Thank you for inviting us to this office. I think you must be busy right now. But, yeah, so today, can we use this?

Of course. UD Talk?

UD Talk, yes. Yeah, so, yeah, I, today, this delegation has been attending the Smart City Summit and visiting many different institutions. And, yeah, I don't want to make this meeting too formal. I wanted to… just catching up with this institution in Taiwan now.

So, I want to share something from Japan's side. Especially after COVID-19, many things happened. And, also, I wanted to know about the latest situation about the government policy. Especially digital policy. Like, I've heard something, DID-related work from Mashbean (Huang, Yen-Ling).

Very exciting. Public infrastructure, like railroads and airports to the universe.

Yeah, and also, I’m really interested in the civic tech things here. Yeah, and, also, I think the people are familiar with the Smart City and he's from the Hamamatsu City. So, I want to talk about the cooperation between Japan and Taiwan, and also Hamamatsu and Taiwan. So, such kind of topic we want to discuss.

Okay. How shall we begin? We should catch on about policy and possible deliberations. And I found my name card, so…

Thank you.

Maybe, quickly introduce… very briefly introduce all of this. And, after that, maybe, I want to know your opinion first.

Okay.

Okay. Very nice to meet you. I'm from Smart City Japan. I'm also a professor at Kyoto University in Japan. And, the last thing today…You were expected to come to Tokyo to make a presentation at the ICONS International Museum in Japan, with the Schwarzman Scholars of Europe. I was there and was very happy to be here today.

Thank you very much. Welcome. And please next one.

Nice to meet you. My name is Nahoko. My company is Yachiyo Engineering.

My name is Yuichi Takimoto from Hamamatsu city. I’m in charge of smart city policy in my city. So, I’m here to talk about, to discuss about smart city policy… Yeah, I’m excited to be here to discuss smart city with you.

Okay. Only Japanese…

Yeah, she’s now working for Code for Japan. She is ex-Yokohama city’s officer. And right now, she’s working on government field. Yeah, have some vision.

Excellent.

My name is Iso. I was a public servant last year. Last spring, I joined the private sector. I still advise on smart city initiative as the smart city promotion support outside… I have developed a system for payment of special cash payment and lottery-based reservation system for COVID-19 vaccination. I am in recognition of the system development to other local governments. We received the local government award and social innovation award in 2021. I am currently responsible for strategic planning and promoting digital government initiatives. Additionally, I serve as a committee member and advisor to national government and various local governments, offering guidance of the use of ICT for local government operations.

Thank you.

Nice to meet you. I’m Natsuko Tabata. Our company is engaged with data analysis. We’re a research company. We have consumer spending data, like what people buy, and product price data in store in Japan. We deal with smart phone data and we’re…

Yeah. Signal data.

So, until now, our business is for the companies, the marketing, using as a marketing. But now, we think about we can use these marketing data for social innovation.

Great. So, you can provide that data to social innovators as well. That’s excellent. Data altruism. That’s great.

Thank you.

I am Tatsuya Kitamura, executive director of the Smart City Institute. My goal with Nagumo-san together is to make more international relationship with the smart city world. So, I'm very excited to be able to know about the network Democracy Very exciting. Thank you very much.

Maybe a brief introduction from our team.

I’m Eric. I work for the Democracy Network, moda. My responsibility is for the public code policy and civic tech policy, and how to cooperate with government, citizens, industries to build ecosystem and improve the open source or the industry to more focused like the digital service to let people’s life better. It’s my job.

Yeah, we are very fortunate to have people with experience from the smart city offices, from municipalities. Actually, only one municipality with that kind of office to join our rank in the end.

Yeah, I’m Mashbean and I’m also working in the Department of Democracy Network. And I’m in the Section of Plurality, the section of web development. So, what we are currently doing is how decentralized technology can help the government or help the civic citizens. So, our large-scale digital public infrastructure project this year is DID Wallet. And we are looking forward to have some collaboration in the internationally. And that’s what we’re doing.

Excellent.

Zach Chang: Hi, this is Zach Chang from the Audrey Tang's office. Before this job, I worked in the Taipei City Hall. And during that period, Taipei City Hall established the Smart City PMO.

