven innovation needs to come from across sectors. Plurality means collaborative diversity. So people who initially are from different ideologies, sometimes the existing digital services often pull them into more polarized levels, into hate speeches and so on. But we want to work with the social sector to co-create data-driven AI systems, with the latest privacy-enhancing technologies, to make sure the bridge-making innovations, like community notes and so on, can thrive through data altruism organizations that fosters collaborative understanding and innovation. And so that’s Plural Innovation.

So I think these are the main ideas of increasing the overlap between participation, progress, and safety, instead of letting them being pulled apart by transformative technology, like “let’s ban all large GPU clusters” on one side, and “let’s just open everyone’s DNA data for AI training” on the other side. We want to ensure that there’s overlapping consensus. And finally, we have an institute, the National Institute of Cyber Security (NICS), it’s a non-departmental public body. And I’m also the chair.

NICS is the institute that works on AI evaluation, for example. Because it is non-departmental. It can work with other ministries very easily. So for example, the AI evaluation is done with ITRI, which is supervised by Economic Affairs. And when it comes to personal data, privacy-enhancing technology, of course they will work with the independent DPA that’s forming soon. So this institute is our main kind of arm’s length interface with other ministries. And we also work with existing public institutes like the III, TTC, and the TWNIC.

That’s the main organizational chart. And I promised to be brief, so I’ll stop here. Anything you would like to discuss?

First of all, let me thank you again for inviting us. It’s a big honor for me. Before coming over here, I read your resume or short bio, and I was very much impressed by the catchphrase that you brougt up with and I reconfirm my impression.

In this morning, I delivered my presentation to the forum, and your introduction of MODA is exactly in the same token that I delivered in this morning. So I think you are the pioneer in this field and on the same page with the OECD. You provided the core values of democracy. We should not forget about the promoting innovation itself. But also, we have to make sure such innovation should be secure with the open science, open innovation.

That’s what I read, and I’m really impressed by your leadership in doing so same as the OECD is doing. That’s my impression. Really impressed.

Really kind words, thank you.

Can I follow up?

Sure, sure.

Thank you very much, also, for receiving us. I think this is really impressive. And my interest is that, okay, this is really, you seem to have been trying to embed, really, the cross ministerial, cross dimensional things that are so difficult for, at least, where I come from, in Sweden, but also what I know from others. You know, to embed this, really, doing this analysis, and being able to deal with the challenges that come up when you–

“To overcome the transformative technology trilemma,” an idea we got from CIP.org.

Trilemma, or even more lemmas. Or how many can you have, really, in order to be able to see the multi-dimensional and deal with it.

So my question, maybe, would be then, okay, you have started this ministry, I think, if I understood correctly, very, rather recently.

Yes, last August.

And what was, really, the impetus? Why was it happening? Was it, and is it strongly embedded, sort of resilient over time, in the sort of institutional structure of the ministry, or the Taiwan institutional structure? So it would live on, even if, maybe, things may change, in terms of elections or something. So have you, really, already been able to embed it strongly?

Yeah, definitely. Since late 2014, I served in the cabinet, as a reverse mentor to the minister without portfolio in charge of legal affairs, Jaclyn Tsai. At the time, in 2014, the public trust in the administration was below 10%.

So when we talk about polarization, when we talk about political apathy, when we talk about hate speech, we had all that in 2014. So that was at the peak of the public distrust to the government. And so, I always stressed that I’m not working for the government, I’m working with the government. And I’m not working for the people, but rather with the people. I’m in a Lagrangian point between the government and movements on both sides.

In 2014, our main platform was that, whether it is from KMT or DPP or anyone else, we should just take all the sides, basically, and systemically, through real-time open data, through synthesis of what we call coherent blended volition, achieve for rough consensus. And rough consensus for people who work in the internet governance. This is basically our DNA, right? Instead of convincing everyone a perfect solution, we just settle on something we can all live with, and do some more prototypes so that people can see the results.

