Malaysian Host: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Good morning, and good afternoon if any of you are in the other side of the world. It gives me great pleasure to welcome everyone here today to today’s event, digital governance and the Taiwanese experience, in dialogue with Minister Audrey Tang.

Malaysian Host: Before we start our session, I wish to convey our great appreciation to the Honorable Minister Audrey Tang for having so graciously agreed to join us today for a discussion with the Malaysian audience on digital governance in Taiwan. Without further ado, I hand over the session to Mr. Moderator.

Malaysian Moderator: Awesome. Thank you Madam Host for your kind introduction of Minister Audrey Tang. Thank you for giving me the opportunity for moderating this session with Honorable Minister Audrey Tang.

Malaysian Moderator: Good to see you again, after our last meeting which we didn’t went because of the Internet connections. [laughs] To kickstart things, I would like to give a brief about…

Malaysian Moderator: I would like our participants to ask the questions, either by typing it in the text box or by asking it directly to the minister. Because of our need to maximize the time, just this one hour session, just one hour available session with the minister, so we have to take care of the timing.

Malaysian Moderator: I hope everyone can get their questions as short as possible so that we won’t have any delay to the all sessions, completion of the session. Audrey Tang is one of the top 100 thinkers as listed in “Foreign Policy Magazine.”

Malaysian Moderator: I was having reading your biography and your interviews with many media online for the past few months. It is always my enthusiasm and my interest to invite you to talk to the audience in Malaysia. I think it would probably be the first one to have first session with you in Malaysia. Is it?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think it makes all the future ones easier.

Malaysian Moderator: [laughs] Depending, I hope there would be more interactions between us in the future. Let’s start with my question. Very, very basic question. Can you give us a brief introduction about your role in Taiwan’s Digital Social Innovation, DSI, or even Taiwan’s digital governance, a bit more about this year?

Audrey Tang: Really happy to be here. Good local time everyone. I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Open Government, Social Innovation, and Youth Engagement. My role in the cabinet at the moment is one of the nine ministers at large, meaning that we work across ministries.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have 32 vertical ministries and commissions. I was their minister. In the cabinet office assisting the premier, the head of the cabinet are the nine ministers at large or without portfolio that takes the effort to work not just for one particular ministry, but across ministries.

Audrey Tang: Also, not just for the government, with the government. Not just for the people, with the people. One concrete example, for example, during the pandemic times, we wanted to fight the pandemic with no lockdown. So far, we’ve never had a single day of lockdown. We also want to fight the infodemic, the disinformation crisis with no administrative takedown. These two are the main ideas of digital social innovation is that innovation comes from the people.

Audrey Tang: If we impose something top down, it may work for a while. Then fatigue sets in, and then the virus mutates, and the disinformation also mutates. Then our top down ways will be slow. We will not be able to catch up to the mutations.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, when the citizens find out new ways of doing things, if we have a very good democratic way in a high bandwidth way so people can just pick up the phone and call us, a toll free number, saying that, “I have this great idea,” and then we can implement it 24 hours afterward.

Audrey Tang: When people find out there’s a way to spread the message, for example, mask wearing in a very fun way we call humor over rumor.

Audrey Tang: Then my role is to amplify it and work with the Minister of Health and Welfare also the Ministries of Interior, Education, Communication, and so on and push a very, very cute dog memes so that people understand that it is important to wear a mask to protect one’s own face against one’s own unwashed hand.

Audrey Tang: That is the bottom right meme, a very cute dog putting food to their own mouth. This links hand washing to the proper use of masks. This went absolutely viral and much more viral than the conspiracy theory like there’s a 5G antenna in the mask and your brain can be controlled or something like that.

Audrey Tang: We out meme, boast this information. Before we got full vaccination, we also out innovate the viral mutations including the alpha and delta variants.

Malaysian Moderator: Can you also elaborate a little bit about your office, how big is your innovation space? This is very unconvention in terms of administrative bureaucracy. What does your office do? What are the future of the office?

Audrey Tang: My office in the Cabinet is literally horizontal. Each ministry can send one career public servant to my office. Out of the 32 ministries, maybe half of them have sent people, around 16 people each from a different ministry. My role is to ensure that they can co create. I don’t give them orders. I don’t take orders from them.