Hello everyone, I’m Wendy. I'm currently working in the Minister’s office. And I'm responsible for citizens' assembly. And actually, tomorrow we will have a citizens’ assembly and we'll collaborate with Stanford university.

To set the boundary of AI.

Okay, so I think the idea of public digital infrastructure is not new to either Japan or Taiwan. But it is true that mostly it was realized under municipal fashion. This idea of international digital public infrastructure was not recognized as a must-have until the pandemic, obviously, right? But during the pandemic, we have seen, for example, for the digital vaccine certificates, that's an infrastructure everyone needs. Otherwise, travel is impossible. Contact tracing. You know, most of the planes are starting to look at the deficiencies of digital infrastructure investment in all governments.

And we have found that places with the digital gap or things like this suffered the most during the pandemic because they cannot do those situational applications out of the proven public code components. And the jurisdictions with good components that can compose to respond to new emergencies fair and better in their… especially in the first two years of the pandemic.

And so, my ministry, the moda, is essentially for teams of people from economy, from national communication, from national development and from cybersecurity who have worked very closely during the pandemic and merged into the ministry. So, in a sense, the composition of my ministry is one of resilience, of responding to emergency through partnership with the civil society and private sector in response to whatever is felt as the most urgent need of the day.

So, this kind of investment is unlike traditional investment where it's very top-down with a one or two mandated use case. Rather, we imagine our public code to be like Lego blocks so that when new needs arrive, we can respond in real time. This is a basic idea of resilience.

And to that end, the Democracy Network, as already mentioned, is working on the most fundamental layer, which is decentralized identity. We want to ensure that while we have a pretty good digital signature system, we want to enact its interoperability in law. So, we have already submitted an amendment to the support of all three parties in the legislature. It's expected to pass soon. That says, you know, we don't previously, 20 years ago, in our current Digital Signature Act, it requires an international treaty, a bilateral agreement for the certificate authorities to recognize each other.

But with the new amendment, that is one option. But the other option is that both sides join technical interoperable trust system so it could be an ISO or NIST mandated trust system, it could be a distributed ledger or anything really so as long as two jurisdictions it doesn't have to be nation versus nation. It could be municipal versus Taiwan, right, so as long as two jurisdictions both enter an interoperable technical trust system then your certificates are recognized as legally valid here, and hopefully, vice versa as well.

So, we need a way to interoperate with all sorts of very different digital signature systems without compromising privacy. And so, we settled on a design inspired by the W3C verifiable credentials that allows free composition in our citizens' DID wallet without constant surveillance or monitoring by our State Department. So, that's one of the four major public infrastructures.

We have others as well, for example, one for issuing out reimbursement, the proof of work by the NGOs and so on, which used to be all paper, and we want to digitalize it. And we are fortunate that the Taipei Municipality already has an existing system for that. No other city in Taiwan has that.

And so, the hard work has been done by the Taipei City. And what we are now doing is just the interoperability layer and providing a default public code implementation for the other municipalities and counties, so they don't have to build from scratch. They can build off what Taipei City has already done, and because it's public code, they can also customize themselves.

There's another one, speaking to the lottery of vaccination reservation or hand-out stimulus coupons and so on, because we've done so many stimulus coupons, vouchers during the pandemic. And last year because TSMC paid too much tax, I guess, beyond our expectation, so we decided to hand every citizen, 23 million citizens of Taiwan, everyone 200 US dollars just to appreciate their contribution. And so, we work with the ATM system, working with banking system, working with post office and so on, in a way that's privacy preserving and cybersecurity and accessibility at the highest standard. And now we're turning that into a public infrastructure. So, all level of governments, if they want to hand out anything, they can reuse the same infrastructure.

There are others for backups and resilience against earthquakes, natural and unnatural ones, but that is less likely to be a municipal-to-municipal conversation. It's more like the Ukraine-Taiwan conversation, right? So, that is for the resilience backup for wartime or emergency, as enforced.

So, we're planning now the public digital infrastructure for the next year. So, we already know we will have a data fabric one specifically for privacy enhancing technology to be deployed so that we can train AI models or share in the, for example, signal data or movement data or consumption data in a way that we can prove that is zero knowledge, as you say, doesn't compromise privacy. So, that is something that we're very interested in.

