I’ve visited many, many times over the years. The first time I came here was 2004, so I’ve been coming pretty much yearly if not many times a year. Because we’ve had 16 cities that we’ve worked with over the years in Taiwan.

Yeah.

So, it’s pretty significant.

Great.

Great. I’ll introduce you to some of our colleagues if you have a moment.

Of course.

Yeah. So, Suvi Linden is from Finland, and she was, as you are….

…works with my counterpart.

Yeah. And she’s now in Oulu, Finland, but was minister at the time in Helsinki.

Matt Owen is executive director of the Intelligent Community Forum. Formerly from the United States, but now lives in the Netherlands. And his wife is expecting. So, he may have to dart out of here any minute, right?

Wow. Congrats.

My son is with me, but he had to go back to the hotel for a moment. Then he’ll be back momentarily.

Okay. Great.

So, thank you very much for inviting us. We would love to talk a little bit about our programs, and we’d love to hear from you about your vision and the programs that you’re working on with some of your colleagues.

Mm-hmm. Great. So, have you already introduced yourself already or maybe we do a very quick-rounded self-introduction?

Yes, please.

Okay, I’m Betty Hu. I’m the Deputy Director General of Administration for Digital Industries. We support all industries to do their digital transformation.

So, sometimes when they make some problem, maybe the cyberattack, or they are not familiar with the new technology, they will come and we’ll help them to do the transformation. And we have some project to support AI teams or the software teams.

And also, we support lots of SME through the SaaS solution. Then they can easily purchase online and then help them to reduce the cost and improve their business.

Yeah. Just today, the administration began the process to become the competent authority for large online advertisement platforms such as Google, Facebook, and TikTok. Simple stuff.

Yeah. It’s a really tough job. We’re going to try to do it.

Thank you.

I’m Astor Chuang. I’m the Assistant Director of Emerging and Cross-Domain Division. Not “emergency”, it’s “emerging”. Responsible for cybersecurity and smart city and science project of the data altruism. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Luo-Ning. Rolling, like rolling stones.

I’m working in the Emerging and Cross-Domain Division. Right now, I’m in charge of local connection projects such as smart cities and system integration exports. Nice to meet you.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jason. Jason sounds like my Chinese name.

And I work at the same division together and I am responsible for the Taiwan smart city project.

Okay, great. Yeah, the smart city budget was part of the science and technology budget, but starting this year, we’ve changed our, like, public digital infrastructure as a new pocket, right? And so, just like building bridges and highways and so on, building the digital twins of the cities and counties or building the data fabric for data altruism organizations and so on. It used to belong in the science and technology budget, which is both, you know, more competitive and also less public code, less reusable.

But starting this year, we’ve been adopting the public code infrastructure which actually comes from the Netherlands and now we are working with the National Development Council, so that all the common requirements from the local municipalities - they don’t need to do this competitive bidding anymore. We will just gather the requirements and then we will do a public infrastructure project for them and subject to the same thing as highways and airports and so on which is much more internationally interoperable.

This is the main development since the previous year.

Budgets are always a challenge but very important, because you can have all the vision that you want but you have to have the ability to execute and you have the commitment by government to see it through.

We’re seeing that in several countries where you know the smart city ideas are actually being executed. I mean look at what’s going on in the United States. For many years people have expected these things, but it wasn’t until Covid that people realized how important it was.

But one thing, years ago, I read an article about this lady here, Suvi Linden - about the human rights of people to have access to the internet. And it was Suvi whose organization put that forward. And that was very important for me to understand how important the internet was not just as a physical requirement for communications but how people ‘s lives and their whole well-being was important about it.

And so, we advocated it but it wasn’t until Covid that people started to realize exactly what people like Suvi was talking about.

Yeah, just like having no tap water if you don’t have problem during the Covid.

Yeah. So, we are constantly traveling and learning about what countries are doing and this is one of our few opportunities to meet someone like yourself and your division to talk about the importance of a government-level to the individual in a municipality, because most of the time we’re connecting ICF to the municipality.

