Thank you all for your time. Live long and prosper!

As a practitioner of Taoist thoughts, I would like to leave you with one core message: To give no trust is to get no trust. Democracies need to move from vertical control to horizontal co‑creation, strengthening civic care.

We are optimistic. The same broad‑listening infrastructure scales. The key is to start with an urgent, shared topic and pre‑commit to feasible outcomes.

Urgency helps. A decade ago former President Ma Ying-jeou’s approval was 9 percent; any process that delivered more trust was worth trying. If you are already at 70 percent , you maintain systems but hesitate to renovate. I am discussing these methods this month at the Victoria Forum with Canadian ...

When we explained to Gov. Newsom that our method mathematically guarantees a coherent package that leaves most people happier and almost none very unhappy, he said he is ready to precommit to implementing feasible outcomes, sight unseen. Pre‑commitment plus the urgency of polarization is the crucible for democratic renewal. Start ...

Make deliberation as fast, fair and fun as a poll. We used to need dozens of facilitators and days of synthesis; now language models produce “group selfies” of consensus in seconds.

We select the top 20 by votes and analyze their synergy graph to standardize interoperability. Five winners receive a trophy from Taiwan’s president (a micro‑projector that — meta! — projects the President awarding it). Each winning team must include at least one public servant, one civil‑society member and one private‑sector ...

It is our pipeline from local experiments to national infrastructure. Each year ~200 projects from towns and agencies propose solutions (tele‑health, air/noise monitoring, zero‑knowledge credentials, zero‑trust networking, etc.). The public uses quadratic voting: everyone gets 99 credits; 1 vote costs 1, 2 costs 4, 3 costs 9, 4 costs 16, ...

There have been physical threats too. After I said at the Summit for Democracy that “if authoritarian regimes want an invitation, they should democratize,” I received ghost money by mail from Hong Kong (a veiled threat). Soon after, someone with a shotgun gained entry to the moda and blasted the ...

Yes. The day I joined the Cabinet in 2016, Gmail warned me I was under a state‑sponsored cyberattack. Taiwan’s government faces about 2 million intrusion attempts daily, so we adopted zero trust and share indicators internationally.

The difference from “DOGE‑style” corporate reorgs is that we distribute the steering wheel to the frontline, rather than centralize power at the top. With AI taking routine tasks, this distributed model matters even more.

That moves beyond democracy into neo‑reactionary ideas (e.g., Curtis Yarvin’s CEO‑state/monarchy). In 2016, as Taiwan’s “OG DOGE” open‑government team, we pushed government efficiency — but by trusting bureaucrats: pre‑announce moves, invite 60‑day public comment, let career public servants co‑create solutions. The result: high approval for former President Tsai Ing-wen and ...

Now, there is nowhere to go but up. I’m working across the aisle — Engaged California with Gov. Gavin Newsom (broad listening for wildfire recovery and government efficiency) about pro‑social media. Both left‑ and right‑leaning institutes are reinventing polling to depolarize it.

Research suggests the U.S. has hit peak polarization — you cannot get more partisan‑polarized. A Facebook‑funded study once claimed more Facebook exposure no longer increases polarization; another showed it is because polarization was already maxed out.

Yes. Taiwan hit peak polarization around 2014–2018, and then built participation infrastructure that helped us become one of the least socially polarized societies among peer democracies by some measures. These are battle‑tested democratic innovations — now ready to share as pressure‑made diamonds.

Internally, very. They spend more on domestic “harmony” than on the military; polarization and bottom‑up mobilization are stifled. They export the Great Firewall model to Belt‑and‑Road partners. We don’t compete on censorship; we deliver — better pandemic response, better anti‑deepfake systems, better growth. Their blind spot is that censorship also ...

The g0v ecosystem (including Cofacts) is incubated by the National Academy, which is politically neutral. When we created the moda, we joined the Transportation Committee in parliament — because we see ourselves as infrastructure builders enabling civil‑society media to flourish.

Treat them like public parks — public squares without ad dependence. Taiwan’s PTT (our Reddit) has run as a National Taiwan University student club for decades: open source, stakeholder‑governed, no ads.

Not in my experience. At the UN Internet Governance Forum (2017, Geneva), I spoke on the record in the U.N. building via a telepresence robot — the chair said, “We’re discussing policies, not politics.” Since then I have joined many U.N.‑affiliated meetings remotely.

Taiwan’s Gold Card invites contributors to the global commons (open source, Wikipedia, blogging, etc.). After five years of contribution in Taiwan, naturalization is possible without renouncing your original passport. It is a new post-Westphalian model.

I am a Palau digital resident and a Lithuanian e‑resident. You don’t get voting or property rights, but you gain access to digital public infrastructure (identity, payments, markets). Digital resources are anti‑rivalrous — like language, they become more useful as more people use them.

On data protection, collect less. If a forum needs proof you’re over 16, do not ask for birthdate or name. We are rolling out selective disclosure with Taiwan’s Digital Identity Wallet, so people can prove attributes (age, residency) without leaking extra data — built on W3C Verifiable Credentials/SD‑JWT; cross‑border interoperability ...

In the short term, offense dominates: AI finds vulnerabilities faster than defenders can re‑architect. So we assume breach and design zero trust: detect quickly, isolate laterally and deploy autonomous guardians that respond at machine speed. We share threat indicators with democratic partners.

In cyberspace, .tw is fully recognized and resolved here, not in Beijing. Online there is no geographic proximity, only proximity of values (a lesson from Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves). Countries that do not seek to dominate the Internet prefer co‑regulation with people — the Taiwan model of digital ...

