Audrey Tang: OK.

Ann Chen: Great.

Audrey Tang: Let’s get started.

Ann Chen: Thank you so much for meeting with me.

Audrey Tang: Uh-huh. Sure.

Ann Chen: I’ll just say a little bit about myself. My name is Ann Chen, and I’m an artist and filmmaker. I’m also teaching at NYU Shanghai in Interactive Media Arts. The article that I’m writing is for “Logic” magazine, which is a tech and culture magazine.

Audrey Tang: It’s online or is it also printed?

Ann Chen: It’s both. It’s online and in print.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Ann Chen: I think this one will go to print. Every issue they have a different theme. The next theme is on care. The article I’m writing is about Taiwan’s response to COVID-19, specifically through the use of technology. I’ve been reading in Western media how they’ve been propping up Taiwan as a model for using technology effectively.

Audrey Tang: Call it the Taiwan Model.

Ann Chen: The Taiwan Model democratically and effectively. I was wondering from your perspective how large of a role technology has in Taiwan’s response.

Audrey Tang: Technology isn’t just information technology or just a technology. Very important chemical technology is maybe the most important technology along with alcohol hand spray.

Audrey Tang: This being a respiratory disease, even if you have all the mask produced, and we’re still making 12 million a day or something, even you keep all the physical distancing rules, if you don’t wash your hands properly, then chances still are that people will touch some surface and touch their own face.

Audrey Tang: I would argue soap is the most important technology. It’s hands-down really there’s no alternative than soap and hand spray. On top of soap and hand spray, you can of course wear a mask to protect yourself from your own hands.

Audrey Tang: It’s a threefold function. First, it protects your mouth from you own hands. Second, it reminds you to wash your hands properly. Third, it’s a social signal to remind other people to also take care of themself by washing their hands properly. That’s essential.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re billing mask as something that protects the wearer, not something that people wear to protect others. It also makes this idea easier to spread.

Ann Chen: It seems to me that the communication strategy is equally as important?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Ann Chen: I’ve been reading before on how because of SARS and Taiwan’s previous response to SARS it adjusted the way that they would approach future pandemics. I’m curious how. I want to get back to technology, more specific the digital technology, because I understand the importance of all the tech…

Audrey Tang: Social technologies.

Ann Chen: Social technologies, but digital, as well, and its role in it. It’s not necessarily that it’s a large one or a small one.

Audrey Tang: Digital is the amplifier. Although every day during the pandemic that our Central Epidemic Command Center holds a daily press conference, if it’s not for the digital live streaming then it will only reach a fraction of the audience, but because it’s always live streamed online in multiple platforms people can also make a discussion on the various public forums.

Audrey Tang: If they have any questions, or even suggestions, they can pick up their phone, which is digital technology-ish, [laughs] and then call 1922. This is a hotline with 90 percent or more pickup rate.

Audrey Tang: They can pick up their phone, call 1922, and say, “Hey, I know a boy who refuse to go to school,” because all you have in their district is pink medical mask and he was afraid that people would laugh at him. Then the very next day everybody in the CECC press conference start wearing pink medical mask.

Audrey Tang: This very quick feedback cycle is enabled and amplified by digital technology, but as its core is still the CECC officers having a face-to-face meeting with journalists every day, every 2:00 PM, answering every question.

Ann Chen: I was hearing about the press conferences, how the journalists are allowed to ask questions exhaustively.

Audrey Tang: Pretty much anything.

Ann Chen: Anything that they want until they’re satisfied.

Audrey Tang: Until they run out of questions.

Ann Chen: Can you tell me a bit about the reasonings behind that?

Audrey Tang: Journalism is our main ally against, some call it, the info-demic, because during the pandemic people are by nature stressful. Because of the anxiety and the stress there could be a rumor that spreads very easily, leads to, say, panic buying in many jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan there was a time when for two days people rushed to buy tissue papers because there was a rumor, started by tissue paper reseller, that said the medical mask are the same material as tissue paper. Because we’re ramping up the mask production from less than 2 million a day to over 2 million a day, at a point 20 million a day at its peak, so we’re going to run out of tissue papers.

Audrey Tang: The journalists, of course, brought this to attention to the CECC press conference and ask about, for example, the material. It’s different material. Tissue paper came from South American material. It’s pulp, but the medical mask are plastic and it came from domestic materials. The CECC explained that.

