Matthew Claudel: I really am grateful that you’re here and willing to take the time to talk. It’s really an honor for me to include you in this special issue of “The Site Magazine.” I know a bit about your work from the Network of Regulatory Experimentation and Indy Johar and that connection.

Matthew Claudel: I immediately thought of you for this issue because we’re looking at this particular moment and trying to think about, on the one hand, the things that are emerging, what’s new and what people are doing in response and the ways in which the crisis is causing people to innovate and do things in new ways…

Matthew Claudel: Also, some of those things that are potentially worrisome and that are changing and the ways that we don’t have government systems in place, governance systems in place, to be thinking about some of the kinds of digital technology, medical technology, or even political responses that are being pursued.

Matthew Claudel: That’s what we’re doing with this special issue. We have people talking about food systems. We have people talking about bottom-up community response. We have people talking about local government, surveillance technology, everything.

Matthew Claudel: It’s a great group. I’m excited to include some of the work that you’ve been doing, that you published on the blogs, but also flesh that out with our conversation here. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure. Let’s get started.

Matthew Claudel: I have a handful of questions for you. Just to make sure, do you have half an hour or an hour? What’s the time frame?

Audrey Tang: We have roughly 40 minutes, but I’m flexible. If we end up taking 50, it’s fine.

Matthew Claudel: Cool. If you could just start out by introducing me to your office, the digital office, and in ordinary circumstances what your agenda is or what the mission of the office is.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is in a ordinary circumstance. We’ve never declared emergency. There’s been zero lockdowns. There’s, unfortunately, six people who succumbed to the coronavirus, but six people is not that much by international standards, by far.

Audrey Tang: Today, our professional baseball league will have a thousand people participating in the audience. We’ve never had to close schools and so on. First, let me say we’re under normal circumstances. This is my office, literally my office.

Audrey Tang: It’s a Social Innovation Lab. Next week, we will be done tearing up all the walls around the office. It becomes a park. Anybody and their dog can walk in and enjoy the vicinity.

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab is home to many artists as well as social innovators that tries to communicate how important it is for people to get together to innovate for the public good. That is social innovation.

Audrey Tang: My office’s role – I’m officially the Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation, Open Government, and Youth Engagement – is to make sure that the best ideas, the brightest ideas, are amplified throughout our network of many social innovation units around Taiwan so that, for example, when people in Tainan thinks, “Oh, it may be a good idea to visualize the pharmacies’ mask distribution.”

Audrey Tang: Then we make sure that all the pharmacies in Taiwan publish their stock level of a medical mask every 30 seconds at a time. Now it’s every three minutes because nobody queues to buy mask anymore.

Audrey Tang: In any case, this real-time participatory ledger enabled everybody to take part in the governance. Instead of trusting the government to make good use of public resources, the government instead trusts the civil society, trusts the entire society to make good use of the shared common data.

Audrey Tang: So that they can form the data coalition, data collaboratives, that makes the analysis, that makes the best decisions and share those decisions, and also take care of people with blindness who cannot view a map into voice assistance, into chat bots, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The main idea is that we should support but not control anything that is a data collaborative by the civil society. We run annual Presidential Hackathon, where the top five social innovation teams get a trophy from our President, Tsai Ing-wen, now in her second term in a couple weeks.

Audrey Tang: The trophy is a micro projector. If you turn on, it projects the image of a president handing you the trophy, promising whatever…

Matthew Claudel: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …you did in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. We do shorter hackathons as well, like the cohack.tw, which is specifically around coronavirus mitigation and transitioning to a post-coronavirus world.

Audrey Tang: Again, we use technology such as Polis, that clusters people’s shared reflections and opinion so we can listen at scale without being swamped by people who AstroTurf or by trolls or things like that. It’s basically a troll-proof way to get people’s rough consensus on any divisive or potentially divisive issues. That’s another thing that we do.

Audrey Tang: We also respond to the e-petitions. Whenever, wherever people – that includes residents of foreign nationality and people under 18 years old – think of a great idea and mobilize 5,000 people to support them, such as banning plastic straws in the take-out of the national identity drink, the bubble tea.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that we have a ministerial point-by-point response and a face-to-face collaborative meeting that take care of all the stakeholders, including the makers of such one-use utensils to make sure that everybody can transition into circular design and so on. I haven’t mentioned the reverse mentors yet, but that is the basic idea of this portfolio.