Audrey Tang: Whenever any of them think of a way that can work better, then we collaborate together to solve the issue together. Every time anyone in the Join platform, join.gov.tw, propose something and people have 5,000 countersignatures, then we do a ministerial response to those petitions. Many of the petitions are cross ministerial.

Audrey Tang: It requires people from various different ministries to work together. There was a petition that said the text filing experience is explosively hostile to Linux and Mac users. Then we got the participation officers from, say, the coastguard, the Ocean Affairs Council, unrelated ministries but they are Mac and Linux users. They can co create a better solution.

Audrey Tang: When we have a conversation about the ocean affairs, about fishing, surfing, and so on, maybe it will be the tax agency or the Financial Ministry chairing the breakout conversations. They also surf and fish in their spare time, and so on. They are on the side of petitioners. They are on the side of citizens.

Audrey Tang: This space is a way for people to work in a cross sectoral and cross ministerial fashion so that they can play the role, not as a siloed public service officer but someone who have a lot of sympathy to the petitioner but also understand public administration as their expertise, a perfect bridge between the movement on one side and the governments on the other.

Malaysian Moderator: You have been calling this term as “working with the government” instead of “working for the government”. Is that the one you mean as cooperative partner for the government instead of working under the government?

Audrey Tang: The idea of social innovation is that the idea comes first from the social sector. If the government comes up with an idea, just ask the people for input, that’s more supplementary input, and we call it consultation. Consultation is great. What we are doing is a step before consultation.

Audrey Tang: It’s the government saying, “We have no idea how to respond to this, so let’s think about this together.” That is social innovation because it’s the people coming up with those ideas. One very quick example of sandbox, which is a way to adjust for regulatory oversight on emerging technologies. We work on the sandbox system since 2015.

Audrey Tang: In 2015, when Uber X first came to Taiwan, working with people who drive to work, but with no professional driver’s license and match them with people that they carry and charge them for it just like a taxi. It’s not a taxi, it’s just sharing economy or something.

Audrey Tang: The idea of co creation is turning this tension between the taxi Union on one side and Uber on the other and use an assistive intelligence or AI powered conversation to work with the people and not for the people because we don’t know the solution. We just ask people, “How do you feel on this public infrastructure free software called polis.

Audrey Tang: We publish the facts, ask people how they feel for three weeks. The best ideas are the ones that take care of people’s feelings across the aisle. People feel insurance is important, or registration is important, not undercutting existing meter is important. If you agree with me, you click Agree, and you move toward me, if you disagree, you move further away from me.

Audrey Tang: At any given time, we show people exactly how divisive they are, and how much consensus they have. After three weeks, always we see this picture where people agree to disagree on a few ideological statement, like whether it’s sharing or gig economy, but everyone actually agree with most of their neighbors on most of the ideas, most of the time because they now have shared feelings.

Audrey Tang: This is what I mean by working with people. It is just to democratically find out the norm. Why does society find acceptable in case of Uber? Of course, Uber is a legal taxi company, Q taxi now, but the most important is that the act that we instill.

Audrey Tang: The multipurpose Taxi app also allows local churches, local temples, local mosques, to set up their own fleet to respond to the places where Uber would not serve, because lack of economic incentives.

Audrey Tang: It allows people to basically create Uber like applications in a much easier way without fearing the legal repercussions because they serve the positive social impact. This is only possible because everyone understand the norm, and saw it coming when we legalized the multipurpose taxis.

Malaysian Moderator: I saw there was some divisive statements in your previous slide here. How do you manage the divisive statements? Those who have divisive statements?

Audrey Tang: We just table them. The idea very simply put, is that we aim for a rough consensus or good enough consensus. If people still cannot agree on a few things, instead of like mainstream media, or in a more antisocial corner of social media, people’s attention are drawn to just a few ideological differences and spend endless time debating.

Audrey Tang: It’s in polis in our digital democracy infrastructure. As you can see, there is no no verification, there’s no reply button. People just propose their own more nuanced, more eclectic feelings for everybody else who feel very differently, maybe strongly. Nevertheless, they agree on a few common principles.

Audrey Tang: We legalize, instill into law, just those broad understanding, those common ground, those good enough consensus. Whilst there may be ideological differences, on these practicalities, we can agree to move forward a little bit.

Audrey Tang: Theoretically, it’s called overlapping consensus, be very specific in the agenda topics, and then we only use the common ground as our agenda for further conversation policy development.