Audrey Tang: It’s always translated into a memetic picture. That is to say, a funny Internet meme. In the case of tissue paper it’s our Premier, Su Tseng-chang, wiggling his buttocks and say, “Each of us only have one pair of buttocks.” It’s very funny. Hilarious, even. It went viral.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that if the journalists are allowed only to ask the questions in one exchange per day then people won’t satisfy with the answers that CECC pushes out, but because it’s multiple rounds the journalists then works as co-detective with the CECC.

Audrey Tang: In fact, at one point Commander Chen Shih-chung said, “OK, how about we off you all,” the journalists, “free epidemiology classes so that you can do the contact tracing with us.” He said that very sincerely.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, VP, at that time, Chen Chien-jen, the author of the epidemiology textbook, recorded such a crash course, and so everybody can learn some basic terminology so that the journalists can ask questions on a more equal scientific ground.

Audrey Tang: Everybody became like amateur epidemiologists after a few months of listening to every day’s press conference.

Ann Chen: Is there precedence for this kind of structure? Is this how the government typically interacts with journalists?

Audrey Tang: There’s precedence, for example, when there’s a major disaster. When there’s earthquake, landslide, typhoon, things like that.

Audrey Tang: The CECC is just one of the central command centers when there’s a large-scale earthquake or some other kind of natural disaster. Pandemic is kind of a natural disasters. It’s very, very prolonged.

Ann Chen: Back to the example you gave of the rumors about the masks, what was the time frame of all of this? When the rumor came out, when journalists and then…? I’m curious.

Audrey Tang: All ministries are required to respond within two hours with two funny pictures, each of them less than 200 characters. That’s called the triple-two principle.

Audrey Tang: Journalists will have more investigation. Journalists would like to know, for example, “OK, so we’re not running out of tissue papers, but are we going to peak at our production of mask? Are we constrained by the source material or are we constrained by the machines?”

Audrey Tang: They’ll ask all those questions. The CECC then takes to answer it at latest on next day’s 2:00 PM press conference. It’s a 24-hour iteration cycle.

Ann Chen: There’s a graphics communications team whose job it is to create these…?

Audrey Tang: Comedies, yes. The participation officer, the person in charge of communicating with people online in the civil society of the Ministry of Health and Welfare lives with a dog. That’s Zongchai, the spokesdog of the CECC.

Audrey Tang: What they did is that after each CECC press conference they would go home, take picture of the dog, and make funny picture. Say, “It’s rude not to cover your mouth. Don’t put your hand to your mouth. Wear a mask to protect you from other hands. Remember to keep two dog away from each other if you’re out, or if you’re indoor three dog away, and so on.”

Audrey Tang: They don’t have to pay Shutterstock. There’s an endless stream of dog pictures.

Ann Chen: Can you share these with me later?

Audrey Tang: Of course. It’s online.

Ann Chen: It’s so interesting that the government’s adopting Internet culture in spreading the news.

Audrey Tang: This is our Premier wiggling his bottom.

Ann Chen: It’s an effective strategy?

Audrey Tang: It’s super effective. If you look at this meme, it’s funny on multiple levels. The text description to this meme is [Taiwanese] . That’s a homonym. It’s a joke because [Taiwanese] sounds the same in Mandarin as [Taiwanese] as twin bottom. That’s funny on that part, the format. This picture itself is a tissue paper box, and so on. There’s many levels of fun.

Audrey Tang: When people feel that it’s funny, this is what we called humor over rumor, they will share it. Everyone who look at this picture will remember that tissue paper came from South American materials, and so we will not run out of tissue paper. After they see the disinformation afterward, they will not spread it. It works like a vaccine to the infodemic.

Ann Chen: That’s so interesting. I haven’t really heard [laughs] of any other government using this strategy.

Audrey Tang: Professional comedians.

Audrey Tang: The designer of this, by the way, is now our administration spokesperson, Evian Ting, Ting Yi-ming.

Ann Chen: Does this encourage people also to create their own memes or share these?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course, to remix.

Ann Chen: I’ve got something, specifically this one article I read by Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl in Foreign Affairs, where they declare that civic tech is a way of stopping the pandemic. That, to me, was very interesting, because I’m very interested in the ways that civic technology can change governance.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Ann Chen: I’m wondering how accurate do you think that portrayal is?