There's also one about building digital twins of cities and municipalities so that we can do urban planning or whatever in virtual reality, in augmented reality. There are many more, but I think these are the ones that are more municipal in its aim. So, I welcome discussions and exchange based on these ideas.

Cool, cool. I have some questions about data sharing between the municipal offices and national level. So, in Japan, it is very headache program. Japanese government level and municipal level have different groups and different data structure. And it also prohibits to share the citizens' personal data to national level.

So, it is very difficult to… it makes very difficult as the data exchanging system. And also, it is difficult to force to use one system for every government. So, every local government is different. And so, your idea, I think you mentioned open data, open source software. So, you provide some sort of public…

Yeah, what we call public code. It's open source, of course, or free of copyright. But also, with code as in code of regulations. So, how to use that within the government, with interpretations and so on, that's also bundled in that code.

So, open source and code for like the idea of regulatory technology is that when you use it in the place that affects the citizens, you have to have due process, appeal, privacy protection and so on. And all these codes are bundled as part of public code.

Okay. So, municipalities can understand that?

Well, I think we have six municipalities all joining right now in our, like, public code conference. So, our aim, and correct me if I exaggerate, our aim is that for this year, we're doing a soft launch where the six municipalities either donate their existing open-source contributions for other municipalities to adopt, or they are users of existing civil society contributions and they are happy for other municipalities to contact directly those civil societies.

So, in either of these two cases, one is a traditional procurement by open-source at the end, and one is open source from the beginning. We want to document the entire process so that in the future, municipal officers know that this build or buy decision doesn't have to be like one size fits all. They can build just 10% of an existing 80% public code and the rest of the 10% they can buy from a system integrator or whatever for their specific needs. So, the main idea is for this year to establish a guideline of how to work with the new IT procurement laws, which we also revised and should be published this month.

So, previously IT procurement was using very outdated like waterfall and people compete on price and so on. But now, we have shifted now so there is a standard price and it's not cutting prices not advised anymore. And if you want extra service level agreements, you have to pay extra and there's a standard price for that, cyber security requirement and so on. So, that people see it more like building bridges or highways is worth the initial investment to get it right, so people don't have this idea that open source is less expensive, open source saves money. No, actually, public code, because it's like bridges and highways should cost more. Yeah, so this is the main claim we have for this year.

So, I think utilizing open-source software efficiently, you need kind of the inside stuff to manage. But I, procuring IT that, so such kind of developers, high quality developers inside the government is very, very difficult, I think. So, how do you manage this kind of data, open-source code, and also community relationship like… Do you have enough staff, or…?

We do, quite fortunately. It's always easier to justify that we need upfront investment as we are building public infrastructure for the whole nation and our nearby allied countries.

If we say this is a cost saving measure, then of course, the personnel would be minimal. But because we are now saying if the municipalities can pull together their resources on top of our public infrastructure, this will save a lot of money down the road because the municipality don't have to do things from scratch anymore. And because there's no vendor lock-in possible, right, so all the SI already earned the profits by the new procurement rules, so it also makes more much healthier for private sector ecosystem of developers because you are not rent-seeking anymore. People are just earning an honest, you know, pay rate for keeping the service level high and so on.

And to your staffing question, so we have a team called PDIS, the Public Digital Innovation Space embedded in the cabinet CIO's office. I’m the cabinet CIO and so I'm also the chair of the National Institute of cybersecurity. So, the NICS is now the umbrella for the civil society contributors who are experts in IT or cybersecurity like Kian who did the mask visualization system. So, people thought it's my work but it's actually his work, so I mostly helped procuring the open data flows for his map.

So, that author has been working with the NICS Institute of cybersecurity for a year now and we can’t afford to pay him salary that is almost a minster’s salary because the NICS is a non-departmental public body and subject to labor law, not to public service law. But because it's a public body, so when Kian works in the fields of cybersecurity and inspection and auditing, he does so as a public servant. So, with the full clearance and so on and so, we struck a balance. It was a pilot. We only had six or seven people this way. But after the premier of the cabinet heard our report, now we have a much more budget allocation for like 40 or 50 such people.

Wow. I have many questions, but I want to share the opportunity for them to ask their questions.

So, we work as a bridge between the transformation and the daily life of the citizens. The reason was very simple. The digital transformation in Japan has been largely led by the national government, like the national subsidies. But people don't really feel what's going on.

So, let's say my wife, right? So, I talk about smart cities. She doesn't care. As she cares, how can you make me happier? But it's not about technology. So, to visualize that idea, we created… as a part of the national guidance… And we have so far, spent the last two years, Hamamatsu city is going to smart cities… exchange how… So, I think we should jointly represent East Asia from…

Yeah, I totally agree. The first thing I did after getting the moda preparation office is to tell our administration for digital industries, which is other moda, to stop using ROI as the only indicator for their infrastructure projects. Because previously, infrastructure projects need to, over time, prove its ROI and as a part of the discipline of budgeting, right?

But I said that actually the UN has SDGs, and there are a lot of methodologies like the Well-Being Index that transform the ROI to social ROI or SROI. So, then we can say that by the time saved, by the quality of communication increased, by the well-being of the planet and the people and so on, we are saving this much money down the road, compared to if you have to do clean-up or things like that afterwards. And so, by framing the SROI and getting the budget office of the science and technology to accept that as a usable way to measure the impact of public infrastructures, I think we are in a very good position to adopt Well-Being Index or any other index, as long as it can be phrased in SDGs slash SROI metrics.

Great. So, maybe after this, we can exchange email…

Yes, that is the purview of our Administration for Digital Industries. And they are doing crowdfunding and quadratic funding and all sorts of very novel crowdfunding methodologies based on the impact measurements and impact expectations on top of those SROIs, so that we can also mobilize private sector impact investor capital.

Takehiko Nagumo: And actually, we need to look at the economic city. We need to implement new, social impact measurement system. And this will be our next time we have foundation for that. And we have a very early stage on that. We will consider later, we will go beyond GDP…

That’s right. Exactly. Yes, I think that the DM is also working on impact certificates and the DID wallet to hold the contributions down the road for those impact certificates and its assessments, so I think we are very aligned. Yeah.

Thank you very much.

I have two questions. Firstly, I would like to ask you about smart city. Because using digital make people's lives more convenient. And we, the city government, can manage our city more efficiently. However, what can digital do to make people's lives happier? I think this is one of the key points to consider when moving to the next stage of smart city policy. What do you think about this?

And secondly, what are the important things in promoting smart city policies while utilizing digital in Taiwan? And in Japan, nation decline and aging society. And disaster response. What are the important things to do about smart city policies? So, I would like to ask about that.

Great questions. As for the first, I was just reading this morning a new survey by Pew Research. And they measured people in Taiwan how they feel about a strong leader leading the country. How they feel about technocratics, you know, people who are experts, ruling the country. How people feel about military ruling the country. Nobody wants that.

And very interestingly, Taiwanese people, by and large, rejected both a strong person rule, but also technocratic rule. Everyone preferred a balanced multi-party system. And this is regardless of whether they feel good about PRC or feel bad about PRC. It doesn't matter. Nobody wants authoritarian rule, whether it's from technical authoritarianism or, you know, populist authoritarianism.

And so, to your question, I think people feel happy if they know that things they care about, if they mobilize for change, they see the change quickly. If they have to wait for four years, they're less happy. If they have to wait for eight years or twelve years, they're very unhappy, right? So, regardless of how the democratic system works on a four-year period, we can respond to people's need in the here and now. People are happier. This is my personal experience running the civic participation system. And especially that is true for people who are around 17 years old, or 70 years old, who both have a lot of time. But for the younger people, because they cannot vote yet, they don't have the full civic participation rights, they have a lot of agenda they want to set.

Now, a system that allows them to, nevertheless, set up agenda, despite not being an adult, that is the difference between they grow up to be adults, fully, happily participating, and adults that are very shy from politics and thinking of politics as corrupt, or things like that. So, empowering the solidarity between the aging population, the strong generation, and the younger people. This, I think, is one of the keys that we can use digital technology to connect them together.

And also, to your second question, to make meaningful changes that they can start by themselves. But our work, like through the Presidential Hackathon, can make their local work into national infrastructure. That is the trophy, the main gift we give every year for the international and also domestic Presidential Hackathon, is just to make those ideas that only works in one city, India, or one city in Taiwan, into national public infrastructure for the next fiscal year. And that, I think it is good, not just for smart governments and smart cities, but also for smarter citizens.

So, how do you see the recent civic tech activity in Taiwan? In Japan, the kind of new generation started new things, like Web 3 View. So, I think we are, I feel, I am a bridge to the next generation, and creating opportunity to work with many different people than just internal people. So, I, yeah, I feel that's why I was running the Code of Japan. I met many people from g0v, right now, and I think it's a different generation, And I think that those people have not experienced some form of a movement, and so on.

And many of them are just here for fun, right? Yeah, because, yeah, previously, 10 years ago, there's a lot of polarization. The distrust between the state and citizens is very high. So g0v, back then, was about being the bridge and building the bridge, so that those high-level citizens, those highly distrusting parties, can start trusting each other more on credibly neutral things, right?

But now, as I quoted in a few research, it doesn't matter which party you belong. You actually believe in democracy. And after our election in January, the affective polarization that people feel toward each other actually decreased. So, we depolarized. The entire society is now very connected. So, people generally feel that their party has won a little bit in the election. And so, there's less hate between the ideological camps and therefore between the government and the people.

And so, for the civic tech people of this generation, there's not such a large goal or gap to cross in terms of the diversity and trust. So, many of them are here in a very experimental spirit, right? They join for fun.

And one such newcomer, a new resident of Taiwan, Vitalik Buterin, is a good symbol. So, because he is now a resident enjoying full healthcare and everything, so he just visits us from time to time. And because he speaks really good Mandarin, so he started caring about, you know, what can he do with his, you know, TW FidO certificate, with the DID wallet. Is there something fun that he can build with the local people and so on?

And so, I think the canvas is much wider for Vitalik's generation and the generation after him. And I'm very happy about that. It means that we can worry less about people pulling each other back and worry more about, you know, emerging AI threats or things that are truly of a global nature. And our solutions can contribute to global commerce instead of things that are just specific to our policy.

Yeah, I totally agree. I feel that Taiwan is kind of the epicenter of the new movement of plurality and also Web3. How to use that Web3 technology for social good? Not just making money.

I know. I think just like we lowercase our ministry, moda. Of all ministries, we're the only lowercase ministry. Meaning we're the only ministry or we're just the moda, the motor that powers other ministries. So, you don't see us from the outside. You see us from the inside. We're replacing old engines into new motors, you know, EV and all that. So, this is our main metaphor.

So, when you see our official publication, when we mention web3, we always lowercase web3. So, web3 as an adjective, not as a noun. Because as a noun, it is subject to the hyper speculation, hype cycle as everything else is. You can capitalize not just one word, but two, like de-fy, right? De-ci, or whatever. But if you use it in a thoroughly lowercase way as a single word, it is just a short form for decentralization, which is very long, difficult to type. So, whenever I type decentralization, and I have to think whether to use British or American spelling, but no, I can shorten it to just web3, just four letters, like ‘i18n’, very easy to type. But I use that to strictly only mean decentralization or decentralized. So, when I say web3 infrastructure, I mean decentralized infrastructure and so on.

So as a shorthand, I think it is a very good meme to remind people that you don't have to centralize in order to deliver convenience or security. And in fact, decentralization is often the best way to avoid a trade-off between convenience and security, because people who want more convenience, they can decentralize and be more convenient. People who want to be more secure nevertheless can enjoy the layer one that is more secure, right? So, and this naturally leads to a more original internet-like open development process, but you know all that.

So long story short, I think using web3 as an objective and using civic as another objective. So web3 means interoperable across wider jurisdictions. Civic meaning that we're closer and trust each other more. So, together they become a decentralized civic infrastructure. And that is the vision of the plurality section, I believe.

You mentioned international in the beginning of this meeting. So, how do you see the international collaboration with such kind of digital ID world also?

Yeah, I think one of the most exciting things is that it doesn't require any pre-commitment, right? As long as we interoperate, as long as we use verifiable credentials or decentralized identifiers, we just happen to interoperate. And this is actually one of the best things about investing in public digital infrastructure in that we are notified of possible changes and uses that we cannot plan from the outset.

So, I think one of the main ways we can continue to work together is to expand on the international presidential hackathon and do more activities of mutual need discovery. And because our municipalities will soon share their public code contributions and use cases, and these will be available online, if you have equivalents in your municipalities and so on that allows for a very natural exchange on your next builder buy decision.

Maybe we use each other's code. Maybe we both use the Ukrainian Diia, which was freshly open sourced, and so on. And so, this kind of co-planning, I think, is the next logical step beyond the co-creation that is presidential hackathon.

I introduced the Presidential Hackathon to Tokyo Metropolitan Government, right? And now there is a conversation between Tokyo, right? And maybe how much can join to that hackathon? I think it would be nice to think about that.

Yeah, definitely. The co-planning, we have another term for that. It's called Ideathon. So, we have Hackathon, which produces code and data, fabric, and so on, and Ideathon that produces narratives, idea, use cases, scenario planning, and things like that.

So, I think Ideathon is, by design, aimed at younger generation. So, if you're a 14-year-old, if you're a 13-year-old, maybe you cannot code yet, or not a data scientist yet, but imagination is your strong suit. And so, many of them participate in the Ideathon before they do hackathon.

Actually, Code for Japan won the public bidding of Tokyo Metropolitan Government for operating next year for Hackathon…

Great! Congratulations!

So, I want to think more collaborative way of having the Hackathon together or something.

Yeah. I think we will also, in a couple years, want to host the Indo-Pacific Public Code Summit or something like that. So, I think this is also something that we would love help from our allies.

It is unlike g0v Summit, which mostly worked from a button-up grassroots agenda setting for Indo-Pacific, and we used the Indo because India stack has been doing a lot in the public code conversations around the world to something that is more intentional. For example, payment operability, right? That is a big thing everyone wants. And so, if we can plan that in advance, and in the Indo-Pacific Public Code to bring solutions to the table and actually make it more like an interoperability test. That will be the best thing because then he will foster a kind of trade agreement that's not nation to nation but rather trust system to trust system.

Okay, so other people who have questions?

Just two questions. How far should the government and the local government go in the development system? How should we listen to the operation of citizens? And how can we liberalize the power of the civic tech in that process? How should private sector companies be involved in this?

Great questions. Perfect for a conference of like six hours.

I will answer very briefly. So, I think the municipalities are closer to people's actual needs. And the national government is in charge for international protocols and international system that have an effect on the local law, the legal code. So, we are the competent authority on the cyber security code, the digital signature code which includes both law and technical components.

A lot of the problem happens when the agility of municipal governments exceeds that of the national government so that they are forced to set up, I don't know, local sandboxes or things like that that doesn't feedback to the national system, and which creates a problem when you want to interoperate across municipalities. One classic example is the Taipei municipality's work of cashless invoicing system but for people who want to do business in both Taipei City and New Taipei City, it means that they have to learn two systems because there's no way for them to interoperate in the New Taipei City and it's just one bridge across… they're actually, you know, very close.

So, I think the national government should focus on solving those interoperability issues we should never re-implement what the local government already has to offer but rather we should make it risk free for them to interoperate. So, to that end I mentioned the digital twin thing, right, in next year's infrastructure. So, we specifically said they can build the local government can only get our budget if they are willing to interoperate with their nearby municipalities. And if it's just doing things for its own municipality without sharing the code and things like that, then they're on their own. They're on their own budgets. So, these are just some of the very easy levers that we have to basically say, “we're lowercase and we want you to become lower case so that you can empower your nearby cities.” So, this is the first question.

As for the private sector, mostly in Taiwan, the civic tech ecosystem is comprised of people who already work in quite affluent private sectors. Think of MediaTek or Asus, Acer, Trend Micro, and so on. So, because they're a strong private sector ecosystem of hardware, of course, TSMC as its supply chain, and the cybersecurity who is supporting them. But also, increasingly with Google Look and so on, and so on, the new unicorns, a lot of these have in their mindset that their staff's contribution to civic tech is not just a good PR and HR strategy, but actually is a good way to test interoperability before their product hits the market.

And so, think of these as like public diplomacy units in those private sector firms. And there's a lot that we can do as the national government and competent authority to basically say, if you're an e-merchant and in the future if you're an internet advertiser, if you invest in this interoperability more, then you are going to comply better. You can either reuse the components we use for digital signature and so on, which are going to save you a lot of money if you invest in the co-development of the ID wallets, or you can roll your own. But then, we will have to do a lot of security inspection.

So, just through those policy levers, we can then encourage private sector to invest heavily, again, upfront into open source and civic tech, just because they can save on compliance costs later. So that's another lever we can use.

I feel like the theory is correct, but in reality I often explain the how the efficiency the new system compare of the old system. I feel sometimes it’s hard to design a system you are procuring because local IT vendors don't want to do that and back up that kind of idea because they want to lock the system. And the municipality is not like others… That would increase their work, they don't want to start new things. How do you convince about this?

And that is part of the question that I didn't answer, which is I think the national government has an obligation to do that - to detect emerging demands from the population. Because if there's a new emerging demand that everyone wants but the municipalities cannot answer yet, this is the perfect legitimacy to invest in service design and the discovery of what new services to deploy. And because we can prove that no matter which municipality you're in, everyone wants, for example, wants to get other online advertisement systems to stop showing celebrities to invite them into their latest coin or whatever scam.

Because now it's because of AI, it's now very easy for people to just clone somebody's voice or somebody's face. And so, we're now seeing a new crop of scam advertisements that you click and it says go to LINE, it's always LINE, for end-to-end encrypted conversation with this celebrity who will offer you the latest advice on Ethereum, probably not Ethereum, or dogecoin, or things like that. And really, it's very toxic for the online trust, because not only are those celebrities unhappy about it, it also makes this whole web3 crypto thing look like a scamming only activity. So, it's one of the top threats that we detected.

Now previously, when new situations like that happens, the line between the government state control and the platform's duty and the duty for the advertiser and private sector and so on are not always very clear. But now we can very efficiently, using a civic technology, to quickly get a picture of which measures the citizens think are okay, which are not okay after deliberation.

So, like tomorrow, we actually sent 170,000 SMS, random SMS, to Taiwanese people using the trusted number 111, so they know it comes from the government. And out of the people who filled in the survey, we chose 400 people that are representative of the Taiwanese population statistics. So, we know that these people are the microcosm of Taiwan. And tomorrow, for the entire afternoon, to the evening, we will send the data to the government. And in the afternoon, to the evening, they will meet online, in the stand for online deliberation, and consider the measures we're about to take for solving those information integrity issues.

It could be requiring digital signatures. It could be deploying a DID for advertisers. It could be constant online monitoring. It could be like many measures. But it's not just like a poll or a survey to vote yes or no. People can actually at their own thoughts, their own new options to ask experts and policy makers and so on. So, at the end of the day of deliberation, we will have a different picture compared to the survey results.

But these are rigorous in the sense that it's as rigorous as any Pew Research poll. So, we can use that and tell the legislature that in our next anti-scam law or anti-fraud law or whatever, we're now pushing only those things that people have already agreed on. And we're leaving out the things that people feel should be the purview of the private sector. And so, if we can keep doing this, then it creates new demands on the private sector that the municipality can then very safely rise to meet because they already know this has national approval. They don't have to view the legitimacy case by themselves. So, if the national government can keep doing this for all emerging issues, then it prepares the municipality for a race to safety. Not a race to risk when it comes to citizenization.

Oh, I understand. Thank you. So, by the way, do you have the government have the phone number of the citizens? Do you send? Do they send this?

Yes, we do. And well, it’s just random numbers. Because we have a national single number, 111, that every government agency is now switching to only use this for communicating with… Because there's a lot of fake SMS as well that says you have to pay your water bills or utility bills and so on. But because the short code cannot be faked, so we settled on the same short code for all of the government communication.

Wow. Japan doesn’t have that.

Local governments in Japan, small number of information officers handle security, system maintenance and operations. Does such a situation not exist in Taiwan? Is it difficult for local areas to find the government moves at such a fast pace? Local governments…

I didn’t get the last part.

Local government and municipalities think that it is difficult to catch up such high-tech innovation. Japan has 1,741 municipalities, so many local governments are very small and difficult to catch up to new technologies. How do you think?

Well, I mean, maybe it's not about catching up to new technologies. We always take the stance of helping the helpers. So, the idea is that the people who help their local citizens, we need to empower them, not to force them to use the national system. This is why the $6,000 NTD hand-out system deliberately chose these three different ways. People who are okay with post office, like my grandma, they still go to the post office. People who like convenience stores, everybody likes convenience stores, go to the convenience store and use the ATM machine embedded in the convenience store. People who use their phones just type their account and receive cash from their phones.

And so, if we had only used one or two of these three main ways of dispensing cash, there are some people who will be forced to retrain in the municipalities. But because these three already encompass all of the local governments, they are not going to be able to use the national system. So, because these three already encompass all of the options, really, for what people usually interact with the financial system. So, nobody needs to relearn anything. They just reuse whatever they have.

This is just like when we do mask pre-ordering or our vaccine registration. People who trust the local pharmacies, they go to the local pharmacies. People who trust the, again, convenience stores, go to the convenience stores. People who use the Universal Healthcare Express app will use the app.

And we sometimes, like for vulnerable population, of course, we will soon have a plan to give them like free 4G connectivity and so on. But even before that, we also make sure that they can just use a printed form and they can fill their envelope of their bank accounts or just write in their contact for receiving a check. And they can just fill it and put it into a nearby post place. And then, the AI recognition or OCR or whatever, have it on the backend.

So, for them, again, there is no difference of how they normally exchange things. But streamlining happens on the back end to help the helpers for them, right? So, this is the same principle we adopt this year for the age tech for people to empower the elderly people by helping their helpers instead of just treating them as people to be, you know, care-taking relationship. We want to make sure that they can shine on their own. Maybe they are comfortable only with live video. Then live video it is. Live video, if they only speak their local language, local language it is. If they only do sign language, sign language it is. So, by designing civic tech to fit the helpers, I think we can avoid a lot of the drawback on forcing the municipalities to retrain their staff.

It's very expensive to be accessible throughout, which is why we're getting infrastructure money.

But municipalities don't need to build such kind of systems.

Exactly. They only feedback the demand.

In Japan, municipalities have to implement… That is one of the problems.

But, I mean, surely if it's a national airport, the central government assumes most of the cost, right? Yeah, so we need to think about digital, like the ID wallet as like an airport.

Other infrastructure.

Right, exactly.

Just last question. As what you were saying, the focus has been how to use the technologies, but essentially, that is the social design. So, it's like, you know, refining the current democracy to something else. In other words, it's going to be a more evolved nature of the democracy. I think you have some vision about, you know, what's going to be the ideal democracy, the regime, sort of thing. I'm just curious what you're thinking about the future of democracy in Japan.

Yeah, I just finished cowriting a book. It will be finalized by this Sunday, which is two days from now, right? So, it's at plurality.net. Glen Weyl and I and a bunch of other people, Vitalik and so on, co-wrote this book.

The main idea is that in Taiwan, ‘shu wei,’ these two words, means both plural and digital. So, I'm also the minister for plurality. So, the ideal is this, to see the plurality, the diversity, the conflict caused by diversity as fuel for co-creation. And so, just like the rocket engine, right, it's just a series of rotating explosions, but it flies very fast. So, the whole idea is how to use technology to harness this explosion, but also to foster more diversity, so that there's a renewable fuel for social conflict into co-creation and so on. Because the current democracy is designed for the voting of the paper ballot. They force the high bandwidth conflict in this resolution into very few bits, right? In a referendum, that's one bit. A referendum of 14 tickets, 14 bits. Election of eight parties, three bits, right?

So, basically, its latency is very high every four years, but more crucially, the bandwidth is very low. It's just a few bits per person. But if we can use the democratic technologies to make sure that it connects to more people, but also more trustworthy, then it solves the trade-off between the, you know, very small municipality. Everybody knows each other. That's great, but it doesn't incorporate with this global system. Everybody votes with their cash, but nobody trusts anyone.

You can find a sweet spot in the middle and extend that toward a democratic system that is renewable in a very short period of time and is also very high bandwidth, as described in the book.

So, the current voting system… once or twice a year. Based on what you said, it is going to be ubiquitous…

Exactly. It's a continuous democracy.

Yeah, we are translating this into Japanese. And also, we will have a conference in July, including the plurality Tokyo. So, I want to invite you.

Excellent. Great. I wish I can agree to come, but I don't know what my job will be at the day. So once I know, I’ll let you know.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.