Malaysian Moderator: This is a very interesting way of using technology, leveraging technology to implement certain policies. Our last conversation was a bit in the past. You also mentioned this philosophy called wu-wei. This is governing without imposition. Did I get the meaning right?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Malaysian Moderator: Can you explain more on this? How did you hold into this?

Audrey Tang: The idea of wu-wei very simply put is to “No top down.” No forced action, I think that’s the most precise English translation. Meaning that we never restrict the space for further innovations to happen. We just provide a space for those innovations to happen.

Audrey Tang: One quick example, very early on in the pandemic 2020 February, we found out that there is not enough mass production capability in Taiwan. At that time, with 24 million people, we only produce less than 2 million per day.

Audrey Tang: While we are ramping up the production, naturally, we will have to ration out the mask so that more than three quarters of people can have access to mask. That’s how we fought off the original variance in 2020.

Audrey Tang: Now, if we simply ask people to follow the rules, without publishing any information about the actual distribution of masks, that will be your way. That will be very top down. Instead, what we’re doing is that we trust these citizens with open data so that everyone can see every 30 seconds, which pharmacy’s near them, how much inventory they have in adults mask and children’s mask. The best thing is that this interface is not a government technology. It’s just civic technology created by people in Thailand city.

Audrey Tang: Once they have this interface, we simply say, we trust you. We will not do our own map. We will not do our own visualization. We simply provide the API, the programming interfaces, so that other people who want to also do their own maps, or chatbots, or apps, voice assistants can all do the same, like a distributed ledger with more than 100 different tools.

Audrey Tang: What it means is that when people innovate, they are not selected by procurement process so that only one vendor can innovate. Literally, hundreds of people can innovate and most importantly, this also allows people to analyze the actual distribution, because now they have the same data as we have because we all publish 30 seconds after each purchase.

Audrey Tang: People queuing in line can see it’s being fair because people queue before them, they make a purchase, and immediately after 30 seconds, the number decrease.

Audrey Tang: Opposition party immediately worked with the OpenStreetMap community to analyze the distribution, and say, “Hey, minister, you say, you’re being fair because the pharmacy distribution overlaps exactly with the people’s population. Each person on the map average have the same distance to the next available mask.”

Audrey Tang: That’s not true, because according to our analysis, not everyone own a helicopter. [laughs] In the rural areas where people have to take public transportation, the same distance may take them hours to cross by the time they got there where there’s no available anymore.

Audrey Tang: It’s actually biased, is being unfair, and we advertise it as fair. What’s going on? The great thing is that, the minister can then say, “Legislator, teach us because you have the same data. You think we’re being unfair. Tell us how more fair.”

Audrey Tang: After 24 hours, the opposition party working with the community discovered a new distribution method with pre registration, a convenience stores as pickup points, and so on. Then we immediately made it more fair in 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: In turns previously a zero sum or lose lose scheme of political blame into a positive sum game of cooperative and co creation. That’s the most important part of working with the people in away kind of way.

Malaysian Moderator: It’s quite unusual to see a good cooperation between the opposition and the ruling party. It’s hard to find in some certain democratic countries. Let’s talk a bit about this Creative Commons project that your office has been forwarding open data about the people that you’re going to meet even for certain policies. These people will be coming to your office for lobbying.

Malaysian Moderator: Can you give us more about this first hand use Creative Commons to use open data to come up with better policies or something policy for the policies?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Indeed, I practice radical transparency so that anyone meeting me, whether they are a lobbyist or whether they are a university lecturer, we make a full transcript of anything that has been said.

Audrey Tang: This is important, not just because it’s good for an accountability point of view. As you can see, since I’ve become the Digital Minister, I’ve talked with exactly 7000 people — That includes me — in almost 1800, counting this one, meetings.

Audrey Tang: We have a very specific privacy policy, terms of use, and so on that protects the privacy of my interlocutors. At this meeting in particular, you are exercising the right to stay anonymous on your end.

Audrey Tang: Only my part will be attributed in the published transcript. We offer a lot of flexibility. One thing that we do not give up is that whatever I said need to be in the comments.

Audrey Tang: The important thing here is that because people understand then the why of policy making, the process, the how of policy making, not just the resulting policies. If I make a mistake in my assumptions, I get the blame, but bad ideas turn into good suggestions by the people who see those transcripts.