In 2014, I think the great thing is that the cabinet at the time decided to embrace open collaboration. And through transition in 2016, the outgoing premier was Simon Chang, who is independent, and the incoming premier, Lin Chuan, also independent. So they did something unheard of, which is a public checkpoint of the existing policy and so on. So I joined a little bit later, five months after the new cabinet, by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. But I still benefit from this public checkpoint, from public transcripts and things like that, so that I can pick up my work as a cabinet minister in 2016.

Even though the ministry is new, new as of last August, I’ve been a cabinet minister since 2016. Having a cabinet level digital affairs organization, although a little bit delayed by the pandemic, was the presidential platform for both the KMT VP Candidate Simon Chang, and Dr. Tsai Ing-wen for her second term.

And so, I think we are one of the very rare policymaking organizations, in that we’re explicitly, credibly neutral. I’m pan-partisan, I don’t work with any party. I work with all the parties simultaneously. And so all the four major parties in the parliament are for digital transformation and solving the trilemma in international collaboration. And nobody want to boycott us.

Fantastic, wow.

Wow.

It is really a big impression that you’re very much open-minded and you can do all these things. It’s really surprised me, impressed me.

Yeah. I think part of the reason is that we face the kind of challenge that is simply not imaginable in other polities, right? In terms of our identity, Taiwanese people pride ourselves in being the top in Asia for internet freedom, right? For freedom of expression, assembly, and so on.

But at the same time, we face this cyber attack that is also probably top in Asia. And so, this two combined together creates the political window for a credibly neutral, non-partisan cabinet. And I’m not the only exception. I think there’s more non-partisan independent ministers than minister of any party in our cabinet.

Personally, I think this is because we have learned to harness the energy from conflicts into innovations. We really need to take all the sides in order, like the top of Taiwan, the Yushan Mountain, kept growing because of the two tectonic plates keep bumping into one another. There’s a lot of earthquakes, right? Three felt earthquakes every day. And then the Yushan keeps growing.

I see, I see. This morning I deliver a presentation which is more focused on our plan for designing next year’s ministerial meeting, which is quite focused on transformative science, technology and innovation policy. And this page with the knowledge of governance things. There, for that, we selected three key pillars. One is engagement, another is action, the other one is value. So based on the right value, which is probably the democratic value is the foundation. So with that interlinked is sustainability and resilience and all such values within.

But most important part is engagement. In order to heading into these values, we need to engage more broader, more deeper. And all different dimensions, which is one, for example, one dimension might be partnership among different stakeholders. Another might be the whole of government stuff, which is all different policy domains should get together in order to address the same challenge. The other one is the vertical things, central and local government should align.

The last one might be the international role of the OECD and also engage with the world of societies and cities, that is our main focus. So from your presentation, I’m really sure that we should, I mean obviously we should come over here as well.

I’m happy to come over.

In fact, we hosted a session at the UN IGF in Kyoto, specifically about this topic, how to engage more broadly but also more deeply. Because it used to be a trade off. You can have a focus group of a few people or you run a Delphi process or whatever, which allows a lot of nuance. But it’s very difficult to do it with millions of people. Or you have polling or things like that, or online voting or whatever, but it doesn’t really give any nuance when you compress into executive summary. All nuance is lost to such broad listening. So in the UNIGF, which I joined as chair of the National Institute of Cyber Security, because this is non-departmental, so I had no problem getting a UN badge. So this is some political practicality.

Innovation, actually.

Right, exactly.

The idea, very simply put, is that we first do a very general listening. Like what are your thoughts on generative AI through basically polling, but polls are wiki surveys, so people write their own polls.

And then, through their online polling and voting, we use language models to automatically identify clusters of common concern. Then we synthesize such clusters into a language model. And then we can ask that language model what to do when new situations arise and so on. So this is like an executive summary that actually talks to you. And so this solves two problems. First, most of the people do not have a individual preference on such policy matters, but they do as a group.

The existing community organizers and so on feels that they are helped by this technology, not replaced by this technology. Even we can import a lot of existing videos, transcripts, and things like that. So it turns an individual voice, not aggregating, but blending it into community voice, is the first point.

