Alison Stringer: Well, thanks so much for your…I know my hat in life. Thanks so much for your time. I know you’re extraordinarily busy with so many things and I know that from open data, open government days. I thought I’d start, if its OK with you, about why me and why I’m here. Have you received a copy of the very brief agenda?

Audrey Tang: Yes, yes I did.

Alison Stringer: Why I’m here, my father was actually radicalized to the climate change denial and ended up being anti science near the end of his life and in October 2020 I was asked to write a research proposal in the meeting and I was stupid or crazy enough to say yes. That was with Tohatoha Aotearoa, which is the organization that formerly known as Creative Commons Aotearoa in New Zealand. I have worked for that organization since 2008.

Alison Stringer: I’d sit them up with I guess a consulting model, costumes. I would just write a research proposal to counter misinformation in Aotearoa. We’re still working on getting sustainable funding for that organization. They received small amounts of funding, but nothing sustaining yet.

Alison Stringer: I’m also aware that New Zealand English is quite difficult to understand. Please stop me if you can’t…

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. I don’t have an accent. I learned spoken English when I was like I don’t know 19, or 20 years something.

Alison Stringer: New Zealanders are number one to talk too fast, but it’s not really fast. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s fine. I pick up whichever accent of the person I’m talking to. I don’t have a native accent so that is entirely fine.

Alison Stringer: Thank you. I have a relatively unusual background. I overlap with technology, research, and civil society and government. I started life as a microbiologist. I’m still with the biologist and DOI by Pearson.

Alison Stringer: I worked for central government for quite a long time. I now work for myself as a consultant. I worked on issues like open data, open government, and data infrastructure for environmental data. Also, I’m trying to get contraction on green innovation.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Alison Stringer: Yeah. To put the ask at the beginning or the request at the beginning as well, I would love to talk hours about what’s the current state of misinformation. I want to look a little bit further out than that so I would really welcome…I hopefully I’m not the first person from New Zealand who said, “Please, Minister Tang, can you please tell us what you were doing and why it’s so successful?”

Alison Stringer: Please tell me I’m not the first person.

Audrey Tang: No, you’re not.

Alison Stringer: Good. I’m so glad.

Audrey Tang: It is a quite a few magazines and news reporters. I think the counter pandemic story is more well known, after all.

Alison Stringer: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I believe, Ms. Ardern, very beginning of the pandemic say we’ll just do whatever Taiwan does. That was early 2020. [laughs]

Alison Stringer: Look, if we’d followed that past, we might not have a camper far right activist on a parliament right now. I’m not sure if you’re aware of that. We have a [inaudible 03:44] . Yeah, of course you are. You were well informed.

Alison Stringer: I guess that’s my request. If there’s any information, documentation, particularly. If it’s not in English, I’m sure we can do something about that. I think it’s past time as you know to share what works. You may have already been doing that. I think New Zealand still looks to other nations who have not been quite so successful. The three things I want to speak about if we can in the limited.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Alison Stringer: Thank you for your time. One is the future. I’m not sure we have all the tools we need and that’s all the infrastructure or all the connections.

Alison Stringer: Two things, one in a crisis response. I think those of us who are not say Taiwan or Finland or some of the other are good examples would perhaps need to build much more quickly towards that social infrastructure. The tools, legislation, civil society structure that you and Taiwan have.

Alison Stringer: The second thing is, is there any way of accelerating what works? Increasing that uptake and dissemination from. Can we shorten the uptake curve? Obviously, particularly around COVID 19 but also, I’ve got connections to an organization in Canada on conflict zones which leads to my third point, which is the most difficult one in sustainable funding, that’s sustaining and funding any type of a challenge is challenging.

Audrey Tang: Maybe I do the reverse.

Alison Stringer: Of course.

Audrey Tang: Maybe I talk about the funding structure of the current country disinformation, apparatuses institutions in Taiwan and then we will go from there because it’s more concrete.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan is an ecosystem comprised of Trend Micro, which is Taiwan’s largest antivirus company, as well as Whoscall or Google Lock, which is a startup that has many users in Japan also and it’s a way to notice and block ads and calls and more many other things.

Audrey Tang: There’s entrepreneurs and established cybersecurity companies working on this problem. In Trend Micro’s case, the initial funding for the 防詐達人, don’t know how to translate that, something like “Myth buster” or “Scam buster”, is provided by the global engagement center that the US State Department international competition are countering disinformation.

Audrey Tang: I think they won the price, so they provide initial funding that converts an internal company kind of pet project that can invite to their instant message closed groups and virus scanner, because that’s what Trend Micro does, would scan for suspicious links, scams and things like that, but also scans for reported and clarifies this information and gets back to the group.