Audrey Tang: Very, very accurate. In the Taiwan civic tech scene, there’s this g0v movement, where for each government website, which always end in gov.tw, that they don’t like, they just change the O to a 0. Then you get into the shadow government website, which is…

Ann Chen: Like a parallel?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, which is always more fun. The point here is that they don’t have to pay for advertisement or anything. You just change O to a 0 and you get into a civic tech reimagination, like public service. It’s on g0v slack channel, where they came up with this idea of the visualization of which stores nearby, which pharmacies still have the masks in stock.

Audrey Tang: You can see this particular one still have 58 adult masks and 196 children’s masks. Because of the civic tech demonstration, as in not protest, as in a demo of the possibility that Premier Su Tseng-chang look at this and say, “OK, we need to support these people.” The National Health Insurance Agency published this information.

Audrey Tang: Unlike pretty much any jurisdiction which publishes only every day or every week, we publish every 30 seconds. Once we do that, it become like a distributed ledger in which people can just go to a nearby pharmacy, swipe their NHI card, expect this number after a couple of minutes to become 49, because there’s 9 masks if you’re adult or 10 if you’re a child.

Audrey Tang: If it doesn’t decrease but rather increase, they will call 1923 right there and say something is wrong with the rationing system. It keeps everybody honest. On the day of launch, we have two maps and one chat bot. Just a week after, we have more than 100 tools taking care of, for example, people with blindness and so on.

Ann Chen: These were all created just by people in the public?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, by civic technologists.

Ann Chen: By civic technologists. I guess I was trying to recreate the timeline of all of this. Was it like it became apparent that the pandemic was serious enough that needed to be addressed? Did the government send out anything saying, “We need help,” or did people just voluntarily start working with what was there?

Audrey Tang: The people just voluntarily start working. Instead of a government for the people, I always stress it’s a government with the people. In this particular case, it’s government after the people. [laughs] They already came up with that idea. We started, when we were rationing the masks, saying that “Oh, it’s such a good idea.”

Audrey Tang: Everybody needs to make sure that the visualization continues after we start rationing in the pharmacy. The actual implementation came a few days before we start rationing masks in the pharmacies.

Ann Chen: I see. Where is your role in all of this? How does the government find out about…?

Audrey Tang: I’m like a cultural translator. When I noticed that Howard Wu, Wu Zhanwei, who originally prototyped this before convenience stores, because at the time the masks were still sold in convenience stores, I just showed just this to our Premier in a meeting, saying that people are already doing this in a civil society.

Audrey Tang: The Premier immediately understood the importance, saying that “Oh, this is just a GPS navigation. The red although it’s more close, it’s like a congested road traffic jam. The green although it’s farther away, it’s like a smooth road. You should go there instead of the red one,” which is a very good intuition.

Audrey Tang: Then he said to the NHIA right there that we need to trust these people with open data. That’s why they started publishing 30 seconds at a time the stock level of all the pharmacy. It also enabled decision-makers to look at these civic tech dashboards. There are people who analyze.

Audrey Tang: For example, this is when we start ramping up the production so we can ration nine masks per two weeks instead of three masks per week. Then everybody can see it’s very transparently. They also highlight in which precincts or townships is there a undersupply or oversupply.

Audrey Tang: Every week when we do the mask meeting, I will show this analysis from the civil society to the Premier saying that “OK, we need to adjust our distribution strategy.” This shows that in municipalities with very long working hours, there’s 30 percent of people who cannot get the mask, because when they go off work, the pharmacist has already closed.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we started working with convenience stores enabling 24-hour pickup. Then Premier smiles heavily during that collaboration.

Ann Chen: That analysis and realization came directly from what the civic hackers…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, from the civic tech.

Ann Chen: …were able to gather and show? That’s pretty impressive. It’s also highly efficient, the speed of…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, interaction. Just like daily interaction. The civic technologists in South Korea took this and asked their government, “Taiwan can do this, it’s a Taiwan model, why can’t we do it?” A month after we rolled this out, the Korean pharmacies started rolling out exactly the same API as the Taiwanese model.

Audrey Tang: The first map they’ve got running in South Korea is actually by Finjon Kiang in Tainan. Even though he doesn’t speak Korean, he speaks JavaScript, which is what counts. That’s a direct export of civic technology.

Ann Chen: In South Korea…

Audrey Tang: They’re also using the map.

Ann Chen: …is it also civic hackers, or was it working directly with the government there?

Audrey Tang: It’s also the civic technologists.