What’s your vision for how you’re going to communicate and make lives better at the local level?

Yeah, that’s a great question. As the cabinet CIO, it’s not just our ministry, but all the ministries that have a component of digital transformation that we consider as infrastructure worthy and therefore, provided to municipalities.

I’ll use one quick example. Previously, when each municipality want to issue like stimulus coupons or cash handouts or reimbursements and so on to people, they usually do it their own way, which means the richer cities like Taipei do it in a way that’s accessible and inclusive and so on, but the counties less so. But because they were using this competitive budget, there is zero incentive for the system integrators to share that infrastructure with other people.

Now, last year, because TSMC and friends paid too much tax, right, than we expected the legislature passed an act that says, you know, now there’s a free cash handout. Each and every individual of Taiwan, 23 million people is going to receive around 200 US dollars just because they’re Taiwanese. And for the first time, we repurposed the infrastructure we used during the pandemic for this kind of economic boosting infrastructure and therefore, all the different components, including getting cash from ATM or getting your wire transfer automatically wired in or post office face-to-face verification, the related personal verification and nowadays FidO compliance verification and so on - we’re all part of this component.

Now, because this is done in a public infrastructure budget, it means that all the municipalities, starting from this year, when they want to do anything that resembles cash handouts or anything like that, they don’t have to build this accessibility, resilience and cybersecurity from scratch. Instead, we provide as public code to them. So, we’re not saying “powered by moda” or anything like that. It is just provided so that they can customize on top of which that they will add their own city logos or whatever, but a fundamental underlying resilient infrastructure remain the same.

Now, it is not just handing out to citizens. There’s another public infrastructure that ADI is doing that aims to simplify reimbursement processes for social welfare organizations or, for example, the long-term health care organizations and so on. It used to be that they require different invoice formats, different proof of work format for each municipality. And each municipality has their own system. And so, in some of the NGOs, they would have to allocate a team just to satisfy three or more different municipal requirements. I mean, they all have systems. It’s not like they’re not digital or smart, but they’re all smart in different ways.

And again, using this idea of public infrastructure, we work with the most advanced cities such as Taipei City and say every other city need to interoperate, at least to this level, so that the other cities and counties no longer need to do their own infrastructure level procurement and then can piggyback starting from end of this year to hand out such reimbursement, including using digital signatures and proof of work and so on in a way that is universally interoperable.

So, these are just two very quick examples involving reimbursement, but there are many more involving data infrastructure and so on. So, my vision is for anything that concerns two or more municipalities to be done in the public infrastructure way, but we don’t control how it’s used. Rather, it’s shared as public code so that they can build upon it.

Right. You already have a fairly sophisticated infrastructure. So, now you’re building much more sophisticated elements on top of that.

Exactly, exactly. It’s like how Ukraine open sourced their DIA app so that like any super app, anyone who wants to build add-ins or modules on top of it can build on a shared open infrastructure instead of being vendor locked to a single assistant integrator.

So, what’s happening with issues around privacy? Do you have a design for… with privacy in mind program or…?

Definitely. We were just at the all hands meeting of the cabinet level privacy meeting. So. we are going to have an independent data protection authority GDPR style later this year. We now have a working office to where it’s not reporting to the ministry, because just like the GDPR, it’s its own independent DPA. But we work very closely with them.

And key to today’s meeting actually is this idea of privacy enhancing technologies or PETs. The idea is to… Because we already have a new Personal Data Protection Act in effect now that massively increase the penalty for privacy, personal data breaches and things like that. So, the ecosystem is now looking to invest in privacy enhancing technologies, so they don’t even have private data stored in them. They can use either in a way that is like multi-party encryption or homomorphic encryption, so that they can do the data processing without touching the raw data. Or they can use one-shot tokenization so that by the time the transaction is over, they don’t even have any meaningful personal data with them anymore as with e-merchants and so on.