And second, as a policy maker, I’m not faced with just a couple paragraphs, but rather something that I can run on my laptop and I can test new scenarios with. So it almost brings a community as a stakeholder literally on the table, because it can join the conversation and have a conversation. So this is one of my research interests in having this kind of plural co-creation when it comes to policy. We already use this to tune our AI in our science ministry. They have a Taiwan trustworthy add-on engine, and we took the collective input from Taipei City for them to tune constitutionally their AI model.

So whatever pre-trained material is, they learn this lens, like wearing an eyeglass, so that its perspective, its worldview, is aligned with this community. And we now work with OpenAI and Anthropic and other top labs in order to tune their AIs in a way that fits the community. So this allows for a scalable listening with nuance.

Another question connecting to Dr. Jang’s, I think, discussion here, where I’ve been really interested in working at an innovation agency, and then governance innovation. I think this is a governance innovation in your system, which I then, when I think about it, why wouldn’t it be possible, why would it be difficult to copy or sort of do this in another setting, another national setting like ours? And I feel it would be difficult.

So what is the secret, really, that you have done here? Okay, you started very early, but why aren’t our ministries able to, which I think they are not yet, to institutionalize a similar thing, a similar function? It’s very difficult. So where is the secret? So if a ministry or someone in a country like Sweden would like to learn, what would be the secret of that?

One additional question is, have you also a challenge, do you have a challenge with different layers or levels of governance here? I mean, a national, a municipal, a city. In our case, we usually have, which are important public data related municipalities. We also have quite strong regions, which are sort of in charge of both healthcare and transportation systems and those kinds of things. And then we have the national level, including in our case, we also have the EU level, who decides the things for them.

But anyway, so do you have any such challenge? What are the secrets? We need to do a similar thing. I think this kind of governance innovation would be extremely important. Also very challenging, difficult, because I think here sounds like it, but maybe that’s an over-interpretation that, okay, the political system seems to be very, very prone to doing these things right?

In 2014, the impetus was, as I mentioned, the legitimacy crisis of the administration. So almost always when a transformative technology comes, and it threatens administration legitimacy, there’s a window for innovation. And I think the secret sauce, so to speak, is that we as civic activists deliberately chose to align ourselves with the career of public service. We did not align with any political party. And that is crucial.

In many other jurisdictions, when a similar crisis came, the activists formed their own party. The pirates, or five-star movement, and many others. But in Taiwan, we didn’t form our own party, and we chose to align with the senior and middle-level career public service.

And the reason why is that the career of public service also don’t want to be mistrusted by the citizens. There is natural value alignment between us and the career of public service. On the other hand, exactly as you have observed, there’s tough protection if we align with any particular party. So once we align with any particular party, we lose the credible neutrality that enable this kind of collaborative diversity, almost like peacemaking or bridge-making stance.

So when I’m often asked 10 years ago whether I’m blue or whether I’m green, or things like that, I’m like, you know, I’m non-binary. I’m not just in gender non-binary. I’m non-binary in everything. And people gradually understood that this is actually a valid way to do politics through radical transparency and civic participation.

And so, after I joined the cabinet, I asked each ministry to send me a secondment. And they don’t have to work in my office. They can still work in their own ministry. But they have to shift their mindset to have engagement as their main job, right? So we have a system of engagement, or as we call it, participation officer network. And every month, they vote on what topic to have a deliberative conversation with the citizens. So that went on for six years.

Throughout those six years, people gradually understood, oh, it is actually possible to achieve interagency communication. And that also answers your local municipality questions. Because for the municipal people, what they don’t want is for one minister to tell them this and another minister to tell them that. And for them to do a system only to have it audited by the third cybersecurity minister, have it to be redone, right? So anything that converges the demands from the society into one coherent, what we call public code, is preferred by the municipalities.