Ann Chen: The civic technologists.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Howard will start at that point referring himself not only as a civic technologist but as a civil engineer, which is interesting because in Taiwan civil engineer usually means people that builds bridges and highway.

Audrey Tang: In a sense because their work is being regularly used by more than 10 million people in Taiwan, and once half of the population use your work, you might as well be a civil engineer.

Ann Chen: I see. That’s interesting. Where are things now in terms of…?

Audrey Tang: We’re post pandemic. We’re handing out Triple Stimulus Vouchers. I just came from the Triple Stimulus Voucher press conference. A funny thing though is that as you can see here people can collect Triple Stimulus Vouchers from post offices. You see a very similar map that shows where the post office are and how much they have in stock. That’s exactly the same API as the mask map.

Audrey Tang: People can order, pre-order to those different convenience stores and supermarts using an online interface. Again, this interface is exactly the same as the mask pre-ordering system.

Audrey Tang: You can also get Triple Stimulus Vouchers from a kiosk in a convenience store, pre-ordering for the next week. Again, this came from the mask pre-ordering system. All the three mask-rationing systems were then repurposed to use for stimulus purposes.

Ann Chen: Do you think, because I think a lot about coming from the US where we don’t have universal healthcare yet…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, single-payer.

Ann Chen: …single-payer system and that collected database, do you think this kind of method or strategy could work in places without this ease of being able to, because everyone could scan their ID card and immediately get masks?

Audrey Tang: What’s the most important is to communicate that mask are there to protect you from your own hands. You can do this with cute dog pictures. US people also like cute dog pictures. I don’t think there’s anything particularly Taiwanese about cute dogs. Actually, I think the Dodge meme came from US. Use more cute dogs. Don’t panic.

Ann Chen: It seems like a unified, effective messaging is more important.

Audrey Tang: Right. It’s much more important. As far as I know in some parts in the US that they’re still relying on a mask-up or mask-for-all campaign trying to convince people of the importance of medical mask or at least cloth face mask in protecting you from your own hands.

Audrey Tang: On that messaging, you really need to think mask to hand washing because if you don’t have that even if you have the best digital rationing system of mask, people are not going to wear it, and then what’s the point.

Ann Chen: Right. That’s very true. Just to step back a bit to make sure that I got all the information, can you describe to me the relationship between the hacker community and the government and how it’s evolved over time and how this example of the tools for the pandemic have…?

Audrey Tang: The first time that people became aware of the g0v movement for many people in Taiwan was when in 2014 a bunch of students occupied the parliament working basically to end peace we’re on strike. They refused to deliberate substantially the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement or CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: The student occupied parliament and worked with 20 or so NGOs across different spectrums. Sometime the NGOs work on the human right, labor right, environmental rights.

Audrey Tang: Sometime they work on, for example, whether we need to allow PRC components in our 4G infrastructure. The consensus on the street was no. There’s no market player in PRC, so we built our entire 4G infrastructure without any PRC components. Now those people are talking about the same thing but in 5G.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what we are doing at that time is a demonstration but not a protest, but rather showing people this kind of civic technology, working in a situation when people focus on the same topic, at that time the CSSTA, can actually produce a set of very strong commitment of everyone to talk together and get consensus for demand at the end, not one less, which was then adopted by the head of parliament, so it was a successful occupy.

Audrey Tang: After that civic technologists became reverse mentors to the cabinet at the end of 2014. I started working in this office as a essentially reverse mentor around end of 2014.

Ann Chen: I just find that really amazing that the government is willing to reach out to the people who were sort of anti-government.

Audrey Tang: We’re not anti-government.

Ann Chen: Not totally…

Audrey Tang: We’re basically saying that the government should work with people, trusting people, making itself transparent to the people, that the government should not just say we’re working for people. We know the best. We’re not against government per say, but we’re against this kind of top down way of essentially patriarchal imagination of government.

Ann Chen: It also seems like the government is adopting those strategies as well.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely.

Ann Chen: When I hear about the way they talk about working with this or fighting this pandemic, the key things are transparency.

Audrey Tang: Look at the pink medical mask.

Ann Chen: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They don’t look like patriarchs at all.

Ann Chen: No.

Ann Chen: No, it’s very gentle.

Ann Chen: There’s very open communication between the hacker community and the government it seems.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the civic hacker. Yes.

Ann Chen: Where do you see that developing in the future? Where is that going?

