You can see that I’m wearing a headphone. I’m only recording what I speak, and when you say anything there is no recording. I’m recording one-sidedly.

You’re in the Internet Hall of Fame. You’re famous, too. [laughs]

I’m still using “vi”, so yeah. [laughs]

Excellent. What is your budget cycle? If you pass a law that institutes a new agency, but it operates in September, doesn’t it mean that its budget needs to come from elsewhere in the government?

Oh, really? Budget first and then agency next. That’s OK.

Oh, very nice. Very good strategy.

Yeah, I read a figure, but I didn’t realize that it’s already active now. Excellent. Good work.

Yeah, the Starlink.

Yes.

It connects people, but not beings. [laughs]

Yes.

Of course. Typhoon, too. Tsunami.

Our telecom towers need to operate even when electricity grid is cut.

Yes, exactly.

Reverse charge. Yes.

Yes, definitely.

Yes, of course. I’ve been to Okinawa too, [laughs] like a lot of Taiwanese people.

Yeah. It’s common in Taiwan. We have that all the time.

The same in Taipei. I’ve lost my wallet like three times over the past 30 years, and every time it’s returned to me. [laughs]

OK. We’ve also been working for the next four years strategy of Taiwan’s DIGI+ strategy. We just finalized ours. We’re very happy to see we have the same values.

Our is called D-I-G-I, DIGI⁺, which covers the digitization, which is same as your idea of no one left behind, and innovation, which I’ll talk later, governance, which is more like the ethical part and then the inclusion, which is the accessibility part. Digital, innovation, governance, and inclusion, D-I-G-I – that’s our four pillars.

If we compare the two, there is one very large difference according to what you just said. You said ethical use of technology, but we say the digital competence for ethical innovation, and this is a little bit different. One is the consumer side, and one is the prosumer side, but otherwise, it’s the same.

Yes, in Taiwan too. I am in Kaohsiung right now. All the six municipality are self-governing, but the central government take care of the more rural places that are not municipalities.

Dark silos, like dark fiber but for silos. [laughs]

That’s actually my specialty. [laughs] Today, I am in Kaohsiung. I am going to join the Kaohsiung city mayor, previously the Vice Premier, the second in the cabinet, who worked with me on the COVID issues has been elected the mayor of Kaohsiung. Chen Chi-mai invited me to be here, with the slogan, “Smart City, Smarter Citizens.” [laughs]

Smart Citizens is a very wide concept. Also, your institution is based on that idea of connecting citizens. My 15-minutes talk today talks exactly about how to solve this problem, but I can, of course, do a quick preview if you have 10 minutes of my talk.

OK. I’m sorry it’s in kanji, though not in Nihongo. [laughs]

This part is very common, actually, in both sides, so I hope that this will work. I’m going to share screen. Let me see if the screen can be shared. Let’s see. This should work for some value of work. Here. Do you see it?

OK, all right. This is the case called data democracy in acute care. Data democracy means that all stakeholders have a governing interest can co-create the rules where data is used. The acute care part refers to a gas explosion in Kaohsiung many years ago. It killed and hurt, wounded a lot of people, but at a time the ICU in a different domain was not connected.

The EMT part doesn’t talk to the ambulance. The ambulance doesn’t know which hospital to go to. Everybody’s calling everybody, and this is very chaotic. This team, very professional, very good, but there is no cross-domain feedback.

Because of that, they, after the gas explosion, mapped out all the potential stakeholders. This is what they call the data heroes. They work with something like your high school students, I suppose, but they’re more like graduate-level students to find out the stakeholders there.

Then, they mapped out the injury side, the major trauma side, the EMT side, and all these different sides. They entered this very interesting mechanism called the Presidential Hackathon. In Presidential Hackathon, what we do is that we made sure that every year, the President, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen hands out five trophies to cross-sectoral teams.

Actually, each person here represent a different stakeholder, but they all received this trophy. This trophy is the shape of Taiwan with a micro projector here.

The micro project, if you turn it on, it shows this picture and with Dr. Tsai Ing-wen promising the team that whatever they did in three months, we will allocate, from the central government, the budget, the personnel, the law and regulation to make it happen next year.

There’s no money in this hackathon, but there is a presidential promise that we will do whatever it takes to make it real. That’s all I need to say because everything else you probably already know, after the Presidential Hackathon, we work with professional facilitators.

We map out the stakeholders. We did rough consensus workshops. Of course, introduced the EDXL – HAVE 2.0, TEP – Open APIs making sure that, for example, the proof of concept can find accessible interruptible unit deliveries.

This basically is talking about a very simple thing like the barcode, that can just connect the emergency medical service to the hospital EHR, which then enable the dashboards that enabled the immediate triage even on the ambulance, and things like that.

What I’m trying to say is that the national government doesn’t need to override the municipal government because this is after all a proposal by two governments, one municipal Kaohsiung, and one county Pingtung which is near to Kaohsiung. They have all the expertise, anyway.