Audrey Tang: It’s not taking anything down, it’s rather adding context, it’s a real contextifier that people can contribute to.

Audrey Tang: When it comes to contribution, the CoFacts project from G0V also saw adoption from Thailand, for example.

Audrey Tang: CoFacts is the idea that if we work with these instant message companies, social media companies, to reveal the real time basic reproduction of the trending rumors.

Audrey Tang: Then, we have a dashboard of public mental health threads, and then we allocate wikilike more resource to provide real time clarifications to the things that are trending.

Audrey Tang: That’s a wikilike collaborative where anyone can join, but mostly they run weekly meetups, so they actually meet and squash the rumor of the week, that’s another part of that.

Audrey Tang: A lot of funding also comes from the Ministry of Education, which has its own project, media competence learning portal, and learn that moe.gov.tw, that allocates a lot of government funding into what we call media competence education, meaning via literacy we encourage students to contribute to the clause of fact checking as I mentioned, but also real time, for example, verification of the three presidential candidates as they were having debates and forums online.

Audrey Tang: They work also with public TV and other public media so that the students feel empowered because, whatever they disclose will appear to millions of watchers immediately and so on.

Audrey Tang: As a way to get people more involved and also the national petition platform, for example, there’s a lot of petitions that started as misinformed from misinformation but because 5,000 people joining the petition, we had this pro and con conversation calling without replepitance and the room for trying to grow.

Audrey Tang: Once we issued the clarification, there was a petition that said: “I wish to change the time zone to +9”, and a more thousand that said, “We should remain +8”, then we did a risk benefit analysis of how exactly that would cost, and sent to all the 16,000 people at once while inviting the representatives from each side to meet face to face in collaboration meetings.

Audrey Tang: The clarification work that’s usually built by deliberation, which didn’t use to spread back to their misinformed communities become much more easy to spread the clarification because if you sign on the petition, you will, of course, have been eligible and willing to take the booster shot, so to speak, of clarification information.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the dedicated teams in each ministries, we call them participation officers. If you look at a participation officer, you’ll find the materials regularly held deliberation workshops, where they serve as breakout group leaders to the issues that were raised by petitioner by other ministry that has nothing to do with their job.

Audrey Tang: For example, the coastal guard will facilitate a tax filing system redesign, the tax agency would have chaired the breakout groups of, for example, the ocean, surfing and fishing policies. The idea is that the citizens feel that those preservation officers are on the side of citizens, because the coastal guard also filed their own tax and the tax agency person also fish.

Audrey Tang: Basically, they take the citizen side, but turn those more misinformed energy into power. It’s like a motor that turns electricity outrage, or whatever, into direct action. Once it’s turned into direct action, that there’s nothing that still motivates people to share the misinformation because they know that they effect a change.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the PO sometime also work with the comedians, humorists, people who are good at making memes. Yes, we remix the current trending memes that are more trending than misinformation anyway, and then connect that to the clarification.

Audrey Tang: We call it humor over rumor so that we make sure that the clarification as surfaced by the fact checkers gets additional boost by making it essentially a viral vaccine. People voluntarily share this very funny information and remix them. Meanwhile, it takes the edge out of the outrage once it gets exposed to this funny but true things.

Audrey Tang: You probably remember there was a very viral clip called “Dumb Ways to Die.” I think it was from Melbourne, from Victoria. It’s a really good thing that they combine some document was very cute cartoon to achieve some virality. At the end of the day, that’s a public service announcement. Don’t stand our railroads or something.

Audrey Tang: We focus on producing things like that so it will go viral, and with pretty good success, especially encounter epidemic measures. That’s like the initial 10 minutes pitch and feel free to dive into any of this.

Alison Stringer: Yeah, it’s interesting because I think one of our greatest forces from the coverage responses data capture analyst and a picket sign. I’m not expecting you to have all the answers, but it’s saying it’s what can we adapt to that ecosystem?

Alison Stringer: Then what else is, for example, you were saying through the WHO is studying to use local song, to spread health messages, or not to be noted, to disseminate health messages and the like. I guess the question is always for somebody starting where to start?

Alison Stringer: The next question is how to adapt from that crisis response and the ending, building that longer term ecosystem, as you say, forgive the very simple question.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In Taiwan, we were blessed with regular earthquakes and typhoons and many other natural disasters.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, there’s any number of opportunities to run drills, so to speak, on disaster recovery and disaster communication so much so we have a entire website ci.taiwan.gov.twciviliot that combines the, for example, citizen led air quality measurement devices, with the state ones, earthquake, monitoring water resource and things like that.