Audrey Tang: Especially, empowering the investigative journalists which are previously in a disadvantage because they could not get the proceedings to aid their own investigation, and therefore slower in producing the news in comparison to the more tabloid ish news workers.

Audrey Tang: Investigative journalism, data journalism is what I have in mind when I publish all this. The other benefit of publishing this way is that all of the lobbyists lobby for the common good, for the future generations, for sustainability.

Audrey Tang: They never lobby for something that will harm other people, just to their benefit, because they know it will look very bad if I publish it under radical transparency. Psychologically, this is also a way to turn something that is more zero sum into positive sum games.

Malaysian Moderator: My last question before I open the floor to the audience. This is about the digital government. How does Taiwan ensure that sensitive data such as those consumption data, maybe also these hidden consumer pre census, even traffic data, normal traffic data?

Malaysian Moderator: How does Taiwan ensure all these data are being safeguarded, that data won’t leave Taiwan and also, this data will be safeguarded for their privacy?

Audrey Tang: The most important thing is we don’t collect aggregate into the government the data that we do not have a purpose.

Audrey Tang: Whenever we introduce new data collection methods, we prefer if the citizens, the social and private sector, manage the data in a federated way. This is very different.

Audrey Tang: The reason why is that if we aggregate all the data in the state in the government, first it creates a very high incentive for cybersecurity attacks on those aggregated data sources.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that because the incentive will be misaligned because the people who do not have a democratic say into the quality of the data, they will not be interested in improving the quality of the data. In fact, they may provide very low quality data because they know that they’re not going to have oversight of its use.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the day, if we make a decision based on biased data, it negatively affects everyone. We put a lot of interest in the accountability. The ability to make an account.

Audrey Tang: One example, last May, in 2021, we found out that the alpha and delta variants need a faster way of getting people’s contact tracing to be known. Oherwise, the contact tracers cannot notify the people who may be at risk of infection by the alpha and delta variants.

Audrey Tang: Previously, we used a paper based way or Google form or whatever to do registration. We found out that we need something that’s semi automated.

Audrey Tang: Instead of the government inventing data collection, this is the g0v, or G0v community, a civil society community, inventing this way of contact tracing.

Audrey Tang: We call it a 1922 SMS method. You’re looking at a convenience store and they post a QR code at the front door. The person using the phone — It’s built in camera. You don’t have to download any app — just point the camera to that QR code and it triggers SMS that sends to 1922, the toll free counter pandemic line. As you can see, the 15 digits is random code.

Audrey Tang: The idea here is privacy enhancing technology through federated oblivious storage. The 7 11 in this case never learns about your phone number because it’s you sending SMS out.

Audrey Tang: Your phone number is never known. Actually, nothing about you is known to 7 11. On the other hand, your telecomm which stored this check in for 28 days before deleting it, your telecomm learns nothing about where you have been because these 15 digits is random to them. Only 7 11 knows that this means 7 11. Again, this piece of puzzle does not compromise your privacy.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the contact tracing people, once they want to use this database, they can ask 7 11 and then ask the QR code printer for 7 11, and ask the telecomms and piece together.

Audrey Tang: Once they do that, they need to take into account all sorts of different input modes. For example, if there is one person with many children, and the children do not have a phone, they can scan a QR code and say plus four, meaning four children are with them.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t have a camera, but they have a flip phone, they can use the flip phone to manually text the 15 digits to 1922. No matter how they do the registration, once the contact tracing use their data, they must leave an audit at SMS1922 website.

Audrey Tang: Anyone can log into that website with their phone and then see which counties and which municipality have looked at their data and download the 28 day audit to do a reverse audit to ask their city councilor on the proper use of their data and so on.

Audrey Tang: I hope this illustrates a very basic idea that you do not need to get the raw data in an identifiable way in order to make something that is good for public purpose.

Audrey Tang: If you have good cryptographic primitives, that is to say privacy enhancing technology building blocks, you can design systems so that each data processor does not learn anything private about anyone.

Audrey Tang: Taken together, they can further a common purpose like contact tracing. Even if someone with cyber security attacks — black hat — attacks one of those data stores, they learn nothing about people’s private data.

Audrey Tang: The city governments only use this data in a way that corresponds to the purpose, which is contact tracing. We never use that data for anything else. Not for criminal investigation, anti money laundering, or anything like that because the Ministry of Justice have interpreted the saying, “This is not wiretap.”

