Yeah, sure. So I joined as part of the technical community.

Yes. I was a serial entrepreneur.

Exactly.

Because, if they have all the source code and all the real-time data, their criticism turns into co-creation, basically. So that took a long time. So to your question, I think first, horizontal leadership, almost like servant leadership, just focus on the bridging. And also a commitment to public code ...

So there are many municipalities in Taiwan that voluntarily donate the copyright of their software systems to us so that we can release them as no copyright reserve as public code. So instead of the civil society people that copy money in public code, pushing us to release, we actually ...

Throughout those six years, people gradually understood, oh, it is actually possible to achieve interagency communication. And that also answers your local municipality questions. Because for the municipal people, what they don’t want is for one minister to tell them this and another minister to tell them that. And for ...

And so, after I joined the cabinet, I asked each ministry to send me a secondment. And they don’t have to work in my office. They can still work in their own ministry. But they have to shift their mindset to have engagement as their main job, right? So we ...

So when I’m often asked 10 years ago whether I’m blue or whether I’m green, or things like that, I’m like, you know, I’m non-binary. I’m not just in gender non-binary. I’m non-binary in everything. And people gradually understood that this is actually a valid way to do politics through ...

And the reason why is that the career of public service also don’t want to be mistrusted by the citizens. There is natural value alignment between us and the career of public service. On the other hand, exactly as you have observed, there’s tough protection if we align with any ...

In many other jurisdictions, when a similar crisis came, the activists formed their own party. The pirates, or five-star movement, and many others. But in Taiwan, we didn’t form our own party, and we chose to align with the senior and middle-level career public service.

In 2014, the impetus was, as I mentioned, the legitimacy crisis of the administration. So almost always when a transformative technology comes, and it threatens administration legitimacy, there’s a window for innovation. And I think the secret sauce, so to speak, is that we as civic activists deliberately chose to ...

So whatever pre-trained material is, they learn this lens, like wearing an eyeglass, so that its perspective, its worldview, is aligned with this community. And we now work with OpenAI and Anthropic and other top labs in order to tune their AIs in a way that fits the community. So ...

And second, as a policy maker, I’m not faced with just a couple paragraphs, but rather something that I can run on my laptop and I can test new scenarios with. So it almost brings a community as a stakeholder literally on the table, because it can join the conversation ...

The existing community organizers and so on feels that they are helped by this technology, not replaced by this technology. Even we can import a lot of existing videos, transcripts, and things like that. So it turns an individual voice, not aggregating, but blending it into community voice, is the ...

And then, through their online polling and voting, we use language models to automatically identify clusters of common concern. Then we synthesize such clusters into a language model. And then we can ask that language model what to do when new situations arise and so on. So this is like ...

The idea, very simply put, is that we first do a very general listening. Like what are your thoughts on generative AI through basically polling, but polls are wiki surveys, so people write their own polls.

Right, exactly.

In fact, we hosted a session at the UN IGF in Kyoto, specifically about this topic, how to engage more broadly but also more deeply. Because it used to be a trade off. You can have a focus group of a few people or you run a Delphi process or ...

I’m happy to come over.

Personally, I think this is because we have learned to harness the energy from conflicts into innovations. We really need to take all the sides in order, like the top of Taiwan, the Yushan Mountain, kept growing because of the two tectonic plates keep bumping into one another. There’s a ...

But at the same time, we face this cyber attack that is also probably top in Asia. And so, this two combined together creates the political window for a credibly neutral, non-partisan cabinet. And I’m not the only exception. I think there’s more non-partisan independent ministers than minister of any ...

Yeah. I think part of the reason is that we face the kind of challenge that is simply not imaginable in other polities, right? In terms of our identity, Taiwanese people pride ourselves in being the top in Asia for internet freedom, right? For freedom of expression, assembly, and so ...

And so, I think we are one of the very rare policymaking organizations, in that we’re explicitly, credibly neutral. I’m pan-partisan, I don’t work with any party. I work with all the parties simultaneously. And so all the four major parties in the parliament are for digital transformation and solving ...

