John Biehler: …that’s Mike Agerbo. He had a major computer issue a little while ago, [laughs] so he’s waiting for Windows Update.

Audrey Tang: Happens to the best of us, I mean Windows Update. [laughs] Are you going to publish the video anywhere, or this is just for your internal reference?

John Biehler: No, we are going to publish the video. Stephen Fung, who arranged the interview, he is our editor, and he is going to put it together as a video podcast on YouTube.

Audrey Tang: OK, I didn’t realize that, so maybe I should do my hair a little bit better, but anyway.

John Biehler: Me, too.

Mike Agerbo: Your title is Taiwan’s Digital Minister, is that right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

John Biehler: Mike, are you using the RODECaster audio?

Mike Agerbo: I am, yeah.

John Biehler: It doesn’t sound like it.

Audrey Tang: Indeed.

Mike Agerbo: I know.

Audrey Tang: It sounds you’re using a normal mike on a laptop.

Mike Agerbo: I know. Yeah.

John Biehler: As long as he’s got good audio, that’s all that matters, and we’ll have local copies as well.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s fine.

Mike Agerbo: I’m just going to do a test here. One moment. This is a test right now. Can you guys say something?

John Biehler: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Something. Some thing.

John Biehler: Testing, one two, three.

Audrey Tang: Something.

Mike Agerbo: OK. Second. One moment.

John Biehler: We use a RODECaster to record the audio for the radio show, and it’s independent of the computer that he’s using.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m aware of that.

Mike Agerbo: Sounds good on this end, but for your recording, John, it sucks. Is that what you’re saying?

John Biehler: Yeah, it’s fine.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s fine. It may also be a bandwidth issue. This is primarily a podcast, and you can do the video later, so I’m not too worried.

John Biehler: Agreed.

Mike Agerbo: OK.

Mike Agerbo: I’m ready.

Audrey Tang: Same here.

John Biehler: All right, and I’m recording.

Mike Agerbo: Hello. We’re back with “GetConnected.” Mike Agerbo here with John Biehler. We have a very interesting guest on now.

Mike Agerbo: As you know, a lot of our coverage has been around technology, and how that has played out with the COVID-19 epidemic. We’re going to go all the way over to Taiwan. On the line we’ve got our guest here…Sorry, it just died, John. One more time.

John Biehler: The joys of home studios.

Mike Agerbo: One more time. Here we go. You’re back with GetConnected. Mike Agerbo here with John Biehler. We have an interesting segment and guest coming up. As you know, most of our coverage has been around technology and how that interplays with COVID-19.

Mike Agerbo: On the line we’ve got Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan. We just want to have a chat to see how they have been coping and the successes that they have enjoyed, and maybe some things that we can learn from them. Thanks for joining us today.

Audrey Tang: Really happy to be here virtually.

Mike Agerbo: You’re a digital minister. Can you explain what that is? You’re actually a member of the government.

Audrey Tang: I’m working with the government to share our experiences in the free software and open innovation communities to make sure that everybody can get access to digital services, digital transformation, and also digital sustainable development. I wrote my own job description and it’s very short, so I’ll just read it here.

Audrey Tang: It goes like this. When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it the Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Audrey Tang: When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience, and whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let’s always remember the plurality is here. That’s my job description.

Mike Agerbo: Very cool. [laughs] Before you accepted an invitation to work with the Taiwanese government, you were a programmer and a hacker. Explain to our audience the type of hacking you do, and how the efforts of you in the community benefits rather than hurts society.

Audrey Tang: The kind of hacking that I do is called civic hacking. It differs from cybersecurity hacking, where the white hat hackers determines the vulnerabilities of a system and inform the system operator of it, or black hat hackers who does the same thing but use it for their personal benefit.

Audrey Tang: A civic hacker doesn’t find or fix vulnerabilities in old systems, rather we build new systems that doesn’t suffer from such vulnerabilities. We’re looking at disinformation, for example. We do not try to get into the accounts of the people who spread disinformation. That would be cybersecurity hacking.

Audrey Tang: Rather we make fun, mimetic pictures, dog pictures that shares the clever fight information in a much more fun way. It is what we call “humor over rumor.” When executed properly, this makes sure that everybody can laugh at a socially controversial issue and then go back to democracy.

Audrey Tang: That’s just one of the many cases where civic hacking has been successfully fending off disinformation along with many other things without resorting to cybersecurity hacking.

Mike Agerbo: You’re talking about misinformation or disinformation which, obviously, we’ve seen around the world has spread so rapidly on social media. A lot of the platforms are even struggling to keep up with that, to block out some of that. Facebook and Twitter are great examples of it.

Mike Agerbo: You guys have developed your own disinformation counter attack. Can you maybe explain that a little further?

Audrey Tang: Sure. The idea of disinformation in Taiwan is very well-defined. It’s a legal definition. It’s called intentional untruth that cause public harm, and all of it are requisites.