So, there’s this whole division within not just ADI but within moda that works on these Privacy Enhancing Technologies guidelines. And the main work that ADI has been doing is just to let the industry know it’s not actually as expensive as you think to invest in such technologies and to drive the cost down, because our work is to establish the bottom basic line of compliance. And once the entire industry knows, okay, now the social and market expectation is for e-merchants to no longer leak your mobile phone number to your delivery, downstream Then, everyone who doesn’t do that will be socially boycotted. There will be a social sanction

So, that is the main work that ADI is doing. And moda proper is doing the technical and the guidelines on the PETs.

Wow, that sounds very interesting. And what about cyber security? How are you dealing with that?

Yeah. I have another hat as the chair of the National Cyber Security Institute. Yeah. We have two administrations under moda So, one is the digital industries, but the other is cyber security.

And the main work that we’ve been doing on cyber security is to adopt this zero-trust network infrastructure. The idea is to go shifting from passwords into something that is just biometrics and device authentication and behavioral detection in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy. So, for example, when I sign on official documents, it’s my phone verifying my fingerprint, not a state system.

But there is another system, CrowdStrike, verifying the integrity of my device. And yet another system, Cloudflare, that verifies the integrity of the CrowdStrike connection. And we never go to a system integrator for all three layers or rather to any two adjacent layers, because that will – the next thing we know, it will be a vendor lock-in. It will be proprietary protocols and so on. So, we insist on open and interoperable protocols on each, like, juncture between the two system parameters.

To this end, all Class A authorities that handle the nation’s personal data have already switched to this kind of zero-trust system, especially for biometric identification. By the end of the year, I think we will spread this ZTA infrastructure not just to class A for competent authorities but also for highly regulated industries such as finance and medical and so on.

So, I think this is the first step we need to make. The next step is just to make these affordable and make sure that non-publicly listed companies like small and medium enterprises actually see the advantage of adopting this because nobody wants to remember passwords anymore.

Yeah, I was going to ask about the affordability of that because some of the – I mean, it’s great to have protection. But some of these companies, they’re pretty small.

Exactly.

And they’re not being threatened. And sometimes it’s easier just to say forget it.

Yeah, and I’ll just pay your ransomware…

I’ll just let you take my stuff…

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so, for example, the zero-trust FidO implementation, of course, there are vendors in the market. But for Taiwan, our Ministry of Interior provides this TW FidO, the national implementation that includes digital signature and verification. So basically, it’s the same as what other countries use plastic eID cards do, in the form of an app, but this app is free of charge and it’s a public key infrastructure. Those reference implementations are public code, that’s to say, open source so people can modify it as they want.

So, the idea is that when we have this public infrastructure provided at no cost, the SMEs don’t have to pay an initial investment. Of course, if they want to get better and better, they will have to like invest but the baseline would cost nothing.

That’s very interesting. And Matt, Suvi, do you have some specific questions?

And this is my son, Michael. He had to rush back to do something but um, thank you for doing that. Suvi?

Yeah. First of all, it’s a big honor to meet you and I have also been in Taipei before, almost 20 years ago. And it’s interesting to see the development. It was very advanced that time with the technology, but now when I listened to you, it’s just amazing what you are doing here.

I always saw my role as an enabler the government role is to make the environment that kind that for example, smart cities can do their things and there is no regulation being obstacle for that or…

So, of course, every country is different and it would be interesting to hear in Finland, we have a big social and health reform going on and we have a minister who is responsible for legislation and somehow tutoring or controlling the local regions. But still, the regions have the responsibility and now we are… first of all, the interoperability. What you were mentioning between the regions that’s a big challenge. Because it used to be that the regions had their independence and they could decide what kind of system and whatever so there were no interoperability. And nowadays, there is a low but still it costs a lot of money because they have to redo a lot of things.