What the central government is doing is essentially just making the XML like EDXL and CAP and FAIR and FHIR protocols standard, and then finding the stakeholders and the political will to make it happen. This is very brief, but you do get the idea.

That’s the three-months incubation program, essentially. Every year, we receive like last year – well, this year, anyway – we receive more than 200 applications.

Each one needs to be associated with one or more SDGs, that’s the global goals. Out of the 169 SDG targets, each target will have many different proposals. That’s the first part because the common purpose is already defined by the global goals framework.

The United Nations in 2015.

Yeah, right. [laughs]

My role is basically making sure that the…You can call it infrastructure politics. People who work with Internet governance are, in a sense, politicians, but they…We are politicians only insofar as we can find rough consensus, so that people understand this is of common benefit to all stakeholders because we don’t have a Navy or Army. We can’t force people to do things.

My team are professional facilitators. The teams that run professional facilitation for working groups – professional editors, court reporters, like IETF multistakeholder forums, with real-time summaries and transcripts, things like that.

Because of that, any local team that enlist our support from the central governments, every year we choose through a new voting system called quadratic voting or QV, which makes sure that people vote, not strategical but truthfully.

Anyway, using the QV, we select 24 teams this year out of the 240 or something and give them this kind of design incubation for three months, so that they can form Data Coalition’s and the best five gets the presidential promise to make it reality.

That’s the same assumption as place-making. If you want to make place-making work in a region, I think the Japanese regional revitalization usually work with a local college to build the capacity for the local people to propose their place-making plans.

Also, setting the national agenda, because they then basically give a free pass to the presidential office access. Whatever their idea is, it’s as same as if the president has it as a campaign promise.

It’s very radical, but it’s very effective. We’ve been running it for three years now.

I read that someone who have successfully organized this kind of activities, of course, without presidential access but otherwise the same, [Japanese] , is now part of your government as well, of course, for Japan.

Yeah. [Japanese] who build the Tokyo Metropolitan COVID dashboard, I think he is now deputy or associate as CTO or something.

Yes, so he knows how to run this kind of stuff.

I’m supported by very senior teams, too. If it’s me calling people to action, the younger people respond, but if the more senior people call to action, the more senior people respond. It all depends on what kind of population you want to respond to your empowerment and call to action.

Of course. If you want to do this monthly, we can just set up a monthly call schedule or something.

Of course.

Yeah, I think so.

Yes, because they need the approval. Yes.

Yes.

You can teach people to play quantum chess. There’s a video with Steven Hawking playing with the actor from “Ant-Man” about quantum chess. It’s very easy to understand. [laughs]

You’re having a digital day every October 10?

Oh, so possibly 10/10?

10/10. That’s great because that’s our national day. The national day here is October 10. [laughs]

That makes us a digital nation, I guess. [laughs]

Yeah. I’m interested. We also get a lot of request from the industry, that basically says if they want to transmit multiple terabytes of information through the public Internet, it’s very difficult.

This usage case, which is very, very high throughput but not so demanding on the latency, versus if we are talking about empowering rural people, then for tele-education and just for this kind of call, what we need is super low latency but not necessarily very high throughput. Putting these two both on the international scale, on the same Internet framework is going to be a challenge.

Ah, OK.

Oh, good.

Do you know Kenny Huang of TWNIC?

Of course, Kuo-Wei Wu, you probably already know. Kenny Huang, Yuh-Jye Lee, and Ching-Teng Hsiao who built the first search engine company in Taiwan, are currently all working on this, what we call the advanced Internet infrastructure project, which sounds very familiar to what you were just talking.

Maybe their team and your working-level team can have another biweekly or monthly call.

I just pasted to you a link to Nicole Chan’s profile; we intersected shortly in the cabinet for a couple of years, but she, after leaving the cabinet, became a Number Resource Organization member council in APNIC for a one-year term.

She is strongly connected to the TWNIC community that I just mentioned to you and the Digital Transformation Association Taiwan, people that works on the civic part of the strategizing of digital transformation. This is a very valuable connection to have, because she already have served one year, so she knows the ethnic culture.

Ah, good.

OK.

You’re selling your IPv4 allocations, that’s the idea?

Yes.

This is very, very creative. This is excellent. [laughs]

43/9, yes.

I’m also part of the board of RadicalxChange, which is funded by Vitalik Buterin, my fellow board member. Vitalik, of course, created Ethereum. He is also upgrading Ethereum to 2.0. In this process, the upgrade is funded partly by him himself selling the Ethereum 1.0 tokens that he has. [laughs] This reminds me of what Vitalik is doing.

Good. If we need more frequent meetings, probably working-level will be better. We also need to get more people in anyway if we want to talk about specific topics. In the strategy level, I’m really happy to talk every month.

OK. Excellent. Thank you.

OK.

It was great. Live long and prosper.

Bye.