…the mother of inventions?

Yeah, and it was out of necessity, in 2014, because the young people don’t believe in the administration.

So I also learned from them, like they have this idea of デジ道, the way of digital, of leaving no one behind, of being pluralist, institutional pluralism. And I learned from that. So these two characters, 數位, in Mandarin, also means, in addition to digital, it also means plural. So ...

The Tokyo municipality also adapted our idea of a Presidential Hackathon in which the local teams, the main prize is not money, but rather a promise for their idea to become national level. The digital agency, when it’s being formed, professor Jun Murai-san, who advises the inaugural digital ministry agency ...

And also, they send reverse fellows, so career public servants, but send them to the NGOs, to the social sector, so that they can learn civic technology and so on. I think Code for Japan is working with municipalities in doing that.

There are several municipalities in Japan that told me that they learned that idea from us.

They could have a youth network, right? Our cabinet-level youth network already connects existing networks with the municipal youth reverse mentors. So having them connect with the international ones is a natural extension.

So that’s obviously our number one threat to our democracy is this intentional cyber attack, hybrid attack, including information interference attack, leveraging generative AI, that decimates our trust in democratic institutions.

But then we learned that the propaganda arm, the information manipulation arm, interference arm, cyber attack arm, and so on, used to be not coordinated. But now, after last August, we now know they’re very coordinated now, which is why we have the Institute of Cyber Security set up earlier ...

The denial of service attack we faced that day was 23 times greater than the previous peak. So there were like unbounded resources just threw at us just to keep our website malfunctioning for a couple hours. And that’s enough for them to mount the information interference attack that says ...

But in addition to those missiles, we also saw signboards outside of rail stations and convenience store act replaced with hateful messages. And when the journalists want to check the ministry’s website for clarification for what’s going on, they found that those websites doesn’t work because it’s DDoSed.

Last August, when our ministry first started, when we put our website online, which by the way, is the same hour as missiles flew over our heads.

But now, with the new open AI, Whisper V3 language model, anyone across the world can mount such attacks semi-automatically. And so we’re now facing real challenges to the democratic institutions, because it’s now very easy to astroturf, to pretend that there is grassroots support on something, even though there’s ...

As for challenges, we’re now facing a situation where the information integrity online is severely challenged by generative AI. So everyone can con everyone, can scam everyone. It used to be if you want to con someone who speaks Hakka or Taiwanese, then you have to be in that culture ...

Because we relinquish even the right to attribution, they can still sell it to other customers, saying it’s their product. Because they don’t have to say, “Copyright © by Ministry of Digital Affairs.” So by giving up everything, we gain everything: The goodwill of the private sector, so this is ...

So we didn’t make an economic argument, like this saves money, or this is better human right, or more participatory, we simply said this is more secure. So which is why having this triangle design is so good, because we don’t have to make an economic argument when we can ...

And second, this is quite alien to the software integrators of Taiwan, and I believe to any private sector getting government money, right? When the EU agreed to evaluate a certain percent of public procurement that goes to free software, open source, and so on, they couldn’t exactly set a ...

So yeah, to your first question, it is very well known that I’m credibly neutral, nonpartisan, and so on. I think it is by now, after a year, well known that moda is not here to fight other ministries for budget. So these two, like defensive postures, we have achieved. ...

Yes, cyberattacks. I can talk about it.

I’m no longer younger than 35, so I’m no longer a young reverse mentor, but I used to be one. And this allows these people to be trusted by the senior public service for two years during their term, and many of them then take leadership roles in higher positions.

It took two years for me to be generally trusted by the senior career public service. And after I become the minister in 2016, we elevated that system to a cabinet level Youth Advisory Council. So now we have like 30 or so reverse mentors as a institution, chaired by ...

Reverse mentor means that they’re actually much younger than the cabinet ministers. So those reverse mentors can see what the minister sees. This reverse mentor can propose new ideas. They’re a consultative role, so they’re not exactly MPs, but they are kind of shadows to their minister. So I was ...