But the bigger issue is that we have just launched a couple years ago the so-called National Health Record where when I go to a doctor, whether I go in my hometown or in Helsinki or wherever, my data has to be there. And then, of course, the doctors can see wherever, but also that I can see. Because it used to be when I went to doctor, and the doctor made the diagnosis and the patient didn’t have the right kind of idea of that you didn’t get any documents out of that.

But now, everything is on the same file or database and it makes more secure healthcare, because the previous what you have had the appointments with the doctors and the doctors see and especially those who go off and have a lot of medication. Then, this way, you can prevent doing wrong things.

So, do you have this kind of national… And how do you actually… For the people, how do they access it? Do you have their identifications so they can have access to their data?

Yes, yes. So, the universal healthcare express app is an app. It is actually the main app we use during the pandemic for rationing out masks, for registering for vaccines, you name it, contact tracing. And that builds upon the 2002 reform that we had for an IC card based universal healthcare that covers also residents, not just citizens. And because the universal healthcare is so comprehensive, there’s no opt out really.

Our constitutional court actually made a ruling a couple years ago that, you know, it requires a special law that allows people to opt out of research. Because of the universality since 2002, it’s very, very like a treasure trove for scientific explorations and things like that. And just, I think next year we will start to have the opt out from it. So, this is how universal it actually is.

And so, yeah, so even before the pandemic, people already use the app. Like I can use it to check my dentistry visits, my prescriptions for traditional medicines as well. And like everything on the same app. And using this MyData regime, we’re applying the same idea to all the other stuff that the government keeps about this person.

So, part of the data fabric is actually to make sure that if any record changes by a person, like a name change or an ID change or whatever, in one of the registries, like the household registry, we want to make sure that everybody, including insurance companies and everyone, gets a real time notification. Something that the so-called X-Roll system is known to be doing like just modify once and be known everywhere, but currently the MyData regime already applies to individual pockets. It’s just the synchronization itself still require an opt-in authorization by the person who will make the change. But otherwise, I think everything else is automated.

That’s very good and very interesting. What about the… What’s the… It’s been some years since I was the minister, but still, the big data is very… It’s a big pressure for companies and of course for public service as a base for services.

But we had the problem that all the ministries, they used to get money by selling some of the data from businesses. And then, when we started this open data program that we wanted to have more viability, more possibilities for businesses doing new kind of innovations based on the data, of course, data privacy there, but still.

And so, it was a hassle because the ministries felt that they are losing money and how do I… It would be a budget deficit. And so, but nowadays the situation is better.

But how do you have this kind of cross border cooperation? And do you have open data administration and is the data available for businesses? Like if I get an idea that for my new kind of innovation business idea, I can somehow reach out for the data that’s needed when it’s not personal or private…

Yeah, we have a comprehensive open data platform since 2014 and we shifted this idea of real time open data by demand. So, open API to respond to anyone’s inquiry starting 2016.

And starting 2018, we have this presidential hackathon, a hackathon annually on the president’s level, so that anyone who require government data in order to do something that advance the SDGs, because that’s also the year that SDGs went popular, the award to five champion teams every year is not money. There’s no money, but rather a trophy that contains a projector. When you turn on the projector it projects the president herself handing the trophy to the team. So, it’s a very meta trophy.

And with it, the presidential promise that whatever they demonstrated to work in their city or municipality will be made into national level infrastructure the next fiscal year. Because this is the true reward for the open data innovators in that their demand will be sustained by societal level infrastructure, the community will keep using and reusing these data in the downstream, and anything that is only a municipality depends on the will of the mayor, of course.

But if the President already promises that, no matter it’s the civil IoT data on air and water quality, whether it is the data to enable a remote diagnosis, exactly the point you mentioned, that doctors from remote can get the medical records with the consent of the person and so on.