Matthew Claudel: What you’re talking about, you said support but not control. There is something really interesting. There’s a nuance. Of course, you’re not controlling, but you also have the credibility with the pharmacies that when you turn around and say, “Look, we need you to open the data,” it’s not that your mandating. I want to understand this dynamic. It’s not that you’re mandating.

Audrey Tang: Of course. They can stay out of it, but they see that if people go to their pharmacy, they get now, if you’re adult, 9 mask every two weeks or if you’re a child, 10 mask every two weeks.

Audrey Tang: It’s much more instant gratification if instead of waiting until the end of day to see the statistics, which most citizens never do anyway, after a couple minutes you just refresh your phone and see the stock level deplete by 9 or 10.

Audrey Tang: This is participatory accountability that establish trust directly between the pharmacies and the customers instead of through the legitimacy of a government. They are also enjoying a stake in it. They’re national heroes now anyway.

Audrey Tang: Basically, they get more instant gratification for the feedback that they receive from the citizens, as well as because they are stakeholders in the system, they can suggest new improvements.

Audrey Tang: We did implement all of that into the data schema that includes, for example, their opening hours, the time that they prefer to hand out numbered cards in exchange for the shorter queue and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All of that makes sure that their design is also part of the national system, making this again a co-creation. It’s not something that we mandate for the pharmacies. They’re also designers.

Matthew Claudel: I’m curious. Obviously, this, the coronavirus, has given you a very specific set of very clear challenges that your office is very well-suited. The structure and the accountability networks that you have and the digital capacities you have, perhaps, are very well-structured to deal with this particular crisis. I’m curious how this moment feels different than the work that you do ordinarily.

Audrey Tang: The main difference is that the time scale of the crisis is the same or almost the same across the globe. Previously, when we worked on climate change mitigation, for example through our civil IoT network, we work with people who crowdsource their environmental data, measuring air quality, now water quality, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t have the same sense of urgency when you compare it to the smaller Pacific islands who will suffer the consequence of climate change within one generation. In Taiwan, we maybe suffer in two or three generations.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a larger, more continental territory, then you suffer it maybe four generations down the road. The timescale is very different between all the different people working on it. That has been the main challenge of working on climate change mitigation.

Audrey Tang: However, the coronavirus shortened this generational gap into a kind of week gap. [laughs] Take any two jurisdictions, they’re only weeks apart when comparing their situation between two epicenters, and so that expanded our international horizon massively.

Audrey Tang: My slides, for example, the fast, fair, fun principle at dealing with the coronavirus using social innovation, now has a global reach that the African countries, the Latin American countries, and so on, basically wherever the epicenters go, this bilateral conversation between two epicenters become like almost immediate.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have to explain the climate science to the other side. Neither do the climate scientists have to explain the urgency to me.

Matthew Claudel: I find that interesting, actually, that now that Taiwan is very plugged into a global knowledge base around this, and that you get this real-time flow of information in a way that hasn’t been as relevant before.

Matthew Claudel: I’m curious, has that been a two-way exchange of information? What are you learning from other places?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. First of all, I’d like to share this website, which is social innovation. It’s not done by our government. It’s by a bunch of YouTubers, and with all due respect. Taiwancanhelp.us is a timeline of how Taiwan has been dealing with the pandemic, and if you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see a crash course.

Audrey Tang: This is very important because it’s done by literally the person who wrote the epidemiology textbook still used in universities, but Chen Chien-jen, academician, is also our vice president. [laughs]

Matthew Claudel: Awesome.

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting how he is able to then work with professional communicators, to take cutting-edge science and turn it into very easy to access courses that are currently being translated into multiple languages.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that includes the latest developments of the international scientific community. There’s no way that Taiwan could have done this alone around rapid testing, around vaccination, and around pharmaceutical research.

Audrey Tang: We also learned from the digital part from, for example, Tokyo, who has offered a real-time dashboard of easy communication web page that everybody can look and see how exactly things are going on around Tokyo, and in Tokyo.