So there are many municipalities in Taiwan that voluntarily donate the copyright of their software systems to us so that we can release them as no copyright reserve as public code. So instead of the civil society people that copy money in public code, pushing us to release, we actually have the career public service saying, oh no, let’s just relinquish the copyright. Because we also don’t want vendor lock-in. We don’t want the demands to be changed all the way. We also want the opposition party to be turned into co-creation party.

Because, if they have all the source code and all the real-time data, their criticism turns into co-creation, basically. So that took a long time. So to your question, I think first, horizontal leadership, almost like servant leadership, just focus on the bridging. And also a commitment to public code and open data and so on that will benefit the municipalities actually much more than the central governments. I hope that answers your question.

Perfect. Wow.

I think you are not just a minister.

What I’m thinking is that really, how can I say it, you are like a startup champion.

Exactly.

You are, actually, right? You were an entrepreneur.

Yes. I was a serial entrepreneur.

Could you remind me your title with the UN?

Sure. Do you mean this photo?

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. So I joined as part of the technical community.

Technical community.

As the chair of National Institute of Cyber Security.

Ah, I understand.

And along with me, other three advisors also. So this is because the UN system, when it comes to internet governance, make a distinction between government representative and technical community. If I select government representative, I’ll have to choose a member state to represent. If I choose technical community, I don’t.

I see. Well, I’m very much tentatively, don’t take it granted, but I’m thinking that next year, in April, we will have a ministerial meeting there, but in front of the ministerial meeting, we will have multi-stakeholder, high-level, policy dialogue. There, we are inviting many stakeholders, like university people, and private sector, international organizations, all such. So probably I’d like to recommend to our ministerial group, to recommend them to host you.

As chair of the institute.

Yeah. Then will you–

Of course. I’m coming. Where do I sign?

So I will strongly recommend that you have the spirit, the body, if they agree, if there’s no problem, then probably we’ll provide–

There’s no problem at all. I mean, in the UN IGF, two of our institute representatives stayed a whole week, and the PRC delegation of 60 people, they totally were okay with it. As for me, I think this is also more flexible, because this allows me to talk about cross-ministerial things, not just a ministry.

As I mentioned, the NICS works with ITRI, with the economic ministry and so on, because the economic affairs ministry also works with our institute, right? So I can talk with other ministries’ policies, introducing this all-of-government work as well. Whereas as a minister, then I’ll have to represent my ministry.

I see.

That’s great. An innovation in itself.

But I have the impression that probably your character and your leadership make it possible, such a cross-

Absolutely.

Coordination. It’s not usual, but it’s very, very rare. Especially in bureaucracy.

I would subscribe to that, fully. The same.

They are all building up their walls between the ministries, and they don’t talk each other, and even in a cross-ministerial board, they fight each other. It’s a very usual picture. But in this case, your leadership might be–

But just adding to that, I think that’s also power game.

That’s right.

I mean, you have your power here, this ministry. So, it seems that you released, or you relaxed that power game somehow, because a shift of interest to what we are going to not be hated by the public, or more than that.

Exactly, yes.

But still, these power games are really strong.

It is, absolutely.

So it is, but telling the secrets would be really valuable.

And a good logo works, because in our cabinet, there are 31 ministries, and all the other 30, including the new logo of the economic affairs, are uppercase, only the moda is lowercase.

So, moda in Taiwanese Taigi, also in Nihongo, means “motor”. So, we always say we’re just a moda. We’re the motor for the other uppercase ministries.

It’s a good way of nudging the system.

Since you mentioned that, I have a similar story, which is that in Korean history of the Ministry of Science and Technology, it started with the administration, rather than the ministry. It was created in 1966, and probably the first agency focusing on science and technology, so. But it started as an Administration rather tha as the Ministry.

And its mission was to support all other ministries. And at that time, and since then, probably up to 1990, it works, I think. It works very well, very well, in terms of the supporting all other ministries toward a better country. And making one consensus toward to the national development.

In your case, I think that your character and your leadership make it possible to such a cross-ministerial practice, to lower your voices.