If we promise it will be national infrastructure, it means that it solves this bootstrapping problem, these super-modular goods, can achieve critical mass without private investment. So, the idea of the private sector investment is only on top of the network effect. There’s no need for the personal investment from angel investors or impact investors to bootstrap a municipality idea to a presidential, nationwide idea. So, that is the main activity we’ve been doing since 2018.

In the past couple of years, with the public infrastructure, we’ve now taken the champion presidential hackathon ideas and simply turned those into public infrastructure budget and proposals, so it solves another problem, which is when a ministry want to engage in data, altruism data for public good, they initially lose some money exactly as you said. Because, for example, the weather bureau can sell this high precision data for money, but if they offered the same as real time open API, their accounts won’t look very good, right?

However, in doing so, we collaborate with the Ministry of Finance, as our law states that if we can prove a high social return on investment, instead of just a financial return on investment, we can then justify not charging the people for it, because the social return on investment will be higher than whatever money we get from the private sector.

But this requires a ministry to actually do this calculation. So, a lot of the work that ADI is doing is be a pilot in calculating those as ROI, so that other ministries like the weather bureau can try the same. And with that, as justification to get public infrastructure running without the need for them to continue selling the data.

It’s amazing what you’re doing. Just one more thing before I… You were already discussing about cybersecurity and we know that in the business level and administrative level, it’s a big threat and challenge. But in Finland, we have had already over 10 years this kind of awareness day, because we got a study showing that actually, end users are the biggest threat. Because when I buy a computer, if I don’t have any protection, I’m a big threat if I have a virus, and I put it on an open network…

And so, for example, we have had some kind of… it’s not a regulation, it’s just agreement that all those who import computers that they install security program and it’s free for the consumer for six months or something like that. And once a year, every year at the same time, we have an awareness day when we are talking about the cybersecurity issues from the consumer’s point of view, and not the businesses.

Because in a way, I think that’s something that you cannot regulate people to do. Of course, you can but then it’s a challenge but to create awareness that how important it is for me when I’m part of the digital society that the devices I used are protected. And quite often people don’t think about it, but now we have the issue that there are these importers, they have agreed that they will install the antivirus, so then you have to pay after six months. But then, you’re already kind of… You are used to have this kind of protection and it’s easier to get the people to pay.

But it would be interesting to hear that what kind of ideas you have on the on the citizen level of the security issues.

Yeah. This is such a great question, and in fact, is the number one frequently asked question for the ADI. Like what have you done to protect people against fraud? Things like that. We’ve been getting nonstop for the past year on that. And exactly as you said, while it is technically possible to regulate individual behavior, the people don’t seem to like that. So, there are limited things that we can do in an enforcement level.

So, for example, one example, we’re now just now sending an amendment for the Digital Signature Act to the parliament. And along with the ADI becoming competent authorities for Facebook and Google and other advertisement companies, we’re going to say to post an advertisement, the KYC process, which previously only require you to take a photo of your passport, which is easily doctored now with AI and generative AI, we are switching it so that it requires essentially a notarized digital signature, like the high-level EU digital signature.

And this is because we’ve seen many phishing and scam and so on attacks that begin with the advertisement. That is precision targeted to the vulnerable populations that will likely believe this stuff. And they always redirect them to a personal like WhatsApp for us is lying conversation, a personal end to end encrypted conversation, which we have no visibility about.

So, instead of controlling on the end-to-end encrypted channels, we need to get the upstream to adopt a real KYC infrastructure. But even for the end-to-end encryption, currently, our Ministry of Interior is essentially subsidizing people to install a app. It’s from Gogolook, called Whoscall. And as part of the Gogolook offering is this idea of message checker, so that instead of wiretapping into encryption, which is a big no no here, anytime your phone pushes a notification, that message checker checks that.