Audrey Tang: The great thing is that the entire proposal is done by their civil society, the Code for Japan. It’s all open source. I personally contributed on GitHub to take this dashboard and change the language selector of the Taiwan version of it.

Audrey Tang: Then work with the g0v community to basically adapt that not only linguistically, but also culturally, so that people in Taiwan can now enjoy the kind of unofficial civil society port of that technology, and compare things on an apple to apple way.

Audrey Tang: There’s many other municipalities in Japan as well as around the world that now uses this open source. I think there’s almost 2,000 people forking that repository as a shared way to visualize data.

Audrey Tang: Our mask distribution data is also then adapted by the Korean people who took our idea and convinced their pharmacies and distribution channels to also open their real-time data.

Audrey Tang: The first working navigatable mask availability map in Korea is actually written by Kiang in Tainan, from Taiwan. He doesn’t know any Korean language, but he knows, I guess, JSON, and GeoJSON, and OpenAPI. [laughs] That’s how international collaboration is done.

Audrey Tang: It’s not in a kind of traditional track one diplomacy, where you have to first sing an MOU before doing anything, but rather, people just collaborate on Slack and GitHub just very organically. It just so happens that some of the collaborators and researchers are digital ministers or vice presidents.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very interesting way to look at international civil society.

Matthew Claudel: I think there’s a question of technological literacy on both levels. Part of what you’re describing in the domestic response has been hinging on technical literacy. That’s everything from pharmacies even having data, to citizens holding government accountable using these platforms, or even just engaging with information and reading graphs.

Matthew Claudel: On an international level, this becomes as rich as it can be because Japan has a phenomenal team working on this, and Korea does, too.

Matthew Claudel: I’m perhaps asking this from the perspective of someone living in the United States, because here, that assumption doesn’t quite hold in many cases, and so I’m curious. Maybe this is embedded in your fast, fair, and fun principles which it sounds like are gearing toward bridging that tech literacy divide.

Matthew Claudel: Can you talk a little bit about that, as a part of your work?

Audrey Tang: Sure. In Taiwan, we say digital competence. We don’t say literacy. It’s a conscious choice because in Mandarin, literacy or 識讀 assume that you’re a consumer or a viewer, reader of information, whereas competence 素養 means that you’re a producer, a creator, a steward of information, and data, and media.

Audrey Tang: This is a important distinction because in Taiwan, we have broadband as human right. No matter how remote you are or how high you are on the peak of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters, you still have 10 megabits per second at 16 USD per month, with unlimited 4G connection. If you don’t, it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, personally, people just attack me on social media saying, “Hey, we have poor reception here,” but in any case…

Matthew Claudel: You send a drone, kind of.

Audrey Tang: No, I share the heat map of alternative telecom provider. We only say that there need to be at least one telecom provider providing that signal. We didn’t say that all five providers need to do the same. In any case, I digress.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that if the marginal cost is literally zero, because there’s no extra bandwidth charge, there’s no extra charge in equipment for anyone to be a YouTuber, to start their own media.

Audrey Tang: The kind of digital competence framework that we baked in into the basic curriculum, starting from the primary school, from the first grade, actually, is to show people to be responsible citizen journalists, essentially.

Audrey Tang: The importance of fact-checking, of understanding your sources, of framing correctly, of engaging with the audience in a responsible way, of tapping into the journalists’ community, of how you can, for example, listen to the presidential debate and help typing in the transcript and fact-check each and every word they say, and your name will be credited into the collaborative fact-checking, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Basically, all of it is with this civil society mandate, that the social sector points the direction of where we should go, and the public sector take that direction and implement it by convincing the private sector that this is really the more sustainable and more useful way for the public benefit.

Audrey Tang: It reverses the dynamic of traditional public-private partnership, whereas in the US, many time it’s the private sector with their massive R&D and consumer reach tell the government that, “We’ve already reached a pact with our consumers.

Audrey Tang: “It’s best if you,” I don’t know the word that you use, “do some regulatory adaptation or reform that takes care of this new consumer relationship between the consumers and surveillance capitalists,” I’m sorry, “and the capitalists.”