Exactly. Now, for example, we just convinced our public budget office that, for example, we have a, say, 10 million US dollars public infrastructure project dedicated just to have the issuing cash, stimulus, or anything out to citizens in a secure way. Or we have another very similar public infrastructure of similar amounts to keep backups in multiple clouds.

For these projects, 90% or more of the such infrastructure budget, we submit a proposal, but it’s executed and the budget goes to other ministries. So in a sense, we’re just a compiler of the shared needs of each and every ministry. And then we keep only very small amount, like 2% on design and public engagement and so on. But everything else is for the budget for other ministry. And so for those other ministries, these are extra budgets because they couldn’t get digital public infrastructure money.

And so, the more they give us their shared demands, basically, the more they get in yearly budget. And so even though our actual budget is the 14th among all 14 ministries, so not counting the councils and commissions, so we’re the smallest, but actually when we grow, every other 13 grows. So this is a way that we avoid all those fighting because the more you support them on that, the more budget you get, basically.

I would like to just ask, you mentioned motor, but it seems that you’re also a design architect for the solutions, bringing them together. Is that so?

Yes.

So actually the 2% are about motoring and design.

Exactly.

Okay, so they can then benefit from system design that they get.

Yes, we have very strong deliberation and service design background. So the more we work with those ministries, the more popular they get, basically. They can be more on the spot, in the here and now, they behave with regards of the public needs and so on. So “moda” also means fashion in some European languages.

May I ask a couple of questions?

Sure.

One is that, well, it is definitely, we need to have a broader engagement with the society, especially the citizens. But one of the concerns most of the policymakers view is that it takes time. It takes more resources. And the reality is that we’re moving very fast and we cannot follow that and costly.

Very much so.

In that terms, how do you think, I mean, well, you know, most probably we have things that, you know, this costly is a very minor component to and benefits that we can get. But in reality and practice, I think it is really hard to make our policymakers understand that is one.

The other one is political obstacles, which is that, as you already addressed, but probably appointing like you as a minister is based on greater leadership of your national presidents. You know, he or she bears that appointing such a character here is politically very much in a difficult. But he do it, it is incredible. So in that terms, probably, you may have some words, right?

Yes. Both very good questions. The first question, when it comes to public engagement, the main challenge was that the bandwidth that decision makers can receive real time input is very limited, actually, the executive summaries, right?

So there’s a diminishing return, even if we all agree that it’s better to listen to two million people compared to 2000, we can’t actually digest two million people’s voices, which means that the majority of those two million people will feel disempowered, actually. They gave us all the suggestions, but we don’t have the bandwidth to digest it, which is why most policy makers kept to the Dunbar’s number, around 150 trusted experts, or MPs, as the voice of the people.

So the kind of language model work that I just showed you, or the community notes by Twitter, now X.com, or Polis, or many others, Talk to the City, and so on, all these are newer technologies that you can think of as compression that is not as lossy as before. It’s compression that preserve the nuance. So if two million people, 20 million people join, it adds nuance to the fabric of the synthetic consensus.

During the pandemic, anyone in Taiwan can call a toll-free number, 1922, to say anything they want about the pandemic. Most just ask questions, but a lot actually have actual policy feedback. And there’s this huge call center work that aggregates, blends the common ideas, and so on, into daily 2 p.m. press conferences, which is live-streamed, and any journalist can ask anything. And that went on for three years.

And so, that’s one of the key of the Taiwanese counter-pandemic work, is just to let everybody become epidemiologists, basically, by asking freely any questions, and get an answer, and suggest innovative, like new contact tracing methods, and so on. All this came from the civil society. And so the civil society gradually associates themselves into what you call a social sector.

So, instead of public sector, private sector, and civil society, they now become social sector that has agency and can produce the civic technologies that empower the public themselves. So this is to your question. I think scalable listening with nuance only works if you empower a strong social sector that has real agency and is equipped with kind of tool that increase the bandwidth of democracy.

There’s a reason that politically-skilled NGOs or groups have very strong voices. Then it might be a big danger.

Yeah, exactly. Which is why this kind of bridge-making mechanism is so important, because it allows them to think of conflict as energy source, like conflict transformation.