So, it doesn’t matter whether you use Instagram or LINE or WhatsApp. Any notification is scanned against this database. And if it contains a weird looking URL, if you click into the URL and you see a carbon copy of a famous e-merchant, but it’s actually fake. We now have an AI system that scans for these tens of thousands of times every day, so that even when the domain name is registered outside of Taiwan, we can work with the ISP so that when you click on that link, it goes to a Minister of Interior Police Force page that says this is a scam, it’s already been blocked. But of course, if you change your DNS to an external DNS, you can still see it. So, it’s not really blocking it, but it is reducing harm for it.

So, three prongs, right? One, very strong digital signature enacted by law. Working with the private sector to subsidize message checkers and Whoscall and Trend Micro Antivirus. And finally, use this active proactive AI scanning, so that even when the advertisers are not taking down it yet, the URL it goes to is already blocked.

I would expect, too, that the people who are more likely to fall for that scam are probably less likely to be changing to an external DNS.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so it protects them by default.

And I came up with a related question. You brought up those more marginalized populations. And this also came to my mind when you were talking about the health app. How are you getting these more marginalized people?

And I mean that in ways of people who might be older populations who might be less ready to adopt a tech, or people in more remote areas, or people who maybe just aren’t economically able to keep up with devices. How are you getting them to adopt?

Remote areas, not a problem, because we have universal access. And part of it is that we have a lot of people who are still able to use it, and we’re able to get them to use that. So, I think the number of people who are already using it is really good. And I think that’s a good thing.

And also, in terms of our spectrum allocation plan, actually already includes universal service. So even for 5G now, in terms of population covered, I think it’s well over 95% now. So, some of the more niche vendors serve the municipalities. So, for them, I think the 5G is at 70% or something. But at Chunghwa Telecom, I think it’s more than 95% now, so like only the most remote are waiting for the end of the year where we will have OneWeb, you know non-geostationary satellite but most of the places are already covered.

And with that, we’ve seen that internet usage doesn’t differ significantly rural to urban. I think the significant cutoff is around 75 years old or something. So, after that, it’s a drop because of eyesight or other issues, cognition and so on. But I think up until like 70 years old, there’s no significant drop in internet usage. Actually, they use it more because they use video conference all day long. They don’t have to go to work or things like that. So, they’re extremely active and bandwidth using.

And coupling that with the 4G unlimited rate plan offered by pretty much all telecoms for just like 16 euros per month unlimited data. It means that all… but the most impoverished people can afford unlimited data. And we’re working on that. We now have a draft plan. Hopefully by next year, we can cover, I think, the 10 US dollars per month basic unlimited data plan for 4G, even for the poorest populations.

I have a very interesting story about hacking. You know, when you think of hackers, you think of someone without any morals, no civic responsibility whatsoever.

However, in Toronto, where we’re from, there was a cyber-attack on our sick kid’s hospital. And they locked them out of all this very important information that could actually cost children their lives because they couldn’t access anyone. They were blackmailing them for millions of dollars.

However, the guy in charge, they didn’t realize who they had hacked. And the guy in charge of this hack realized that it was a kid’s hospital. And they said they were sorry and immediately released the data back to them at zero cost.

And, you know, it just goes to show you that, you know, these are not just guys in a basement somewhere working, you know, with no conscience whatsoever. I mean, these hackers can be like companies almost. And they themselves did not want the bad publicity that went with attacking a children’s hospital.

Another funny story is, I actually worked for a real estate brokerage. And they were blackmailing us. They had taken some of the data. And they thought that they had all of our important information like addresses, SIM numbers, and things like that. And they were blackmailing them for, I think it was like a million dollars or something like that. And our main broker said, well, what did they actually get? Like, actually look at what they hacked.

They hacked our printer codes. So, he sent a message back saying, it’s okay. Keep the printer codes and he released all of the printers to print for free. So, now I can print whatever I’d like for free. And that was the cost of this hack.

Okay. That’s a very interesting story. It is true that, like for ransomware attacks, which you mentioned, they always need to be very precise and actually deliver on their words. Because otherwise, nobody will pay the ransom anymore after that. So, in a sense, they do have a reputation to hold.