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, it’s entirely the other way around. It’s the people who have joint controllership of the data, decided to apply pressure to the government so that our environment ministry need to submit to the legitimacy of the thousands of people measuring their own air quality.

Audrey Tang: Working with them to apply social pressure to the private sector industrial parks, so that they have to agree to also start measuring their air quality on the land within the private industrial park but the land is private property, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is a reverse of the traditional PPP partnership model. I think this is by far our basic assumption, a social sector-led assumption when it comes to digital social innovation.

Matthew Claudel: Something you’ve brought up a couple of times is legitimacy. I think that’s at the center of all this, because not only does your approach have tremendous legitimacy clearly in the public sector, it also has tremendous legitimacy in the broader social structure of Taiwan.

Matthew Claudel: I think something about that kind of deep model where you have education and digital competence built-in from day one, I guess, from a young age, that cultivates a condition where you can respond quickly to a situation like coronavirus, because you have that framework of legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the collective intelligence that has more signal than noise, and the government who shows that they do respond to all the suggestions, including for gender mainstreaming.

Audrey Tang: Some boy gets bullied by his classmates for wearing a pink medical mask. The very next day, Commander Chen, minister of health and welfare and all his colleagues started wearing pink medical mask on the livestream ask them anything press conference.

Audrey Tang: It shows everybody how important it is to have innovation from civil society, and how quick it is to have the same kind of like a presidential hackathon binding power to the CECC, and that your message gets amplified into a kind of national platform and national agenda.

Audrey Tang: Minister Chen broke all the records of legitimacy. The poll yesterday of all the cabinet ministers, vertical ministers – I’m a horizontal one, I’m exempted from that – all the ministers with vertical ministries, and Commander Chen Shih-chung of ministry of health and welfare has approval rating of 93.4 percent.

Audrey Tang: We’ve never seen this kind of number in any democratic country. [laughs] That usually appears in a totalitarian country.

Matthew Claudel: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: The runner-up are in normal ranges, like 60 percent, or 50 percent, or things like that. There’s something in a daily livestreamed, ask me anything press conference, where he responds to all the digital social innovations yesterday, and apply it immediately, that massively increase the mutual trust.

Matthew Claudel: I think that’s really fascinating. It’s something, that nimbleness, that capacity for responding quickly, and for that response to be taken seriously.

Matthew Claudel: I’m curious, are the situations where you’ve made a fast response and with good intention, but found that it was the wrong one? How do you manage that communication, where you say, “OK, we tried this. It didn’t work, and that’s part of figuring out the right solution”? Can you talk about that process with any specific examples?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. For example, in the very beginning of mask, there was no rationing. We just distributed all the stock of medical mask to the major convenience stores, and we say everybody can only buy three pieces each, at a very reasonable cost.

Audrey Tang: However, there’s no way for them to work across stores or across different chains and convenience store, to make sure the same person doesn’t ride a scooter, and if the mask arrive by 2:00 AM, they can just ride a scooter and buy all the supplies, three pieces at a time.

Audrey Tang: If you have sufficient numbers of people doing this, then by 6:00 AM, nobody else has any mask left to purchase.

Matthew Claudel: Did that happen?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that actually happened.

Matthew Claudel: Wow.

Audrey Tang: That was I think the first five days of the mask distribution policy, and so there’s massive unrest, there’s speculation, the conspiracy theories. There’s no insight into the stock level anywhere of convenience stores, and so it created unnecessary tension between the store staff and people, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It went on for like three days, and Howard Wu of Tainan, that I mentioned, he personally see too many instant messages in his friends and family channels, and all the message says is that, “Hey, this convenience store still have some mask, and this masks is running out in this convenience store.”

Audrey Tang: It’s not very useful because all the way that they can communicate those geolocation is not commeasurable with each other, and it’s just adds to the noise even more.

Audrey Tang: He decided to code up using the Google Places API, a simple map where all his friends and families can report whether the masks are running out of stock, or there’s plenty of stock, or it’s something in-between, in that crisis of mask. It’s like Ushahidi. It’s like a cross-list intelligence.