Audrey Tang: In two ways, one is that once empowered, people will feel that there’s more and more that the government when there’s a disaster, when there’s a natural disaster or whatever, the civil society can act faster than the government.

Audrey Tang: Then the government will learn that for even prolonged natural disaster like, I don’t know, air pollution or something, people’s network where people collect the data, curate the data, and donate the data, but bargain as they did in Collision or data collective with the government can demand, that the government will work on their terms. This is very important.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have tens of thousands of air-measurement stations run by the civil society, sometimes primary school teachers on their school, their balcony, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They have a much more comprehensive coverage of the actual air quality compared to the official ones, so much so that they then negotiate with the environment minister saying that we will let you calibrate our numbers and make calculations on the national high-speed computing center using our data.

Audrey Tang: In exchange, we would like you to set in these industrial parks, which are private property, our design of the micro sensor of air. We complied to the social sector innovation.

Audrey Tang: Now the lamps, which are owned by the municipal government in major industrial parks often come with those air quality sensors called AirBox. That contributes to the understanding. This is not our only thing. People around the world can just download the hardware and software and run with this.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that the social-sector-led data coalition is one very exciting development often based on distributed ledgers and other technology. That’s one part.

Audrey Tang: The other part is the government itself is encouraging public-sector entrepreneurs through, for example, the presidential hacker fund where any public servant can just give an idea. I want to solve water leaks. We want to solve, in remote islands there’s a lack of medical resources, so why don’t we just teleconference in the specialized doctors from the main island and so on.

Audrey Tang: Every year we choose five such winners, and they all get a trophy which is shaped like Taiwan. When you turn on the micro projector, it projects the president herself giving you the trophy. The president attends actually the workshops of the presidential hackers all listening to all the pitch.

Audrey Tang: The president’s trophy, there’s no money, but it says whatever you did in the past 3 months, the president commits to make it public policy in the next 12 months. That’s executive power shared with entry-level public government officials as public servants so to encourage the entrepreneurship, that is to say entrepreneurship within the public sector.

Ann Chen: Does this almost like stamp of approval make it easier for these projects to get funding, to…?

Audrey Tang: To get the state’s blessing basically.

Ann Chen: The state blessing. Just to go back to the other project, the air-sensing project, is that run by an NGO or how is it…

Audrey Tang: This one?

Ann Chen: Yeah. Is it…?

Audrey Tang: It’s a distributed ledger. Anyone can join. The main coordinator is from Academia Sinica, which is a top research organization which doesn’t belong to Ministry of Education or anything. It’s a special research agency directly reporting to the president. There’s a researcher, Dr. Chen Ling-Zhi, coordinating the various organizations.

Audrey Tang: The main groups installing these, they’re just grassroots organizations all across Taiwan.

Ann Chen: People are just volunteering their time to do this.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm. It’s really cheap. Each box is less than 100 US dollars. In Taiwan, you can get just for 16 US dollars a month unlimited 4G data connection, so keep it running doesn’t cost you anything.

Ann Chen: I see. To go back to the digital maps and the tools that were created for the mask-inventory systems, people are hosting it on their own?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Ann Chen: They’re donating their time and money to it? Are they collecting fundraising, or are other people donating money? How do you keep it going?

Audrey Tang: The original one done by Howard is sponsored by Google.

Ann Chen: OK.

Audrey Tang: Google basically said that as soon as they went very public, Google said as long as you say it’s from the Google Development Group and sponsored by Google Cloud, that’s kind of like product placement, then Google is committed to keep it running, and they kept to their word.

Audrey Tang: They kept it running for quite a few months until we introduced kiosk purchasing at a convenience store at which point queuing really isn’t a problem in pharmacy anymore. Google spent quite a few resources not only hosting but also developers in a local developer group to keep this one running.

Audrey Tang: One by Finjon Kiang is entirely grassroots using opensource maps and opensource tools. The hosting is done by GitHub, which is Microsoft, and which hosts the static content for free.

Audrey Tang: More developments are hosted by National Center of High-Speed Computation, NCHC, which is taxpayer money, but they’re willing to offer for free any computing and storage instance related to COVID until the end of the year.

Ann Chen: Did Google see this in the media, then reached out and said, “Oh, we’d be willing to sponsor”? That was how…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because the media reports widely that Howard Wu paying on his own pocket owes Google something like 20K US dollars just for two days of posting it. For Google, it’s a really good business development opportunity, too, because for us, there’s two maps and one chat bot on the day of launch. It’s not like we have to run the Google one.