Throughout the life cycle of all the participation officer network, we handled more than 130 collaborative meetings across stakeholders, and zero of which ended in violence. A lot of them are with very strong NGOs, like from, for marriage equality and many other very contentious issues. So after six years, people now have the confidence that conflict always comes together and co-creates something innovative. So conflict transformation now become a regular practice that the career public service is comfortable with.

Although, of course, still, it’s not very comfortable. By definition, it pushes you out of the comfort zone, but it never ends with violence. So that, I think, calms everyone down when it comes to engaging with NGOs and so on.

And to your second question about how exactly does someone like me have become trusted by the cabinet, I think the system instilled by the cabinet in 2014, called reverse mentor, played a big part. At the time, they decided that each of the cabinet ministers and ministers without portfolio, the at-large ministers, need to work with one or two people younger than 35 as their mentors.

Reverse mentor means that they’re actually much younger than the cabinet ministers. So those reverse mentors can see what the minister sees. This reverse mentor can propose new ideas. They’re a consultative role, so they’re not exactly MPs, but they are kind of shadows to their minister. So I was the reverse mentor for Minister Jaclyn Tsai.

It took two years for me to be generally trusted by the senior career public service. And after I become the minister in 2016, we elevated that system to a cabinet level Youth Advisory Council. So now we have like 30 or so reverse mentors as a institution, chaired by the premier, and co-chaired, I think, by Minister Lin Wan-yi now, basically they work with all 14 or so ministries, each nominating one or two young people under 35.

I’m no longer younger than 35, so I’m no longer a young reverse mentor, but I used to be one. And this allows these people to be trusted by the senior public service for two years during their term, and many of them then take leadership roles in higher positions.

Could I follow up? I have two questions related maybe. And the first one is, it seems obvious to me that the impact you make with this sort of function to the system and to the different politics is huge. But to what extent is the narrative of how this impact is generated, and through this function, carried by these different stakeholders from the ministers?

So first, how embedded is the narrative? Okay, everyone knows, everyone sees that, okay, this is to present, and we avoid doing mistakes that are much more expensive to us if we have this functionality. So to what extent is that narrative already embedded?

And the other question is maybe very much more difficult to talk about openly, but anyway, where are the main challenges going forward in order to sort of preserve and develop further this functionality? I guess there are some issues.

Yes, cyberattacks. I can talk about it.

So yeah, to your first question, it is very well known that I’m credibly neutral, nonpartisan, and so on. I think it is by now, after a year, well known that moda is not here to fight other ministries for budget. So these two, like defensive postures, we have achieved. What we are now working on is this new idea of software and data infrastructure as public infrastructure. This has not been public knowledge or common knowledge yet, because first, we’ve just entered a budget cycle. We still have to defend that public infrastructure budget.

And second, this is quite alien to the software integrators of Taiwan, and I believe to any private sector getting government money, right? When the EU agreed to evaluate a certain percent of public procurement that goes to free software, open source, and so on, they couldn’t exactly set a timeline for full adoption, because many, as I see this as in competition with proprietary software development, and not to mention proprietary data hoarding and things like that. So I think the great motivation that we have is not a economic one, but rather a cybersecurity one, because we have the public infrastructure that are literally battle-tested, and we can prove it is much safer if you just use this components, instead of going to your local SI and develop your brittle system that’s the cyber attack from the red team, with very easily find vulnerabilities, right?

So we didn’t make an economic argument, like this saves money, or this is better human right, or more participatory, we simply said this is more secure. So which is why having this triangle design is so good, because we don’t have to make an economic argument when we can make the safety one, right? So this is how we overcome the initial challenge of resistance of the private sector vendors against public code or open source in general.

Because we relinquish even the right to attribution, they can still sell it to other customers, saying it’s their product. Because they don’t have to say, “Copyright © by Ministry of Digital Affairs.” So by giving up everything, we gain everything: The goodwill of the private sector, so this is the first one.