Audrey Tang: This is nothing like private to private SMS that may be part of the telecommunication surveillance. This is purely a counter epidemic approach. Once people get assured that, “Oh, this has actual use,” this will reduce the spread of Delta and Alpha variants.

Audrey Tang: The first variant of Omicron, we fought off all these because we shortened the contract tracing from 24 hours to 24 minutes, so people participated in it. They see the meaning of it. They know it will not be misused, so they work together very well. More than 2 million venues printed those QR codes in the first week and then together provide very high quality data.

Malaysian Moderator: It’s a very eye opener for this kind of approach in managing the data. I would like to open up this floor to the participants. Anyone who has any questions, can you please unmute yourself. Let us know where you’re from and your name.

Malaysian Moderator: Anyone?

Malaysian Moderator: OK. Technical team?

Technical Team: You can use the raise sign.

Malaysian Moderator: No questions for Minister Audrey?

Malaysian Moderator: This one from…

Malaysian Moderator: I think I saw somebody.

Stefan: Hi, Stefan here. Thank you very much, Minister, for these insightful comments. Basically, what you described sounds very much like a big success story to leverage technology for managing an emergency like the pandemic.

Stefan: However, I’m always a bit on the critical side when it comes to using technologies because I do believe they are not neutral in sense and always are entangled with society and its power structures, so they always do create new inequalities.

Stefan: I was wondering, could you tell us a bit more of various pitfalls to be aware of when using technology in the way that you just described? Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, I see two main pitfalls. One is authoritarian pitfall. I call it AI as in Authoritarian Intelligence.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, just because machine learning allows data to produce code, there’s a tendency so that if we centralize data to the state, to one multinational corporation, or whatever, to overcentralize the data then it tends to make better decisions.

Audrey Tang: This is very dangerous because, exactly as you mentioned, it takes away agency. It takes away democratic accountability, which is why the instinct in Taiwan is to federate the data processing to always coexist with existing data processing ways.

Audrey Tang: For example, when we introduced a QR code base to contact tracing, we never said that it takes away the Bluetooth, the exposure notification by Google and Apple. It coexist with the Bluetooth technology.

Audrey Tang: Even with Bluetooth and QR code technologies, we never say that it takes away the paper based technology because my grandma — almost 90 years old now — never takes a phone with her when she goes shopping or something.

Audrey Tang: She goes alone. There’s nobody who does a plus one for her. Just for my grandma, [laughs] we need to preserve the paper based registration in venues and 7 11.

Audrey Tang: In fact, provide a small slip of paper so that she can stamp her contact information to that paper and fold it, put it — just like voting — into a box, protecting her privacy from the people who join the venue after her.

Audrey Tang: The QR code and Bluetooth still protects my grandma because it means that there’s less people crowded in these voting booths of paper based contact tracing. It protects her by enforcing social distancing.

Audrey Tang: Harmless coexistence is the antidote to this overcentralizing “One size fits all” approach. That’s very top down, shutdown, lockdown, and takedown. That’s the first big pitfall that we counter using decentralization.

Audrey Tang: The second pitfall I see is over decentralization. There’s another stream of thought by the Bitcoin Community most prominently, but also many other people that says, “The state existing institutions is always hostile, so let’s disrupt them and provide decentralized everything. Defy the sock.”

Audrey Tang: Say we just build a new governance mechanism, ignoring the existing one but the existing governance mechanisms are there to ensure inclusion and fairness.

Audrey Tang: Even people who do not have access to personal computers or cryptographic understanding, they are still protected by the existing institutions, which may arguably be slower, but they are slow for a reason because they are more pretty governable.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, for example, for Uber, we do not say just because Uber dispatch cars more efficiently than laws so Uber can ignore the law. [laughs] We don’t say that.

Audrey Tang: Instead of over individuating and each passenger as a sovereign individual or something, we simply say, “Let’s look at the part of Uber that fits the social norm,” and search pricing searching for a taxi without hailing them on the street.

Audrey Tang: These are the parts that a society already understand and accept, but there are parts that the society does not want. So, always does new technology need to fit the norm of technology in the society? In appropriate technology way. Never asking the society to be disrupted simply because those shiny new technology dictate a new way of living together.

Audrey Tang: We avoid both the overcentralization and over individuation through what I call plurality, which is pluralism. The collaborative technology that honors existing institutions but do not foreclose new institutions from appearing.