And to your second question about how exactly does someone like me have become trusted by the cabinet, I think the system instilled by the cabinet in 2014, called reverse mentor, played a big part. At the time, they decided that each of the cabinet ministers and ministers without portfolio, ...

Although, of course, still, it’s not very comfortable. By definition, it pushes you out of the comfort zone, but it never ends with violence. So that, I think, calms everyone down when it comes to engaging with NGOs and so on.

Throughout the life cycle of all the participation officer network, we handled more than 130 collaborative meetings across stakeholders, and zero of which ended in violence. A lot of them are with very strong NGOs, like from, for marriage equality and many other very contentious issues. So after six years, ...

Yeah, exactly. Which is why this kind of bridge-making mechanism is so important, because it allows them to think of conflict as energy source, like conflict transformation.

So, instead of public sector, private sector, and civil society, they now become social sector that has agency and can produce the civic technologies that empower the public themselves. So this is to your question. I think scalable listening with nuance only works if you empower a strong social sector ...

And so, that’s one of the key of the Taiwanese counter-pandemic work, is just to let everybody become epidemiologists, basically, by asking freely any questions, and get an answer, and suggest innovative, like new contact tracing methods, and so on. All this came from the civil society. And so the ...

During the pandemic, anyone in Taiwan can call a toll-free number, 1922, to say anything they want about the pandemic. Most just ask questions, but a lot actually have actual policy feedback. And there’s this huge call center work that aggregates, blends the common ideas, and so on, into daily ...

So there’s a diminishing return, even if we all agree that it’s better to listen to two million people compared to 2000, we can’t actually digest two million people’s voices, which means that the majority of those two million people will feel disempowered, actually. They gave us all the suggestions, ...

Yes. Both very good questions. The first question, when it comes to public engagement, the main challenge was that the bandwidth that decision makers can receive real time input is very limited, actually, the executive summaries, right?

Very much so.

Sure.

Yes, we have very strong deliberation and service design background. So the more we work with those ministries, the more popular they get, basically. They can be more on the spot, in the here and now, they behave with regards of the public needs and so on. So “moda” also ...

Exactly.

Yes.

And so, the more they give us their shared demands, basically, the more they get in yearly budget. And so even though our actual budget is the 14th among all 14 ministries, so not counting the councils and commissions, so we’re the smallest, but actually when we grow, every other ...

For these projects, 90% or more of the such infrastructure budget, we submit a proposal, but it’s executed and the budget goes to other ministries. So in a sense, we’re just a compiler of the shared needs of each and every ministry. And then we keep only very small amount, ...

Exactly. Now, for example, we just convinced our public budget office that, for example, we have a, say, 10 million US dollars public infrastructure project dedicated just to have the issuing cash, stimulus, or anything out to citizens in a secure way. Or we have another very similar public infrastructure ...

So, moda in Taiwanese Taigi, also in Nihongo, means “motor”. So, we always say we’re just a moda. We’re the motor for the other uppercase ministries.

And a good logo works, because in our cabinet, there are 31 ministries, and all the other 30, including the new logo of the economic affairs, are uppercase, only the moda is lowercase.

It is, absolutely.

Exactly, yes.

As I mentioned, the NICS works with ITRI, with the economic ministry and so on, because the economic affairs ministry also works with our institute, right? So I can talk with other ministries’ policies, introducing this all-of-government work as well. Whereas as a minister, then I’ll have to represent my ...

There’s no problem at all. I mean, in the UN IGF, two of our institute representatives stayed a whole week, and the PRC delegation of 60 people, they totally were okay with it. As for me, I think this is also more flexible, because this allows me to talk about ...

Of course. I’m coming. Where do I sign?

As chair of the institute.

And along with me, other three advisors also. So this is because the UN system, when it comes to internet governance, make a distinction between government representative and technical community. If I select government representative, I’ll have to choose a member state to represent. If I choose technical community, I ...

As the chair of National Institute of Cyber Security.