Audrey Tang: If it’s unintentional, as I said, it’s misinformation, or it doesn’t cause public harm, it only harms an image of a minister. That may be just good journalism. It has to be intentional and it has to cause public harm.

Audrey Tang: Whenever we detect that such a disinformation is trending, every ministry is now equipped with the capability to roll out a fun mimetic message within 60 minutes. When they do that, it’s very effective so that whenever we see – I hope that you can see my screen – something that needs to be clarified to use the humor-over-rumor response system.

Audrey Tang: For example, this is our Premier, our Prime Minister, who wrote it out after an hour of a rumor that says, “Perming your hair will be subject to one million NT dollar fine.” It not only says it’s not true, it says, “I may be bald now, but I will not punish people who look like my youth.

Audrey Tang: In a fine print that says, “What we have done is introducing a labeling requirement for hair products start taking effect July 2021.” A smaller picture of the Prime Minister as he looks now and says, “However, if you do perm your hair many time a week, it will not damage your pocket, but it will damage your hair. When serious, you could just look at me to see what would happen.”

Audrey Tang: This is generally funny, and everybody who shared this participated in the clarification. If you’ll search for those keywords, you’re bound to find this picture, not the disinformation. That’s one of the examples of how we successfully fended off disinformation with the power of humor.

Mike Agerbo: How many people do you have working for you to accomplish this.

Audrey Tang: Working with me. I don’t give orders to the ministries, but each ministry have dedicated people. All the people for ministries, about 12 of them, have allocated a team of at least 7 people of different expertise so that they can preclear the use of the Prime Minister’s image for that.

Audrey Tang: I also donated my Flickr album saying that all the editors all around the world can freely use it for non-commercial purposes, so they have a stock of images for any purposes. Then they work out how to respond within 60 minutes, so at least seven people per ministry.

John Biehler: How is that all coordinated? Do they have autonomy to respond to these things online, or does it have to go through one central person or group before things get posted or dealt with?

Audrey Tang: One of the seven is the political delegate from the ministry. Just as my office is one delegate from each ministry maximum, everybody in that humor-over-rumor response protocol has direct access to the spokesperson’s team of that ministry as well as to the administration’s spokesperson.

Audrey Tang: Of course, they do have to clear that, but by clearing that I mean like five minutes, so it’s not a lot of bureaucracy. Another example is the same Prime Minister smiling happily here in the convenience store.

Audrey Tang: One day there was a rumor that says there’s a panic-buying of tissue papers, because people think that the material of those medical mask is the same as tissue paper, which is not true. It’s intentional untruth that harms the public.

Audrey Tang: Again, applying humor over rumor, the same Premier also now publishes a mimetic image now showing his buttocks and wiggling it a bit. The title here says, “We only have one pair of buttocks each,” meaning that there is no point in panic-buying tissue papers. There’s a table that shows the materials of medical mask is actually plastic, and it’s from Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The tissue paper which is paper they mostly are produced from South America. These are different and we don’t need to panic-buy. It’s so effective that within a day or two everybody stopped panic-buying, and we found out the origin of disinformation source is from a tissue paper reseller. A very good, interesting use of humor, but it’s only useful if it’s rolled out timely.

John Biehler: That’s fascinating. We’re still having problems with the toilet paper here, so maybe we can get some [laughs] learnings from that. You guys practice something known as radical transparency. Can you explain what that is?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. All the interviews that I give, including this one, and all the lobbying that I receive all goes into this website called SayIt. SayIt is one of the very interesting civic technologies originally prototyped by people in the UK from the mySociety folks.

Audrey Tang: You can see after I become the digital minister, I’ve talked to 5,000 or so people over 1,200 meetings, and we spoke a lot, 264,000 speeches. Each and every one of them is kept not in summary but in full record. If you want to look at a specific lobbying, like this, it’s a meeting from the doorbell to the end of the conversation.

Audrey Tang: This lobbyist said that they will ask that local team to prepare material and send them over to me. I say, “Sure, just know everything you say will be made public.” In this way, although we usually, with journalists, for example, I can embargo until you publish, and there’s some coediting. The opening is the default.

Audrey Tang: It takes time and effort, if you’re a journalist, to go back and change some question you ask, which is allowed, but you’re not allowed to touch my part [laughs] of the conversation. I apply this also to the internal meetings that I hold with internal stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: This makes sure that everybody who interviews me, who lobbies me, who attend the meeting that I hold understand the context, the why of policymaking, not just the what of the policy that’s introduced because of these meetings.

John Biehler: Contact tracing is a big thing for a lot of countries. Some are doing it very well, some are doing it OK, some are not doing it very well at all.

John Biehler: We’ve seen companies like Google and Apple now entering into agreement to provide contact-tracing services through their smartphones. Is this something that could help Taiwan? What have you guys done technology-wise to do the contact-tracing for the virus?

Audrey Tang: We’ve done a lot of contact-tracing, but we did not mandate any app-level data collection. Basically, we do not collect extra data for countering COVID whenever and wherever we could. What we have done instead is that we do testing on the borders. Taiwan being a bunch of islands, it’s impossible to accidentally stumble upon our border.