Malaysian Moderator: Two questions here from the audience. They’re questions in the chatbox. They’re from Pieter. Do you see the government’s approach to the privacy as the basic care being transferred to the private sector, for example Google, Microsoft, etc., as the new standard for managing user data?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, yes. This is a good thing about peaceful co existence, is that people vote with their behavior. [laughs] The QR code based contact tracing is very transparent. It’s auditable. Anyone can develop their own QR code scanning method.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, it’s quicker for most people. Not my grandma, but for most people quicker than the paper based method. It’s more reverse auditable. More transparent, more open source so to speak.

Audrey Tang: The Google Apple exposure notification team need to adapt to this fact in Taiwan. That their team, the local team working with them to develop their Bluetooth space contact tracing is peer pressured into publishing their entire technological stack as open source under MIT license. Very permissive, GitHub and so on.

Audrey Tang: Simply because they must be even more transparent in order for people to even consider using Bluetooth technology. We have a very transparent and auditable QR code based SMS technology in the middle. It creates not race to the bottom, but a race toward more private, more accountable, and more participatory.

Audrey Tang: Another example that I usually use is that the citizens in 2016 occupied the national auditing office in our control. Yet they occupied the printer, [laughs] and printed all the paper audits of the campaign expense and donation records.

Audrey Tang: We at a time, the g0v community worked together to run a CAPTCHA, a massive CAPTCHA, that people use like solving CAPTCHA to reverse engineer those printouts into structured data. That not just the national auditing office can do audit, but anyone. The investigative journalist can do audit.

Audrey Tang: That led to the control UN, releasing finally as open data the campaign expense and donation in the 2018 election. Once they released that, the independent journalist discovered that the social media advertisements, which bypassed both fact checking and parliamentary oversight, the Facebook advertisements, they’re never declared as campaign expense.

Audrey Tang: The donors came from outside of our jurisdiction and even from jurisdictions that there’s no Facebook. Obviously, they’re doing something. [laughs] It creates a social pressure.

Audrey Tang: We negotiated with Facebook saying, “We’re not making a law that punish you or fine you, but just look at what people had found.” People’s norm after, amplified by the social sector, we got accepted by the public sector.

Audrey Tang: Now, the private sector need to adhere to this norm. They cannot ignore our local norm. Facebook in 2019, leading up to our 2020 election, Taiwan became one of the first jurisdiction in which they published all the campaign donation and finance in the sponsor advertisements and also banned all the sponsors outside of our jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: This is very important. It leveled the playing field of our election because our campaign donation never accepted external, outside of jurisdiction, donors anyway. It leveled the norm of democratic participation instead of saying that Facebook is outside of Taiwan so they can disrupt our politics if not nothing like that.

Audrey Tang: A strong social sanction as implicit threat is very important in negotiating with, not just Google and Microsoft but also Facebook, Amazon, and friends.

Malaysian Moderator: We have another question. Actually, one, two, three, four, there are four. There’s three more question from the chatbox here.

Malaysian Moderator: The second question by Mohamed Sufi says, “Thank you for such an illuminating dialogue. I would like to ask the minister regarding digital diversity and trends of censorship. Especially, since censorship is used during COVID there by Asian democracies, what are your thoughts and experiences on this?”

Audrey Tang: Censorship is like a lockdown. When the virus gets really bad, sometimes people are saying there is no choice, we have to do a lockdown and so sacrificing some liberty and freedom in exchange for better public health or in the sense of the infodemic, better mental health, that is the usual rationale.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re able to do with no lockdown. Even that we’re facing the Omicron variant, we never had a single day of lockdown. The reason we can do that is that we have vaccines. Similarly, in the public square, in the digital realm, in the social media, we need to have vaccines as well.

Audrey Tang: That helps people to not get the close contacts sharing this virus of the mind with them and get very angry so they cough digitally angrily sharing this information and then spread to 10 other people. It’s exactly like the COVID. We felt that vaccination on the mental health realm is possible.

Audrey Tang: It’s through journalism. Journalism is like public health discipline for the virus of the mind once people understand how journalism works, how the framing effects work, how fact checking work, how getting credible source work. All the training that a journalist must go through, we have in our basic education the digital competence and media competence classes.

