There are many dilemmas between safety on one side and liberty on the other that needs careful balancing in the realm of digital. In that, we are the same with the jurisdictions this question asks.

Like during COVID, you need to have the economic prosperity, but you also need to take care of people’s health. You need to take care of civil liberties and privacy, but you do actually need to trace the contacts of the virus.

I think the main difference I see is that in many other jurisdictions, the digital ministers focus on, as I mentioned, to make the progress and safety harmonize.

Thank you.

I was on a promotional video saying that biology should not determine destiny. When I learned programming, the computer never cared about my gender. So if you’re interested in that slightly humorous comedic film, I can send it afterwards after this conversation as a supplementary material.

To date, there’s thousands of high school and young undergraduate women that specialize in this program because the president herself gives an award, the science minister, the digital minister, everyone gives a high level of legitimacy so that they become national heroes defending our nation – because we do face ...

Previously, the young women, if they say during their high school years that they want to be a hacker, white hat researcher, and so on, usually it’s kind of frowned upon by their parents because hacking was associated criminal activity, and things like that.

But there is a specific subdomain in programming that has significant gender imbalance, which is cybersecurity. Admittedly, I think a majority of hardcore cybersecurity practitioners are still men.

So we have a very healthy balance of boys and girls, because many people consider design as something that’s closer to people instead of just engineering, which is closer to machines. At some places, we even need to encourage boys to get into design because of the other way of ...

What would I say to encourage girls to learn and work in information technologies? Interestingly, because in Mandarin, we translate “程式設計,” programming, as program design or software design, instead of software engineering.

So that’s like my three-minute elevator pitch. I hope that answered this question. If there’s any follow-up, please ask. Otherwise, I’ll just move on to the next.

But as of last August, we brought them all together into a new ministry, the ministry of digital affairs.Our main idea is digital resilience for all, meaning that participation, progress, and safety need to be taken as a more and more overlapping concern within our ministry and within the government, ...

So we have participation, as I mentioned. We have progress, like platform economy, AI, and so on. And we have security, like cybersecurity, and testing and verification, and so on, which all three used to belong in different ministries.

Just last year, after the pandemic, we reorganized to have a ministry of digital affairs that takes all the agencies that work closely on informatics during the pandemic, and put them into the same ministry.

I’ve been serving now seven years or more as the digital minister.

After a couple of years working with the cabinet, doing crowdsource regulation on Uber, Airbnb, a lot of technologies, emerging ones, I then got promoted to full-time minister in 2016 when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became the president of Taiwan.

At the end of that year, the national government in Taiwan said that open government data participation is going to be the national direction. I was hired as a young reverse mentor to advise the cabinet.

The Occupy for three weeks was peaceful and nonviolent. I supported – along with many other people – the live streaming, the facilitation, many of the tools that we now take for granted, like live streaming and so on, we pioneered its use in large-scale demonstration so that the 20 ...

People deliberated, among other things, whether to admit so-called private sector equipment from PRC into our then new 4G telecommunication network.

Then in 2014, the people in Taiwan had a large-scale deliberation on the street, with half a million people on the street and many more online. It was called the Sunflower Movement.

And then I worked as a consultant with Apple’s Siri language technology team for six years, as well as with Oxford University Press and many other startups.

And then I discovered the open source movement in ‘98, and then I just put all my energy in, including working on the new computer languages, Perl and Haskell and things like that.

So my focus was on swift trust, how people come to trust each other quickly on the internet. And so very quickly, when I was 16, I co-founded one of Taiwan’s more highlighted startups during the dot-com era, doing full-text search, doing instant messaging, doing C2C, like eBay auction and ...

The principal was very understanding and agreed that I could homeschool and did not need to join her in the class anymore.

I was a junior high school student back then, the eighth grade, and then I dropped out of junior high school because I told the head of my school that I get to do research on this new thing called the World Wide Web and I don’t have to study ...

It’s documented that I participated very early on in the free software communities since ‘94, ‘95.

The first question asks about my background. As you can see, my background is very transparent.

Since we already started highlighting the first one, I will just proceed to answer the question, but feel free to raise your hands and ask follow up questions and continue to post or press like on Slido.

I’m delighted to already receive 10 questions before the talk.

Thank you. Thank you for the very kind introduction.

Thank you.

Yeah, we need a conservative progress towards social markets. We need to bridge everything that’s bridgeable. That’s what it looks like.

Anyway, we want to be a electric motor that drives digital transformation, but we never take the credit. We want those upper industries to take the credit. The same applies to the directors of our departments.

He has deep connection with the hardware side of things. He has been a member of Cyber Security, have deep connection with our diplomatic allies and friendly countries when it comes to cyber defense, generally. I want to continue that tradition. I don’t want to build a silo. Moda is ...

That’s a great question. As I mentioned, the two Director Generals of the two administrations on industries and cybersecurity, they already held from the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Service in particular. They have longtime connections with 呂正華, the Director General for the Industry Administration, who was head of the ...

I think it’s something like that, extending its purview to make sure that it can address the incoming threats which requires ethnographic, anthropologic, and all social science expertise, but still rapid within a credibly politically neutral term instead of, pardon the example, but this information over the sideboard. It is ...

I think in the US, one good example is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the NIST. I think the AI Safety Institute is now also hosted under NIST, partly because it’s not seen as partisan.

Across the board, I have talked with my counterparts, either cyber ambassadors or fellow ministers that have a similar incredibly neutral view, not necessarily a partisanship, but just on being a nexus of trust across political parties.

Meanwhile, I don’t belong to any political party, really. But for issues like cybersecurity, if there’s a partisanship around this, if the municipalities are against national policies, there’s no way anythings to be done. We can only be effective on cyber resilience if we are throughly politically neutral. I think ...

I think I’ve always tried for this Ministry to be seen as a credibly neutral party in everything, which is why, although by law, we can use political appointees for our directors in our departments. There are six of them. I’ve used exactly zero. All of them are career public ...

We’re just one and a half years old.

If we frame things this way as an individual, it’s the same. It doesn’t create divisions across religions anymore. It only creates divisions on people who, for example, feel that the homosexuals actually have an advantage here because they don’t have as much obligations to extended families… It becomes a ...

Then it becomes whether people value commitments to each other and state enterprise and things like that. But it doesn’t touch kinship at all. The way we legalize marriage equality is exactly that. We leave out the kinship part from the civil code. It’s a new type of relationship.

This is what I have learned during our referendums following the constitutional court ruling on marriage equality, is that it all depends on how you frame the division. If you frame it as a right for homosexuals to marry and have a family, then you reinforce existing lines. But if ...

Yeah, we need differences to co-create things, so we need conflicts. But we don’t need those conflicts that reinforces the existing social differences. For each new social topic, preferably, like people from the… Half of the people from the blue camp would agree and half would disagree, and half from ...

Exactly.

We’re an equal partner among democracies. Diplomacy-wise, I think this is very good. The Korean handling of this is very commendable. They’re a democracy, of course. Along with Japan, we’re the top three democracies in this region. Of course, we should talk to each other about democracy.

Of course, PRC condemned our attendance. When journalists asked me a couple of days ago, I said, “If they also want to attend, they can choose to democratize too.” It’s their choice. I think it also helps to counter their narrative this way by affirming Taiwan as a bed of ...

Things that sounds good but didn’t receive a lot of public infrastructure budget suddenly become highlighted, and so people are much more willing to invest in democracy as a technology. This is my first takeaway.