Audrey Tang: However, he didn’t anticipate that everybody around Taiwan who saw his work through the television would start to use his service, and so in just less than a day or so, he owes Google in API usage fees, some 20K US dollars, which is not really another number. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: He had to shut that site down and look into alternative ways, but eventually we worked with Google. In an act of, I’m sure, social responsibility, Google waived all his usage fees.

Audrey Tang: I showed this prototype, which only lived for a couple of days, to our premier, our prime minister, the very next Monday, and say, “Look, if we can get accurate data in pharmacies, then this would actually save the mental health of our entire population.

Audrey Tang: “Nobody need to waste their time queuing or to look into the pharmacies that are already out of stock. Well, they would still queue a little bit at the beginning, but we will see exactly how the supply has been growing.” Now, we’re manufacturing almost 20 million medical masks a day.

Audrey Tang: In any case, the premier looks at that and say, “Oh, it’s just like a navigation software. If you see a road that is shorter but red, you know it’s congested, so you shouldn’t take it. If you see a pharmacy that is further, but it’s green, it means that you should take it despite it being further away.”

Audrey Tang: It’s a good metaphor, so he just said to the National Health Insurance Agency, as well as the entire ministry of health and welfare that says we should do everything to support this social innovator, and we need to absorb their cost.

Audrey Tang: Now, the leading map from Kiong, another developer using OpenStreetMap technologies, is running on our National Center of High-Speed Computing, which is, I think, top 20 super computer in the world. They absorb all the usage fees, all the bandwidth fees, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The civic tech actually become a kind of civil engineering because, like roads and bridges, it’s used by over half of the population, thereby qualifying this idea of civic tech which is used only by handful of people, into civil engineering, which is used by pretty much everybody.

Matthew Claudel: Digital infrastructure, yeah. That’s fantastic. There seems to be this really interesting back and forth relationship between programs that are created by government, and things that are coming up and then sort of how they flip and flop and grow as they…

Audrey Tang: Right. The rallying cry of the g0v community, where all these developments of mask pharmacy happens, is to fork the government. Very peculiar pronunciation, fork the government. [laughs] Which means that instead of writing the government off, you take it into a different direction.

Audrey Tang: Whenever people are fed up with a government service, they just create alternative, changing something.gov.tw into something.g0v.tw. Just a change of letter in your browser bar, you get into the shadow government that is jointly governed by the people.

Audrey Tang: It is always open source and creative commons content, so when the government sees that, “Oh, it’s a good idea,” we just say, “Oh, we can’t beat them. We join them,” and then we make sure that they run on government-sponsored property and thereby become infrastructure.

Matthew Claudel: I think that’s brilliant. It sounds like you also had that happening with scientific experts in the hackathon, and when people were giving ideas, and there were experts saying, “OK, this is workable. This is not. This conflicts with certain policies…”

Audrey Tang: Yes, there’s also legal counsels of essentially human rights and impact assessment.

Matthew Claudel: Which is of course an important and interesting thing, when you’re creating rapid response to a public health crisis.

Audrey Tang: Right, because everything that we do need to be operating under normal law. As I said, there’s no emergency situation, so we’re still operating under a traditionally continental law system, where everything we do need to have a legal basis as pre-approved by the legislature.

Audrey Tang: The Minister Chen may now have 93 percent support, but that also means there are 7 percent of people who disagree with his measures, and we thank those 7 percent of people because they keep us honest.

Audrey Tang: They demand that we explain the scientific reasons, the scientific case of every measure that we do, and without those seven percent of people constantly demanding to say, for example, why 14 days of home quarantine and things like that, we wouldn’t be able to communicate as effectively.

Audrey Tang: It would be a traditionally top-down health authority thing, but actually, Minister Chen, and Vice Premier Chen, and Vice President Chen – they are all of the Chen family, not immediately related – but in any case, they all take this idea of co-learning, saying that although they may teach or learn epidemiology, what they have learned is classical epidemiology.

Audrey Tang: We’re in a digital world, so the digital epidemiology is a chapter that’s currently being written. Nobody know how exactly digital epidemiology works, but we need to constantly look into the kind of norm that we want to have as a whole society, instead of relying on the bad old authoritarian ways.