Yeah, and the moral…

And the moral aspect.

You know, you think about a hacker as someone who has no morals. Here they are. They hacked. They could have withheld this data. They were actually trying to get the money together to pay these guys. And then they sent a message saying, “We’re sorry. Here’s your data back.”

Yeah. So, maybe we’ll look back to today and say, back in the good old days of 2024, it was still human doing those ransomware attacks and they have morals.

But in a couple of years, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s all robots.

…If it goes to the top, it’s always a man controlling the machine, right?

Well, I wish I share that optimism.

One of the things that I think is important for us to impart with you, and of course, Matt will join me in this, is that we tell stories around the world about municipalities. But it’s really about the people. So, whether it’s a municipality or it’s a country, it’s really about the people who we are telling the story about and what they are doing with the technology, good or bad or so forth.

What we’d like to do, and we’ve been here since 2004. 16 cities have made it. 4 of them were recognized as the top cities in the world. Taichung and New Taipei City, Taipei and Taoyuan. And of course, we’re taking their stories and telling the world about it. One of the benefits, of course, is the reputation, the brand of Taiwan, Taiwanese companies, but also, opportunities for business. And more direct investment, partnerships, all those things. And so, when we travel the world, often a Taiwanese story becomes part of that.

And so, what we would like to do is engage even more. Now, we haven’t done that at the central government level or the federal government level here in Taiwan. And this is really our first opportunity to have this conversation. It would be great to do more. Not just about the awards and so forth, we have so many other things that we could be doing, not just with each municipality, but explore different ways in which we can cooperate on a global basis.

For instance, one of the things that we’ve recently accomplished is to create intelligence states. So, in Ohio, we’ve created an Intelligent Ohio, not just a municipality opportunity, but a statewide. There’s an opportunity to explore how to promote and develop Intelligent Taiwan as an example or a best practice model for the world.

So, these are the kinds of ideas we’d like to explore more of and happy to work with you and your representatives in making those things happen.

Yeah, definitely. As I mentioned, prior to this year, there’s no idea of national public infrastructure around data or around software or around public code. Like this whole thing just sprung into existence.

So, we will continue to have very interesting story to tell on how central government actually play a service leadership role to the municipalities, which is unlike most other jurisdictions, right? So, this new model, I think, is very much worth talking about.

We have a number of ideas that we can explore. I’m happy to go into any depth, but in general, it sounds like you’re amenable to that approach.

Definitely, definitely. And there’s also, like attracting foreign talent, there are policies that are not municipal level that only the national government could provide.

One example is the digital field for Gold Card. Gold Card is this three-year residency card with universal healthcare for you and your family. And for, especially for digital nomads, if you stay here for less than half a year each year, there’s no tax requirements and so on. So, it’s proven to be quite popular to especially open-source developers, because we say you don’t need eight years of work records, you don’t need a diploma, and you don’t need salary proof. You could look back at your contributions on GitHub, Ethereum, Wikipedia, or similar platforms, and as long as one can prove they’ve been contributing to the internet commons for eight or more years, they’re eligible for our residency.

And so, this is quite good for like people in Argentina who have worked on Ethereum and other blockchain, not to make a lot of money but just to keep their money, right? And so on, and for these innovators, they often don’t have other proof of credentials, but their contributions are on the blockchain, and to date, we’ve approved hundreds of Gold Card holders this way, so that they can become also-Taiwanese. They can actually choose to naturalize after a few years without giving up their own passport, so this story is also something that ADI is now telling with the talent office of Taiwan to the world.

So, I think there’s already plenty of documentaries or materials or things like that that you can also help to look at and maybe translate, so that it speaks more to your target audience.

Yeah, we have already worked with your team on some podcasts and some other kinds of promotional activities. And, of course, we do videos and promote through conferences and what not, but there are many other areas to explore. You know, promoting the work that you do on a n international level by underwriting possibly books that can be put through high-level channels like Cambridge Scholars and those kind of… done by a third party, because I think you need that separation…

Academic rigor.

