Please take a seat. We don’t often use this meeting room because we’re quite far apart in this arrangement. [laughs]

Welcome.

Thank you.

Pleasure.

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

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

Thank you for visiting us.

Anything from Tim and Betty? Okay, great!

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

Great. Thank you.

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.

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 ...

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?

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.

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.

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? ...

Academic rigor.

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.

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 ...

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, ...

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.

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.

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.

Well, I wish I share that optimism.

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

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.

And the moral aspect.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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.

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...