Audrey Tang: People above 30 in Taiwan remember not only SARS, but also the martial law, and nobody want to go back there.

Matthew Claudel: That was actually one of my questions, was that it seems like a big sort of asset that Taiwan has had was the recent learning from SARS, and the fact that you went through this and you developed some knowledge from that.

Matthew Claudel: I’m curious. First off, what did you learn from SARS and now you’re taking into the COVID situation? Also, knowing that you were able to learn from that, what are you taking forward into the next, into the future, from COVID? What are the provisions you’re packing from this moment?

Audrey Tang: From SARS, we learned three important things, and that’s fair and fun. [laughs] First is obvious, because we don’t have a easy to cross border. We’re a bunch of islands. It’s impossible to accidentally stumble upon Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: If you do testing and quarantining at the borders, you don’t have to do Bluetooth tracing apps at any kind. We’re not rolling that out. If you do the quarantine well at the borders, test well at the borders, act early, like when Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower post that there’s new SARS in Wuhan around the end of December.

Audrey Tang: We received that from the social media signals at the last day of December. The very next day, the first day of 2020, we start doing health inspection for flights from Wuhan to Taiwan, and 10 days afterward, WHO would still be saying, “No, you shouldn’t do that. People from Wuhan is OK. There’s no clear evidence of human to human transmission,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, by having this SARS inoculation of society, we take the measures as if SARS has happened over again, because nobody know what this SARS-CoV-2 is like at that point, and we enacted these inspections and soon quarantining at the borders.

Audrey Tang: This fast response I think is really important, also with the hotline. Everybody can call 1922 and get their ideas at tips across to the CECC, to the Central Epidemic Command Center. That’s the first lesson we learned from SARS.

Audrey Tang: The second lesson we learned is that mask is essential. In Taiwan, mask is very interestingly billed as something that protects the wearer, especially medical mask, because, A, it reminds people not to touch their mouth. B, it reminds people of proper hand sanitation rules, and so it’s protective.

Audrey Tang: Of course all of us know it primarily protect other people, but it lead to an interesting social situation where, even in a crowd of people of 20, even if only 2 people wear a medical mask, they can gently remind the other 18 people to take care of their own health by putting their mask on.

Audrey Tang: The subtext of their communicating this is actually asking those 18 people to protect their own health, but they need not say that.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very interesting incentive design that is very well-ingrained in Taiwan, and not only in Taiwan, but also Hong Kong and so on, during the SARS epidemic, and so that norm is been reinvoked in the coronavirus.

Audrey Tang: Finally, communication is essential. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, we’ve already doing this humor over rumor way to counter disinformation with very fun, memetic pictures that make sure that joys travels quicker than outrage online.

Audrey Tang: It is really the only effective way that we found to counter disinformation, of course armed with real data, and journalism, and fact-checking, and so on. The payload still need to be journalistic, but the fact-checking need to be fun and memetic.

Audrey Tang: That’s something we also learned from SARS, in that, if you only broadcast public service announcements filled with scientific jargon, it has zero legitimacy compared to the conspiracy theories. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The early communication, and a hotline, and a daily press conference, the spokes org of the ministry are all essential designs that we learned from our previous failures in public communication and risk mitigation.

Audrey Tang: Now, what are we taking forward? I think there’s two things that we’re taking forward. The first one is that the legitimacy-building is almost an art now. We give out lots and lots of medical mask, but if you choose another website, which is taiwancanhelp.com.tw, I’ll share the link with you, you will see that those medical mask that we donate to the world is actually dedicated by a lot of people.

Audrey Tang: If you follow the link, you’ll see that at the moment, there’s more than four million masks from 527,000 dedicators, and you’ll find people’s name in it.

Audrey Tang: When the recipient of the medical mask receives our gift, they can see that these mask are not the gift from the government of Taiwan only, but rather from the people of Taiwan, and not an abstract people of Taiwan, but exactly 500,000 people where you can look up your name on. This gives this international collaboration a publicly approved mandate.

Audrey Tang: We don’t need 100 percent. As I said, there’s people who did not participate in this, but there’s a lot of people who basically dedicated their uncollected mask quota, starting from the point where everybody is guaranteed to have three mask per week, to now.