Audrey Tang: I said to Google I’m willing to place the Google-sponsored map on the top of the directory, but only if they agree to waive Howard Wu’s payment. They eventually convinced their managers.

Ann Chen: You were also part of that conversation and negotiation?

Audrey Tang: I’m also part of that negotiation essentially.

Ann Chen: I’ve also joined the Slack group as well. I’ve been following all the different channels. How active are you on it? Are there other people in the government who are also active?

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of people who are also public servants active in it, and also contractors. On the Slack, there’s someone with the name of Frank, Frank Cheong. I’ve never really met him until way after the pandemic. Frank was the person in charge of developing the online chat bot [Taiwanese] .

Audrey Tang: He is from the organization called HTCDQ. Their chat bot have millions of subscribers. On the LINE platform, which is very popular in Taiwan, you can just click Ji Guan Jia [Taiwanese] and say, “Hey, where is the nearest pharmacy,” and still have the map. For many people, it’s easier than opening a map.

Audrey Tang: They look at open data on the very day of launch. Even before Finjon Kiang and Howard Wu finished their maps, they’re like, “Hey, we finished our implementation.” They are actually contractors of the Center for Disease Control, of the CDC, but they did it completely unprompted.

Audrey Tang: They’re like, “Oh, this is super helpful. This is a value to our users.” Of course, this is open data. A lot just go for it.

Ann Chen: It seems like people are just connecting over Slack to do this work with each other.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Ann Chen: That’s pretty amazing. What’s interesting is how you would think, like with civic tech, it seems like there is a multiplicity of versions or replicas of similar things.

Audrey Tang: Hundreds of them.

Ann Chen: It feels messy, but at the same time, it provides almost like alternative ways for people to get at the same information.

Audrey Tang: They actually complement each other. This is a standard map. If you, for example, have a eyesight issue, then, of course, you will prefer something that can be read out by your assistive intelligence, by your voice reader. Table is going to be very useful to you. Or, sometimes people would like to see not individual pharmacies. They just want to look at the whole map of Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Just like the air pollution thing that I showed you before, people want to say, “How is the distribution even or uneven?” For a while, there was a lack of mask. You will see that’s in orange or something on the northern part, but southern part will have extra supply. We can change the distribution strategy based on these real numbers. This is also very useful.

Audrey Tang: Of course, this one is extremely, frankly, even if your phone has a very small screen or something, they can very easily and quickly point you to precisely the one pharmacy that is most time-effective for you to go to. As you can see, depending on where you are in Taiwan, like we’re around here. It will just show you at this level the one that has the most…

Ann Chen: The exact number.

Audrey Tang: …mask available. You would probably just go there.

Ann Chen: Cool. That’s helpful. Can you describe to me a bit your ministry’s role and your team’s role in this whole ecosystem?

Audrey Tang: We’re a office with secondments from 12 or so ministries. There’s no single ministry. Every ministry may send up to one secondment to my office. They’re still working for their ministries’ work, but they agree to work out loud. Meaning that not afraid of letting other ministries know what they’re working on. It’s more like a horizontal leadership thing.

Audrey Tang: The main point here is that when people discover that there’s a better practice in some other ministry, they can learn very easily on this network. That’s the core of our office. In each ministry, there’s also a team of participation officers. Some of them live with a dog and take picture of their dog.

Audrey Tang: They’re charged with the task of engaging people who have emergent issues to talk about. not necessarily about the pandemic, about pretty much anything.

Ann Chen: I see. You have someone from the health ministry here as well and…

Audrey Tang: In the Ministry of Health, there’s a participation of this network in that ministry. They may or may not send a secondment to my office. Most people-facing ministries such as Ministries of Justice and Interior, Education, Culture, Communication, Finance, and so on were in this office.

Audrey Tang: Some of them were here from Foreign Service on a rotating basis. The Foreign Service sends someone and they go back to become a section chief. They send someone else and so on.

Ann Chen: In that way, you’re connected then and they’re connected to each other?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, because digital transformation is the whole of society approach. It doesn’t make sense to say, “Hey, the Foreign Service should be analog and the Council of Agriculture should be digital.” It doesn’t work out that like that. Everything is cross-ministerial.