Audrey Tang: For example, if you see on international media that we built this mask availability map apps more than hundreds of this in three days. That’s because it’s piggybacking on existing air quality and water quality collaborations, which has changed the data APIs and then is there.

Audrey Tang: Without this regular work on the lower impact disasters, I think it would not be possible to get the mutual trust when it comes to really large scale disaster be outbreaks are really aren’t large earthquakes.

Audrey Tang: Find some recurring disaster is something that is useful. For example, the water box team. They did talk to people in New Zealand, and people in New Zealand said, “OK, maybe in New Zealand, you don’t have the industrial areas bordering agricultural areas, problem that motivates this distributed ledger, multi party monitoring.”

Audrey Tang: There are similar dynamics, for example, on the dairy farms and swimmable water and things like that. It’s not about a specific issue that this solution can be ported over, is about a specific collaboration mechanism or mindset.

Alison Stringer: It’s interesting, because I think what is happening is this is part of the playbook of…We’re getting targeted now. We’re up to a smaller target previously. Taiwan knows exactly what’s that like. There’s going to have to be quite a record.

Alison Stringer: I hope anyway, so the next few weeks are going to be very interesting, but at least we had some examples to look towards, which is incredibly useful. You’ve actually eventually answered that question.

Alison Stringer: We need to run the crisis response on building on the infrastructure where existing drone scenery, or whatever geologically active with Reggie had a really worthwhile successful code respond. We don’t have some of the building blocks and we’re keeping on building those.

Alison Stringer: I don’t want to treat everything like a documentation problem, but how are you sharing and finding what works? Because is that mostly from your community that you’re building and then that builds out? Are you working from Finish example or other examples?

Audrey Tang: Usually what we do is that we amplify the social innovations that already worked locally like 500 people level. The trick here is basically, people closest to the pain are most of knowledgeable how to solve that.

Audrey Tang: What they lack is the empowerment that amplify their collaboration models to the national level because of communication barriers. It takes forever to communicate the specificity of a local. If you want to work on community building for example, it takes average five years until the local people trust you. [laughs] It’s hard to just port to adapt like this but what we’re doing essentially is making sure that people who have a good social innovation, we absorb all the risk.

Audrey Tang: I’ll use one example, there’s this annual event called the Presidential Hackathon, where the President gives out five trophies. Each is a shape of Taiwan’s micro projector. If you turn it on, it projects the President giving you the trophy as a recording as self describing…

Alison Stringer: That’s beautiful.

Audrey Tang: …meta trophy. The trophy promises that whatever you did in the past three months as a local social innovation will become national level policy with all the personnel, budget, and I guess regulatory, if needed, support that the President can muster. It has the same level as the presidential promise and we do track that.

Audrey Tang: Every year, hundreds and hundreds of projects gets proposed. We see that a lot of it, although, it’s nominally from the social sector. Probably, someone in the civil service wrote the meat of [chuckle] the proposal. Some middle level, civil servants, usually in municipal or town government knows exactly what it takes to solve the issue.

Alison Stringer: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: It’s too risky because they know there’s no political buy-in. Previously, there’s no budget. It would make trouble in their ranks and so on. Civil service is supposed to be anonymous so they post that through their social sector or academic friends. There’s two constraints to the selection process. First is that each need to correspond to one or more of the Sustainable Development Goal targets 169 times. It has to be good for everyone, not just good for Taiwan, and this is important.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that we use a novel voting method called quadratic voting, so that anyone with a Taiwan SMS number is eligible to vote. But unlike most Internet voting where leave most people feel they have lost. This system using 99 points, you can allocate it to the square number of the points of their votes is the point cost.

Audrey Tang: Usually, people vote for example, nine votes to their pet project, which costs 81 points. And you have 18 left, so you motivate to find another one, and then vote 4, that’s 16. Then there’s two left, so maybe you look for two more, and then you find some synergy so you take something back. That design is such that marginal cost of each vote is the same as marginal return of expectation.

Audrey Tang: People are motivated to share, truthfully, their idea on the synergies and team that didn’t make the top 20 based on quadratic voting will then become materials, basically talents that can rejoin the top 20 that they found through the quadratic voting that has this energy wisdom. It’s a really positive Internet voting scheme.

Audrey Tang: Once that happened, then is the three months of incubation period where we help those top 20 to realize their vision, both locally also on a larger municipal level. The five ones that actually showed promise in a cross sectoral way then gets state funding, but not to those people, to their ideas.

Alison Stringer: Good.

Audrey Tang: There’s no trophy money, but we are committed to make it happen, basically.