Audrey Tang: If they did not collect some of those rationed mask because they still have it stock and things like that, they can go to the same app where you pre-order the mask, and say, “I want to dedicate my uncollected quota to international community in need.”

Audrey Tang: This is, I think, a social innovation in diplomacy that we’re taking it forward, so that in more international humanitarian aid and things like that, we make sure that this carries the individuals’ contributions, not only their names, but down to the specific amount of contributions that they made.

Audrey Tang: I think this really makes us a republic of citizens. That’s a really new thing, and we’re taking that. Also, the Cohack framework with the joint Taiwan-US statement, I think it’s just a prototype of many more to come.

Audrey Tang: We are looking forward to work with many bilateral – bilateral sounds weird – bi-epicenter, so, between two epicenters, and make sure that…Even now, as I said, we’re not rolling out Bluetooth tracing apps, but it doesn’t stop our researchers from researching into privacy-preserving Bluetooth tracing apps, not for Taiwan, but for other people in need.

Audrey Tang: We basically offer our civil society and researchers as resource persons to solve this global pandemic, instead of just thinking of Taiwan only. This, Taiwan as a resource, Taiwan Can Help, I think is, again, something new that we’re seeing.

Audrey Tang: We’ve had this slogan, Taiwan Can Help, for years, but it’s only after the coronavirus that it actually gained international recognition.

Matthew Claudel: Right. I’m curious how you see that landing in other places, because Taiwan is obviously, in very logistical sense, Taiwan is really exceptional, right? Because you have essentially like a city state, a very small population, and one that’s…

Audrey Tang: 23 million is not a small population. We just have a small geography. [laughs] We’re very densely packed.

Matthew Claudel: Yeah, and it’s politically different. I’m curious how you see, given any kind of help of the kind that you’re already seeing with some of the digital things, or some of the responses, or whatever might emerge in the future.

Matthew Claudel: Let’s say I’m here in Boston, or I’m the mayor of Amsterdam, or I’m the prime minister of France. How do you see this landing in other places?

Audrey Tang: First of all, that’s why I mentioned epicenter to epicenter communication. Taiwan is twice bigger than New Jersey, so it’s not like a city state. You wouldn’t say New Jersey is a half city state. [laughs] In any case, what I’m trying to get at is that if we begin with a mindset that says as long as anybody can share…

Matthew Claudel: Sorry, Audrey?

Audrey Tang: Yes?

Matthew Claudel: Audrey, you broke up. I missed your response to that question.

Audrey Tang: I said that Taiwan is about twice bigger than New Jersey, and so you wouldn’t call New Jersey a half city state, or maybe you would. [laughs] The point I’m making is that what we’re offering is a culture of open innovation. That’s why I mentioned the good example of our collaboration with Tokyo.

Audrey Tang: In Amsterdam, actually, there’s this mayor city office, and they do a lot of their development in the open. Our own website for not only the masks are from the civil society, but our own website for the revitalization plan, the directory, and so on, these are all open source. They’re developed on GitHub.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that maybe it’s a good opportunity for us to look past the traditional jurisdiction-based multilateral point of view. It’s much more useful if we just compare one epicenter to another and see how they resemble each other, and only on the paths of where they resemble each other.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Czech Republic use a lot of playbook of the interesting incentive design that I just mentioned around mask use. They did a very successful, fun digital communication campaign that basically changed the norm around mask use over the course of a week.

Audrey Tang: That’s something, the mask for all campaign, that the Taiwan digital communicators can get behind, and provide scientific evidence that you can revitalize the mask, for example, using rice cookers. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m trying to say is that if then the measure that the #MaskForAll unites people who are in similar stages, then we can collaborate on that particular subject with all the subject matter experts.

Audrey Tang: That’s why Pol.is, the technology, you’ll find such focus among a swathe of social innovations, is so important in Cohack and similar setups, because otherwise, more people joining actually detracts from the problem-solving, because people have to use their mental bandwidth to look through all the ideas.