Ann Chen: Moving beyond the civic technology, I’m curious about the other ways the government has used digital technology. For example, the digital fencing with the telecommunications with mobile phones and quarantining people and making sure that they’re staying within…

Audrey Tang: The digital fence?

Ann Chen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: The digital fence is a very simple technology. It’s by choice. Once you return to Taiwan from a high-risk area, which is pretty much everywhere in the world, you can choose to go to a quarantine hotel, in which case you’re physically barred from leaving for 14 days. If you live in a household with plenty of room and you don’t live with vulnerable people, you can also choose home quarantine.

Audrey Tang: Digital fence basically says, “OK, it’s your phone, or if you don’t have a mobile phone, and then we give you a phone for 14 days.” That phone, which already communicates to nearby cell phone towers to measure the strength of signal, that’s like if it’s five bars out of five, it’s very close to the tower. If it’s three bars out of five, it’s a lot farther away.

Audrey Tang: The three nearby cell phone towers, if you draw the distance in three circles, it’s called triangulation, then those three circles will meet at one point. That’s where the phone is. Because of the nature of cell phone transmission, it’s not very precise, even in the urban areas. It only knows in 50-meter radius or so. A very rough estimation.

Audrey Tang: It’s more privacy-preserving in two accounts. First, it’s not GPS. We’re not asking you to install a app that reports GPS, because the GPS would know in which room you’re in in your household. We don’t need to know that information. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that the cell phone operators aren’t collecting this anyway. This is not new information being collected.

Audrey Tang: Even the SMS that’s sent when your phone moves out of the digital fence to the local household managers or local police. These are already a well-understood system called cell broadcasting. Like after an earthquake, if you’re in a area that’s dangerous because of landslide potential, you get such a SMS, or, if there’s a typhoon and you’re in a flood area, and so on.

Audrey Tang: People understand intuitively how that works. Instead of collecting new data or requiring you to install a new app, we repurpose exists existing data collected and existing notification mechanisms to create something that people are more comfortable with.

Ann Chen: It calms people’s fears that more of their private data is being taken.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s exactly the same data that the telecoms are already collecting anyway. It’s exactly the same notification mechanism. The constitutional limits on our work says that after the 14 days of quarantine, there’s no limits of us continuing to provide you service, but there is no rationale for us to keep your data collected.

Audrey Tang: After 14 days, if you still feel unease, for example, you can apply for a RT-PCR testing and pay for it yourself. We do not track your cell phone after that.

Ann Chen: It’s just very clearly within the boundaries of…

Audrey Tang: Of time and space.

Ann Chen: …of the time and space of this pandemic. Let me see. That might be it for me. Is there anything you feel like I’ve missed that…?

Audrey Tang: For people in home quarantine, we thank them for their patience. We pay them 33 US dollars per day as a stipend. You don’t have to worry about your job or healthcare and so on.

Ann Chen: Is that everybody, even a foreigner, like if I was quarantined?

Audrey Tang: That’s everybody. It’s important because of the single-payer healthcare system. People who develop symptom, even though they may or may not be COVID-19, they will get a mask, go to a local clinic, because it’s the rational thing to do. It will not incur social and financial burden.

Audrey Tang: If you create a situation like this, then people will be much more pro-social. That’s not because they’re collectivists, Confucianism believers, or something like that. No, it’s just the rational thing to do.

Ann Chen: It’s the assurance that you’re being taken care of, so then you become more voluntary in what you’re giving.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Ann Chen: I’m thinking of the future next steps. Now that things seem to have stabilized in Taiwan, there’s this outward…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we’re post-pandemic.

Ann Chen: …donation the masks. I guess maybe this isn’t something you can answer, but eventually I guess borders may reopen. Is there a second wave?

Audrey Tang: We’re working on the bubble.

Ann Chen: You’re working on the bubble.

Audrey Tang: The trouble bubble. We initially will be very careful. People coming from lower-risk areas, they still need to do quarantine, but maybe shorter, as short as five days. They still have to take our RT-PCR before boarding and after the quarantine.

Ann Chen: It’s still essentially the same system that you’re following. It’s just shortening the days.

Audrey Tang: It’s just shortening the days a little bit.

Ann Chen: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Ann Chen: If there isn’t anything else, that’s all my questions.

Audrey Tang: I’ll ask Joel to send you the slides that I just showed you.

Ann Chen: Thank you. Also, the transcript?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Ann Chen: Great. Thank you.