Audrey Tang: Now, if you visit Taiwan, you first have to be a returning resident and have a really good case for visiting at the moment. If you come from a high-risk place, the entire airplane or the passenger from a high-risk place goes into quarantine.

Audrey Tang: The quarantine’s provided by top hotels. We make sure that we thank you for the 14 days of your effort, and pays some 30 Euros per day stipend. If you break that home quarantine is 1,000 times that fine.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what we have done instead is that we controlled this at the borders with quarantining. We use something called a digital fence, meaning that if people break out of their quarantine with their phone, then a automated SMS message is sent to local hostel managers and police so that people can see what really happened. We keep people within quarantine using this way.

Audrey Tang: Of course, if their phone runs out of battery or stays for too long without moving or answering messages, the same thing happens. It is some encroachment on the privacy during those 14 days, but we do have a constitutional court ruling during SARS and after SARS when we did a recap that backs this up.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we have not had to use any up-level tracing, because we’ve never entered lockdown. There’s only 400 or so cases, and we know the contact history of most of them and all are using traditional interview methods and so on.

Audrey Tang: We’ve not had any closure of schools or anything like that, so we’re not at a stage of community spread, and it’s been almost a month now with no new domestic confirmed cases. There’s a litany for those Bluetooth-based tracing apps.

John Biehler: You also did something really interesting with how you were managing the supply chain for masks using technology. Can you explain that?

Audrey Tang: Sure. At the very beginning, the medical mask everybody wants to buy it. In Taiwan it is very interesting, because it’s a signal that I’m taking proper care of myself, I’m wearing a medical mask to stop my hands to touch my mouth. I’m wearing the medical mask to show that I know proper hand sanitation rules, which has its own mimetic packaging and a fun lyric at that.

Audrey Tang: In any case, it’s a sign that I’m protecting myself. As all of us know, it primarily protects others. Because of that, the social pressure works in a selfish way that is also prosocial.

Audrey Tang: If you show up in a gathering of 50 people, but only 5 people are wearing medical mask, they can apply social pressure reminding the other 45 people to take care of themselves, but actually they protect those 5 people.

Audrey Tang: This is very effective, but because of that, there was very confusing accounts of how many mask are there and things like that. Because of that, there’s a civil society, a civic hacker, someone who writes for the public benefit software programs who did a map that shows all the availability of masks in convenience stores, but the convenience stores very quickly ran out of supply.

Audrey Tang: We start rationing it out through the pharmacies, and to the more than 6,000 pharmacies they receive a fixed amount of masks every day. They can sell it to anyone presenting their national health card. We have also a single-payer national health system here so that everybody who show their card can collect at a moment, if you’re adult, you can collect every two weeks nine medical masks.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a child, every two weeks 10 medical mask, and you can see the stock level of that pharmacy on your phone depleting by 9 or 10 on the adult or child column every three minutes. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the publishing of statistics information every day is normal, we make sure that we publish every three minutes in a distributor ledger manner so that it’s mirrored, it’s copied to more than 140 tools.

Audrey Tang: If your visibility or eyesight is not that good, you switch to chatbot or a voice assistant or something that is more friendly to people with blindness as well as people speaking different languages and so on.

Audrey Tang: No matter who you are and where you are, you can access where are your nearest pharmacy that still have some mask in stock, and thereby reduce the queueing and also increase the people’s confidence that the supply is indeed growing. Also informs the distribution strategy, because we know exactly where has oversupply and where has undersupply.

Audrey Tang: That’s why after a while we decide to partner with convenience stores on a preordering system, because there’s many municipalities where people work very late in the day, and therefore will miss the mask collection because they work longer hours than the pharmacist. That is again a case of evidence-based policymaking.

Mike Agerbo: You’re telling me that convenience stores update this chart by the minutes? Not daily?

Audrey Tang: The pharmacies, because the convenience stores are operating on a preordering basis. You take your card there, you swipe, and then you receive the mask a week or so afterwards. There’s no stock level.

Audrey Tang: If you really need it now, like if you start developing symptoms and things like that, you can just go to your nearest pharmacy and collect the mask, and put it on and go to a clinic or something.

Audrey Tang: This is a rational thing to do because of the universal healthcare coverage, 99,99 percent, everybody who show any symptom, COVID or not will get treated fairly and without incurring any financial cost other than the five euros of the registration fee on the clinic.

Mike Agerbo: Definitely could learn a few things. We’re talking with Audrey Tang. He’s the digital minister for Taiwan. I want to thank you for joining us today.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Mike Agerbo: When we come back from the break, more tech to talk here on GetConnected back after this.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Mike Agerbo: That was awesome, thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I’ll send you the high-quality recording on my side.

Mike Agerbo: That is awesome. Thank you so much.

John Biehler: Great. Thank you, thank you for your time.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Cheers, bye.

Mike Agerbo: Cheers.

John Biehler: Bye.