Audrey Tang: For people to cross-moderate each other and then find commonalities between two very different epicenters as one or two things – actually, no, it’s seven things or so – to focus on, that is very useful. That’s, again, how digital deliberative technologies can help to unite the research focus of all the resources into epicenters, and we look forward to do them all.

Matthew Claudel: I think that’s brilliant, and it actually comes into all sorts of different domains, right? Like you could apply that same principle to any number of governance, or regulatory, or even…

Audrey Tang: Yes, we did that with the open contracting partnership in the previous Presidential Hackathon, and it’s such a hit that we’re now doing it again. [laughs] If you have any good ideas around any of the 16 Millennium Goals, and think how open contracting can help solving it, then the International Track of the Presidential Hackathon is exactly what you’re looking at.

Audrey Tang: Honduras team and the Malaysian team that won previous year’s International Presidential Hackathon, really told us that this Taiwan experience gave them international legitimacy, so that if they talk to World Bank.

Audrey Tang: Or if they talk to other endeavors, they can say, “No, Taiwan has a very good social sector-led model. I would like to use your resource this way, and it’s been proven that it’s more effective than the traditional PPP model that you’re suggesting,” and maybe the World Bank learns a thing or two.

Matthew Claudel: That’s fantastic. Do you have any concluding thoughts or things I missed that have been on your mind, maybe even on a more personal level?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think the government should fully trust the citizens. When we say mutual trust, all too often, people think it’s the people should trust the government, which will lead to people trusting each other.

Audrey Tang: There’s even this meme of Taiwan being a kind of city state with Confucius thought or things like that, which is actually Singapore. We love them, but it’s actually Singapore.

Matthew Claudel: I lived there for like six months.

Audrey Tang: It really is a city state with Confucian thought, and we’re happy with our relationship with Singapore, but Taiwan is not that. [laughs] Taiwan is far more Daoist, or Austronesian, or Pacific Island than traditional collectivist thought.

Audrey Tang: A lot of Taiwan’s design comes from the idea that the social sector had years and decades to build legitimacy. The president only had comparatively a small number of time, because we first get the direct presidential election in 1996, after the World Wide Web.

Audrey Tang: Not only digital and democracy is the same thing in Taiwan, the same generation of people working on it, but also often need to respect the social sector legitimacy that’s already very well-established before even the modern liberal democratic system.

Audrey Tang: That, I think, is part of the underpinning of why we always say we cannot beat the social sector. We must join the social sector. We cannot control the social sector. We must support the social sector. Even in the language choice, we never say the third sector because they’re the primary sector.

Matthew Claudel: That’s fantastic. Thank you. This is hugely inspiring. Also, for my own work, it’s just a terrific body of work that you’re building, and it’s really just a fascinating relationship between these different sort of groups and ways of thinking.

Matthew Claudel: I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to constitute a public. This is on my desk right now, but John Dewey’s “The public and It’s Problems” is from almost 100 years ago, but he’s talking about when people have a shared problem or a mutual goal, they come together and they become a public.

Matthew Claudel: Only if a government is necessary does the government then become a function of that public, but what’s really happening is this public format. I just find that compelling, and it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing in this approach. It’s like government’s there, but it’s really the process of this public formulation that’s at the heart of it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. As a concluding thought, I’ll share with you a write-up from Medium, from Jon Edward Alexander with the title, “The Nation You’re Not Allowed to Learn From,” that sums up some of these ideas with a citizen republic lens that you’ve been describing.

Audrey Tang: I did not tweet that because the content is a little bit overly critical to the UK government. [laughs] In any case, if you take out the parts that are critical of the UK government, I think it contains a pretty good reading and comprehensive, too, of the philosophy that we’re operating under.

Matthew Claudel: That’s fantastic. Thank you.

Matthew Claudel: Audrey, this has been a pleasure, and I’m excited to keep following your work, and I hope to stay in touch in the future.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Thank you. Cheers.

Matthew Claudel: With regard to the recording, let’s collaborate on transcription, or share the recording, or…

Audrey Tang: I’ll make a transcription anyway, and we can embargo until you publish, so we’ll just communicate over email.

Matthew Claudel: Great.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Bye.

Matthew Claudel: Thank you. Bye.