Alison Stringer: Nice.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like a traditional accelerator. It’s more like a way for the public service to amplify the anonymous good ideas with cross sectoral support, because then if you didn’t get it to the top 20, just so you know, we participate in a hackathon event, but you can take paid time off for that. But if you did win it, then people go to the stage and say I propose that and their career changes.

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the many designs that we did, along with the participatory officers, collaboration meetings, is a systemic way to very quickly surface social innovations to go beyond the four years of cycle when it comes to Mayor election and things like that.

Alison Stringer: It gets you around the popularity contests…

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Alison Stringer: …and with the funding of people who look like they shouldn’t sound like they should be funded.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Also this year, we are trying a different track. That is to say, if on the initial brainstorming stage, people all agree or voted that this is worth pursuing, but for some reason, the technology, for example. It involves six generation communication to enable co presence and we don’t have that yet.

Audrey Tang: Previously, they simply lose the Presidential Hackathon because there’s 30 percent allocated feasibility in the next fiscal year. That’s sad so we basically work with another team on speculative design, and say, what if we just turn that into a separate?

Audrey Tang: We call it ideas on track so that we make immersive, alternate realities and put our 60 researchers through these interactive, immersive reality so they can build the technology as the way that people imagined it in a pro social way, instead of some other more antisocial social media, naively connecting people until it explodes. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Basically, the vision building should also be funded but the funding then goes to the arts or the poets, the game makers and so what.

Alison Stringer: Yeah, sorry. I was sorry to wave it laid my pin at you. That’s something I’m going to talk.

Alison Stringer: I met the Taiwan head of your arts festival in the US. I went to speak to them, it was wonderful. Speak to them about how do you fund the arts in a similar way that you do amazing engineering or how do you bring these things together in a way that was that works for everybody? We are artists don’t feel explorative, etc.

Alison Stringer: I don’t want to say intellectual gap but I think to you, this is your business as usual for us to store the future. For me, I guess it’s closing that gap between what feels like an emerging issue for us and as a very mature. Sorry, you know this stuff.

Alison Stringer: For me, I guess my job I see at the moment has been bridging that gap. Also, seeing if there’s a way…I’m not sure this is a good idea but I’m going to see how I’m going to go down the track a little to see how to talk to funders . Specifically, which is blind and might not be a good idea. Specifically, perhaps for crisis response and conflict zones.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s your job. [laughs] I think it’s a really natural ally. I would also say that a lot of the quadratic voting and so on stuff did come from the Ethereum Community. It’s interesting because Ethereum community has many accesses. I think, NFTs.

Audrey Tang: There’s also a branch of them working on funding public goods and they reinvent a lot of things that the social entrepreneurs already know about. For example, their retroactive goods funding is exactly as the idea of the, what was the word, impact bonds. Pay for success, that’s the English.

Alison Stringer: Yeah, honestly.

Audrey Tang: Right. They reinvented this whole pay for success thing because they need to. I think it’s worth connecting a little bit because a lot of the fundamental economics has already being worked out by the impact investors and social entrepreneurs.

Audrey Tang: It’s just that previously, it requires state funding because for massive scale things that require RCTs to prove that this shortens jail times or this improve the quality of lunch, this improves the quality of education, really no other players than the state. Not even the Gates Foundation can run it on the national level.

Audrey Tang: Ethereum provides a different configuration is a different polity that can run it on their national level statistic. We say, a quicker iteration and also was funding. For example, we didn’t quite get to quadratic funding yet. In Ethereum, the Bitcoin, people already implemented quadratic funding to pretty good success to fund public goods. The open collective and many other CRR funds are also looking to partner with them. Not to get to the NFT bandwagon, but to get to the core economics working together.

Alison Stringer: Yeah, I’m afraid to mind who runs the Four Thieves to collect over that I’ve made contact of speaking. Trying to work that out as well. We’re nearly at time and I’m sure you have another meeting right on the half hour so thank you so much for your time, Minister. I really appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: Last thought. Kickstarter, which is a B Corp. A crowds’ funding site called Kickstarter. It also looking to move to a carbon negative distributed ledger to basically turn itself into a more decentralized autonomous organization. It may also be a natural ally of sort.

Audrey Tang: If we’re thinking about funding public goods that are good…as I said from a local innovation to a global application way because that’s what Kickstarter is good at to give international exposure to local ideas.

Audrey Tang: The initial funding would not be from crowd funding, but crowd funding is a good way to get the message out that you are actually working with the people, not just for the people. It’s like one of the PR angles that I would not dismiss. That’s my last thought.

Alison Stringer: Thank you so much for your time and I wish you and your country stay safe and well.

Audrey Tang: Yes, thank you. Live long and prosper. Bye.

Alison Stringer: Thank you. Bye bye.