Even though the ministry is new, new as of last August, I’ve been a cabinet minister since 2016. Having a cabinet level digital affairs organization, although a little bit delayed by the pandemic, was the presidential platform for both the KMT VP Candidate Simon Chang, and Dr. Tsai Ing-wen for ...

In 2014, I think the great thing is that the cabinet at the time decided to embrace open collaboration. And through transition in 2016, the outgoing premier was Simon Chang, who is independent, and the incoming premier, Lin Chuan, also independent. So they did something unheard of, which is a ...

In 2014, our main platform was that, whether it is from KMT or DPP or anyone else, we should just take all the sides, basically, and systemically, through real-time open data, through synthesis of what we call coherent blended volition, achieve for rough consensus. And rough consensus for people who ...

So when we talk about polarization, when we talk about political apathy, when we talk about hate speech, we had all that in 2014. So that was at the peak of the public distrust to the government. And so, I always stressed that I’m not working for the government, I’m ...

Yeah, definitely. Since late 2014, I served in the cabinet, as a reverse mentor to the minister without portfolio in charge of legal affairs, Jaclyn Tsai. At the time, in 2014, the public trust in the administration was below 10%.

Yes, last August.

Sure, sure.

Really kind words, thank you.

That’s the main organizational chart. And I promised to be brief, so I’ll stop here. Anything you would like to discuss?

NICS is the institute that works on AI evaluation, for example. Because it is non-departmental. It can work with other ministries very easily. So for example, the AI evaluation is done with ITRI, which is supervised by Economic Affairs. And when it comes to personal data, privacy-enhancing technology, of course ...

So I think these are the main ideas of increasing the overlap between participation, progress, and safety, instead of letting them being pulled apart by transformative technology, like “let’s ban all large GPU clusters” on one side, and “let’s just open everyone’s DNA data for AI training” on the other ...

We also have the department of plural innovation, meaning that data-driven innovation needs to come from across sectors. Plurality means collaborative diversity. So people who initially are from different ideologies, sometimes the existing digital services often pull them into more polarized levels, into hate speeches and so on. But we ...

In addition to existing departments of Digital Strategy, Communication and Resilience, Resource Management — like spectrum and number allocation — we also have all-new departments. For example, instead of department for international cooperation, we have department of democracy network, which means that we also focus on people-to-people ties. Because even ...

The three ministerial values that we bring to the team from one of each minister into the new team are participation, democratic participation on top; and progress, like technological advances on the left; and safety on the right. And so we have two administrations, one for industrial development, digital industries. ...

After the pandemic, we immediately faced new geopolitical issues, like the war on Ukraine, and so on. So all this let us see that the transformative technologies cannot be dealt with simply by existing four ministers each taking care of one value. That doesn’t work anymore. We have to have ...

Indeed, moda was formed during the pandemic. During the pandemic, we worked very closely with the Department of Cybersecurity, of the electronic services, including data flow and all that, spectrum allocation, SMS, for contact tracing; as well as the part of Ministry of Economy Affairs that manufactured the masks, PPEs, ...

Ministry of 0101.

Okay, great. So I’ll let my colleague introduce just a little bit of the organizational thoughts of the Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda), and then we can launch into any topic of discussion as you like. Please.

Our ministry is very new. We just founded last August. We’re rather like a startup here. So instead of a very long presentations, we just have very brief introductions, and then most of it will be discussions.

And I think really lifelong learning is what shields people against this kind of polarizing ideologies. And only by working with the education system can we really change the nature of the conversation online and also face to face.

And so, now, we have a generation of young people who take pride in contributing to Cofacts and so on. Because that’s what their teachers teach them. We even have a cabinet-level youth advisory council. We even have the open government steering committee advisor that was just 17 years old ...

So, we have now classes where the teachers take the students to fact check the three presidential candidates. Or four, we don’t know, right? So, you have four presidential candidates as they’re having their debate or forum and so on. Or measure their air quality and contributing to the distributed ...

Yeah, definitely. Now this was the question we tackled when we worked on the basic education curriculum. And that was before I joined the cabinet. And the answer to that is that we need to change how scoring system work in schools and examinations and so on. Instead of testing ...

These are really toolkits. It can be used to talk about other things than generative AI. It has been used to talk about Uber, Airbnb and so on.