Yeah, and having people from different parts of the world come and evaluating the cities but also the country at large, you know. Those are very important points of view that can be put out there by third parties, again. And that’s one of the things that we are capable of doing, so we’ll explore more with you.

Now, we’re working obviously with your team from ITRI and from ICF Taiwan, but if there are others that you would like us to work with as well, we can do that.

Definitely. I mean the international track for presidential hackathon, which I just mentioned, this year has the topic of “Digital and Green: Next-Generation Public Infrastructure”. I think this is one of the main things that we offer external teams to join, not just as competitors, but also as jury, right? And they can look at the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that Taiwan can build to share with others or import part of the, you know, European stack or the India stack or whatever stack into our DPI.

Betty here used to be in charge for the International Presidential Hackathon, but not anymore, right? It’s now the Department for Democracy Network. Yeah, but I think Betty still retains most of the connections. Yeah, so this is another track that we can fruitfully collaborate on.

We’d love to do that.

Can I use this opportunity to invite you to Finland? Greetings from our minister, Mrs. Lulu Ranne, who is now in the government taking care of the digital issues.

And in Finland, we have the biggest startup event in Europe called Slush, which is in November. And it’s super big nowadays. It started by the University of Technology in Espoo. There are students started, but now it’s already that over a thousand investors are coming all over the world and there are like 10,000. Altogether, the event is very big, but they say the Slush is the name because it’s in November and then the snow is wet and it’s slushy, it’s dark.

But I was in Armenia a year ago and they had a hackathon event there and they were giving us a first prize, a ticket to come to see the startup event. I know that minister is very busy, but it would be great if you had a possibility to visit Finland and especially look into how they have created this startup event, which has grown the biggest in Europe.

And actually, they have been able to get our investors from… When they, these students, when they started it, they took like a private plane and brought from Silicon Valley investors to Helsinki and now it’s really established and big and those young kids who have been running it, actually they have been part of the unicorns and everything. So, it has been a great, great learning environment for this because it’s run by the students and voluntary people. So, it’s a great event and that might be something to look into.

But anyway, welcome to Finland. It’s in November.

I think last time I was in Helsinki was also around that time. It was almost 20 years ago. I was in Tallinn and then to Helsinki.

But they say that it’s the vibes. You can check online what they are offering, but it’s a great experience. And, of course, to see, Finland is a front runner in technology in many ways, but I think that we have a lot to learn from you. But maybe there are some things that you can look into.

Yeah, I was at an event for the Finnish Innovative Innovation Forum. And I was there, and I was there for the innovation national fund. The Sitra, was that the name?

Yeah, Sitra.

Yeah, Sitra invited me to talk about how to use like deliberative polls to listen to all the population and so on. But I had to attend as a video conference because of travel arrangements, especially during parliamentary sessions. So, for November, I think I can evaluate around May because from now to May, we’re in the so-called caretaker cabinets. And so, we’re taking care of the cabinets at the moment.

But after May 20, then I will be much more clear on my travel schedules. And so, if an invitation around then comes, then I will be able to evaluate around early May.

Okay. Then I’ll need to know and you will get the invitation.

Great. Thank you.

Another opportunity in November is Matt and his team are working on a program that ICF will be doing in Barcelona for the Intelligent Community of the Year program. So, if you’re traveling or willing to make the trip, we might invite you to come to Barcelona at that time.

Great. Okay, that would be excellent. So, I will just look at all of these connecting flights in May and see how we do.

Lovely. Thank you.

Anything from Tim and Betty? Okay, great!

Thank you for visiting us.

Well, thank you for taking the time. This was great, and we appreciate your team inviting us to come and meet with you.

Excellent! So, I reckon we have some gifts for you.

We have some as well.

Okay, maybe we do our photo opportunity outside because there’s a cute moda logo. And you can put your stuff here.

Okay.