We are reinventing polling to be generative. In Bowling Green, Kentucky (with Google), an open‑ended process — What Could BG Be? — let people up‑vote/down‑vote ideas (no retweet button). Over 80 percent of ideas converged on uncommon ground that made most people happier and few unhappy. This is expanding via ...

Also, do not assume universal passivity: on join.gov.tw, the most active groups are ~17‑year‑olds and ~70‑year‑olds — they have time and think long‑term.

Literacy alone cannot withstand superhumanly persuasive AI swarms. We must equip people with defensive AI they can steer.

Beijing bans TikTok domestically for being polarizing while exporting a version that amplifies extremes — like a reverse opium war. The remedy is structural interoperability: adopt radical portability (like Utah’s law). Require big tech to forward the social graph/events to family‑friendly or pro‑social local platforms for your citizens — or ...

Like geology: Taiwan’s Yushan rises ~0.5 cm yearly; we turn tectonic conflict into co‑creation energy.

I write like Wikipedia: publish first, then invite critique and remix. Our book Plurality was open from outline to release under CC0. Over 60 contributors and 100+ editors participated. It spawned adaptations — a UK young‑adult novel (Any Human Power), a short film (Good Enough Ancestor), a student‑friendly Japanese adaptation, ...

We are exploring subscription pools (think Apple Arcade / Spotify for journalism): people pay a monthly fee that is redistributed by time spent, remix value, or other civic‑care metrics, with privacy safeguards. The Ministry of Digital Affairs, or moda, is discussing funding pools with major platforms — an alternative to ...

Ad‑funded models have perverse incentives. Subscriptions are incentive‑aligned. Compare engagement‑driven social networks with subscription‑based ones (e.g., LinkedIn): You see far less polarizing content because users can simply unsubscribe, and scammers do not offer long‑lasting jobs.

Primary students build low‑cost airboxes to measure PM2.5; middle-schoolersfact‑check presidential debates and see their names in national news. Teens can start e‑petitions on join.gov.tw — at 5,000 signatures a ministry must respond, and some become reverse mentors to Cabinet ministers before 18.

Journalism is not only a profession; it’s a civic muscle anyone can practice — establish shared facts, present the best arguments from multiple sides. In 2020, Taiwan shifted from media literacy (receiving) to media competency (co-production).

With Mozilla and others, we launched a middle path in Paris: ROOST — Robust Open Online Safety Tools — to build decentralized defenses with open models that reinforce security. Example: fighting synthetic CSAM. Attackers are decentralized; centralized defense breaks down. So mid‑sized platforms (e.g., Bluesky, Roblox, Discord) collaborate on federated ...

The discourse has polarized between a vertical race (Manhattan‑Project‑style superintelligence) and a horizontal diffusion (open models steered by local cultures). At the Bletchley Summit, these camps clashed.

We also build resilience (e.g., fallback to microwave and LEO/MEO satellites if subsea cables are cut). All three hyperscalers engage with Taiwan: AWS launched a Taipei region in June 2025; Microsoft announced plans for a local Azure region; Google Cloud already operates the Asia‑East1 (Taiwan) region. As chip production globalizes, ...

Chips from Taiwan manufacturers (e.g., TSMC) power sensitive computations — medical, military, scientific. That conveys trust in Taiwan technology. As cyber ambassador, and previously as digital minister, we worked with the supply chain on cutting‑edge cybersecurity/resilience standards such as SEMI E187. Our assume-breach approach avoids trusting any single vendor or ...

Groups can invite chatbots from multiple trusted orgs — e.g., Trend Micro and Gogolook (Whoscall) — to auto‑suggest context in group chats. Apps like Message Checker can locally compare notifications against a crowd‑sourced fact database. This is epistemic security — bottom‑up, privacy‑respecting, and fast.

A critique of Community Notes is that it is too slow because it relies on human juries. So Taiwan’s g0v community built locally tuned open models that draft first‑pass context within seconds. See Cofacts for a live dashboard of viral memes with immediate, editable context.

Sometimes itis less than zero — they profit from harm (e.g., scam ads). Our response is to ensure bridging context appears quickly.

Today, we see malicious AI swarms: synthetic broadcasters read LLM‑generated scripts, pushing 50+ variants of the same negative spin, A/B testing what “travels.” They stitch together facts into speculation and innuendo (e.g., family ties) to maximize negative affect while avoiding falsifiable claims. Hard to “take down” because it’s not strictly ...

There is a repeating meta‑narrative: “Democracy leads to chaos and never delivers.” Content is reframed to fit it. During Hong Kong’s anti‑extradition protests, a PRC public‑security account posted a Reuters photo with a misleading caption implying protesters were paid to assault police. That’s a cheap fake — real photo, manipulative ...

We favor pre‑bunking over debunking — design humor and shared references that defuse polarizing frames before they dominate. Early 2020, we anticipated mask polarization and reframed masks as “protect your face from your own unwashed hands” — with a cute Shiba Inu mascot. As science evolved, people stayed open because ...

Research shows that in any network with a repost button, polarization emerges structurally. Taking content down often backfires, validating conspiracies and burning bridging potential.

Note: none target content; they target integrity and accountability. Over 85 percent across demographics agreed. The next month we met platforms; by Mayan electronic‑signature measure advanced and by July we passed an Anti‑Fraud Act with enforcement rules for deepfake/scam ads and penalties (including 24‑hour takedown on notice and fines up ...

If a platform lacks legal representation in Taiwan, require it or apply traffic‑shaping until it complies.

Make platforms liable for harm from unsigned ads.

Label every ad “probably a scam” by default unless digitally signed by the endorser.

We texted 100,000 randomly selected residents asking a simple question: How should we protect information integrity together? Thousands volunteered; 450 (random, stratified) joined an AI‑facilitated citizens’ assembly (45 rooms of ~10). Proposals included: