Hello Taiwan my and hello friends old and new. Two years ago in Bangkok, I joined your audience. Today, I open the third Congress. Our ancestral fork theme calls for privacy and kinship for the planet, for people, and for an internet of beings. In 2012, civic hackers in Taiwan grew tired of unusable government websites.
We build our own versions and hosted them at g0v.tw. That is gov.0 with the O turned into a zero. We forked the government.
A fork does not reject what exists. It takes what is there in a new direction, and if the idea is good, the main line can merge the change. Three years on, Taipei City adopted the volunteer's budget visualization, and later I joined the cabinet from that community and published official meeting transcripts with participants' consent in the public domain. So, anyone can fork and branch out. Privacy builders, human rights defenders, open source AI makers, and policy makers all branch in different directions.
Yet, like a living ecosystem, I hope we still share one ancestor. The conviction that technology must answer to the people and the world it touches. Let's keep collaboration voluntary and keep fighting on common ground. Collective intelligence can keep big tech in check. In 2024, as scam ads impersonating real people spread in Taiwan, we randomly text the citizens to deliberate online.
Software facilitated the listening. The people formed the judgments. While the government was already drafting the bill, this civic deliberation gave it the backbone of public scrutiny. Decima, the law required major advertising platforms to verify all advertisers and impersonation scam ads fell by more than 94% in a year's time. At this congress and beyond, two challenges deserve our attention.
First, proving our personhood without surrendering our privacy. Second, keeping the right to fork. To nurture a healthy ecosystem, we need systems that communities can inspect and steer and the freedom to leave a platform with our data and our friends. And to scale this kinship globally, Eileen Ladamore and I recently wrote an essay in Noema. We proposed a standing global assembly chosen by lot to let the people set the pace for frontier AI with labs and governments required to answer in public.
As GovZero says, ask not why nobody is doing this. You are the nobody. We the people are truly the superintelligence. Let's be good enough ancestors together. Thank you and live long and prosper.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.