Audrey Tang: It’s not literacy, which is just for viewing and consuming. Competence is when the middle schoolers can fact check the three presidential candidates as they are having their platform and debate in real time. If their fact check corresponds well, then their contribution goes to the public broadcasting live stream network, and they feel like heroes saving democracy and so on.

Audrey Tang: We rely on people to flag incoming spam even into an encrypted channels. They can voluntarily donate individual messages as spam or scam. Then, from there, everybody see what’s the most viral trending disinformation or propaganda from outside of our jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: Then the fact checkers and the meme makers focus on it, make comedies, and so on, very cute dog and cat pictures. People then share the antidote even more virally. It’s a little bit like a viral vaccine. If you are already boosted, getting omicron sometime if you are young is like getting the fourth shot. It’s a little bit like that.

Audrey Tang: We do notice and public notice highlighting, that there is this disinformation going on. Pointing out the attribution, “Oh, it’s actually sponsored by some Weibo account,” then people who share this also share this fact checking spike protein. They got it into their system.

Audrey Tang: It also developed antibodies because they see, “Oh, this trending disinformation is actually sponsored by someone outside of our jurisdiction.” Exactly the same playbook that we counter the virus of the body, can be used to counter the virus of the mind with no lockdowns on this side and no takedown and censorship, on the other side.

Malaysian Moderator: Now a question from Aylin. What are some of the challenges you face when it comes to co-creation, especially getting more input from the marginalized or less politically dominant members of the society? Does your civic society engage in their own crowdsourcing, which then integrates to government services?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. This, from 2016, is the airbox where people, usually high school and primary school teachers, teach data stewardship and data competence to their students by having a PN2.5.

Audrey Tang: That’s air quality, small particles pollution measuring device on their balconies, on their schools, and so on. Each dot here is something that is contributed into data altruism by a local school.

Audrey Tang: These teachers started a movement that demands the government to complete a puzzle even in the places where there’s less of those air boxes maybe because it’s an industrial park. Of course, the primary school teachers cannot break into the industrial plants and set up airboxes there.

Audrey Tang: What they can do is that they can set up surrounding that place. It is now the burden of the industrial park owner to prove that the air quality pollution is not from their plant.

Audrey Tang: The local city government instilled this way of setting up the airbox according to the civil society specification in the lamps which the city government own, in the lamps powering the industrial area completing the puzzle together. We turned that into a data collaborative called civiliottaiwan@ci.taiwan.gov.tw that you can look up.

Audrey Tang: That takes care of not just air pollution but also the water quality, earthquake and other disaster recovery in a truly crowdsourcing way. We also invested and distributed ledger technology so that every student can upload their own models to the shared data store and is all immutable.

Audrey Tang: It will not be changed leading to an election and things like that. It’s a fabric that engenders trust. Because of the success of civil IoT and many other civil collaboratives, we finally instill this annual event called Presentation Hackathon that gives out five trophies as you can see here. Which is a micro projector underneath.

Audrey Tang: If you turn on, it shows Dr. Tsai Ing Wen, our president, handing you the trophy. It’s very meta. Then the teams that won those trophies are selected by the people using voting method called quadratic voting.

Audrey Tang: The data collaboratives, five each year like the air boxes. They receive this trophy that symbolizes that the national governments will turn their local experiment maybe just in one city into national wide deployment with other personnel budget and regulatory support required.

Audrey Tang: Basically, endorsing it like a presidential promise. Each and every of those projects need to correspond to one or more of the concrete sustainable development goal targets. Usually, they combine assistive intelligence with collective intelligence into what we call augmented collective intelligence or ACI. I hope that answered the question.

Malaysian Moderator: It did. Another question: “What’s your future driven and strategic maneuver in driving Taiwan into the progress in the spheres of its own economy, and incorporating the next frontiers of AI, nano, and quantum technologies in modernizing urban community and defensive capabilities?”

Malaysian Moderator: The other one is the second question as well, “With Taiwan in semiconductor dominance, what is the strategic move in ensuring continuous progress in this particular advantage? According to the conversation of a student and progressive digital transformation and the digital culture acceptance of the masses.”

Malaysian Moderator: This is quite a long question.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s a really good question. The first question, I have no answer because of the 16 ministries that have sent people to my office. As I mentioned, most people facing ministries have sent people, but the ministry of defense never sent anyone. I know nothing about national defense. Not more than any newspaper reader, so [laughs] I do not know. I trust that our Ministry of National Defense, our National Security Council is also learning from the counter pandemic playbooks and so on. Especially the recent developments on geopolitics in Ukraine. It’s not my department. I literally don’t know.