As for challenges, we’re now facing a situation where the information integrity online is severely challenged by generative AI. So everyone can con everyone, can scam everyone. It used to be if you want to con someone who speaks Hakka or Taiwanese, then you have to be in that culture in order to do financial scam or spear phishing or whatever attacks.

But now, with the new open AI, Whisper V3 language model, anyone across the world can mount such attacks semi-automatically. And so we’re now facing real challenges to the democratic institutions, because it’s now very easy to astroturf, to pretend that there is grassroots support on something, even though there’s no grassroots support for that thing.

Last August, when our ministry first started, when we put our website online, which by the way, is the same hour as missiles flew over our heads.

But in addition to those missiles, we also saw signboards outside of rail stations and convenience store act replaced with hateful messages. And when the journalists want to check the ministry’s website for clarification for what’s going on, they found that those websites doesn’t work because it’s DDoSed.

The denial of service attack we faced that day was 23 times greater than the previous peak. So there were like unbounded resources just threw at us just to keep our website malfunctioning for a couple hours. And that’s enough for them to mount the information interference attack that says the rail station have been taken over or whatever. So we mitigated that quickly. The stock market didn’t comment, it grew that day.

But then we learned that the propaganda arm, the information manipulation arm, interference arm, cyber attack arm, and so on, used to be not coordinated. But now, after last August, we now know they’re very coordinated now, which is why we have the Institute of Cyber Security set up earlier this year. It is just to coordinate all the defense functions because we cannot afford to be silent when the attackers are so coordinated.

So that’s obviously our number one threat to our democracy is this intentional cyber attack, hybrid attack, including information interference attack, leveraging generative AI, that decimates our trust in democratic institutions.

I see. Thank you.

I was just wondering your comments that, since you mentioned the reverse mentors…

It’s a good idea.

Well, it’s for democracy, and a smart government, I should say.

Here, just I mentioned the minister meeting in the OECD with the dialogue forum, the post-dialogue, there we invited, well, definitely, one of the factors that we’ve had is Youthwise. OECD has a Youthwise program, which is selecting 10 or 20 young scientists or engineers who should be, get to know, more familiar with the policy makers, and probably they all participate there. Probably they should learn from you a lot.

They could have a youth network, right? Our cabinet-level youth network already connects existing networks with the municipal youth reverse mentors. So having them connect with the international ones is a natural extension.

I see. So do you know of any other country that uses reverse mentorship for the ministers? Or is it entirely–

There are several municipalities in Japan that told me that they learned that idea from us.

They learned from you.

And also, they send reverse fellows, so career public servants, but send them to the NGOs, to the social sector, so that they can learn civic technology and so on. I think Code for Japan is working with municipalities in doing that.

The Tokyo municipality also adapted our idea of a Presidential Hackathon in which the local teams, the main prize is not money, but rather a promise for their idea to become national level. The digital agency, when it’s being formed, professor Jun Murai-san, who advises the inaugural digital ministry agency of Japan, we had monthly talks about such ideas.

So I also learned from them, like they have this idea of デジ道, the way of digital, of leaving no one behind, of being pluralist, institutional pluralism. And I learned from that. So these two characters, 數位, in Mandarin, also means, in addition to digital, it also means plural. So I’m also the plural minister. And that’s an idea that we share with the Japanese digital agency.

But it is a Taiwanese innovation from the beginning, the reverse mentorship, is it?

Yeah, and it was out of necessity, in 2014, because the young people don’t believe in the administration.

Well, necessity is necessity. It doesn’t always mean that they become…

…the mother of inventions?

Yeah, the mother, yeah. But you maybe need the father, too, I guess. ‘Cause it doesn’t seem to be happening anyway, because I think many governments have this challenge, not so much trust. But still, it’s not coming up with such a radical idea, I think, and it’s an excellent one.

Yeah, it’s true.

Well, we were invited to be here, but I learned from you a lot. And I see you have very young staffs. So maybe we have to pay something.

Not at all. I’m happy to share any time.

Thank you so much for visiting us. Thank you.