Audrey Tang: The second thing I know better. The most important thing of the cultural acceptance by the masses is to ensure that it’s the citizens setting the agenda, not the technologists setting the agenda. To do this, basically we’re looking at this policy that they shared as the digital equivalent of a town hall of public infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, we need digital equivalence of museums, public libraries, campuses, parks and so on, and not just Facebook which is a digital equivalent of a nightclub with very loud music, and smoky room. You have to shout to get heard. Probably the bouncers, addictive drinks, mental health hazards for minors I can go on, and others.

Audrey Tang: If we are forced to do town halls in the nightclubs, then of course, this picture will be flipped. People will look very divisive, pretty much everything. That’s the property of the space, not the property of the people.

Audrey Tang: We need the additional public infrastructure, the public space where people can develop measurements of progress together for meaningful co creation between the sectors in the society into innovations.

Audrey Tang: When people ask my job description, I’m like, “This is very easy. I just make the space for reliable data, 17 18, effective partnership 17 17, and 17 6, which is open innovation and we need to continue to adapt technology to where people are, not asking people to give up their values for technology.

Audrey Tang: I think that galvanizes people because they see that they are being treated as complimentary partners, not just supplementary data points.

Malaysian Moderator: Another question here. In the context of social innovation during pandemic. How do you see the roles of social enterprises in Taiwan, in the context of social innovation during pandemic? The other question is, do you observe distinctive business or operating modules on all these SEs, social enterprises?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Taiwan has a very long tradition of, especially consumer cooperatives, but also labor cooperatives in our indigenous lands in Taiwan. Cooperatives form the backbone of our social enterprise movement. Of course, many social enterprises take non coopt form of association.

Audrey Tang: For example, there is a trend of the social enterprises operate as a charity on the talk, but a charity own a for profit company as a shareholder. Because we allow the legal entities, not just individual persons, as board members.

Audrey Tang: It could be a foundation holding as a permanent board member to a corporation, a company. A for profit company is free to get investment from the market, but because of the special veto stock, or the special arrangement of the article of association, the purpose of the for purpose seat always is there, cannot be diluted.

Audrey Tang: This kind of hybrid organization of a charity owning a for profit company, so for purpose with profit, this is a new organizational innovation that has been taken hold in the past few years. Not necessarily a coop but with the spirit of a public benefit coop. There’s many other variations on this theme.

Audrey Tang: There’s also decentralized autonomous organizations on the distributor ledger, especially Ethereum, where people also found global for purpose not necessarily companies, but DAOs and part of the open collective movement, the Gitcoin and so on. Many of them have Taiwanese inputs that furthers a global goal that is beyond Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: They get their association of charter not in any particular jurisdiction, not even in Cayman Island but in distributor ledgers. There’s a wide embracing of this technology when it comes to crowd funding, crowd sourcing. That’s another frontier of social enterprise.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the other SEs, they share the sustainability development goals as they are common index of their purpose. They’re just like publicly listed companies which has the obligation to do the reporting for SDGs and the ESG annual report.

Audrey Tang: More and more it’s more in medium enterprises, even startups, pride themselves in doing the same or even better than the public listed company because it attracts impact investments.

Audrey Tang: Frankly speaking, the supply chain rewards them, because they now can prove that they work in jurisdiction that care even more than Taiwan about say, net zero on climate mitigation or many other SDG indexes.

Malaysian Moderator: Maybe I pick one more question from the floor before we wrap up this session. Any question from floor?

Malaysian Moderator: Any questions from floor? Maybe not. Maybe I wrap up with one question for you. It’s about what I got from the…I just named the Taipei City Government which I was a visiting fellow back in Taipei.

Malaysian Moderator: I interviewed them and they asked me that one of the reasons that they don’t have Malaysian State governments working with them, is that, Malaysian State governments tend to view digitalization in the commercial perspective instead of a public policy of social innovation to allow digitalization.

Malaysian Moderator: For a county like Malaysia here, any suggestions for us to venture beyond such a focus on commercial sense? How can we take the digitalization into the public policy domain?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Just as the free software movement around the turn of century, we collaboratively adopted this marketing campaign called open source, which is exactly the same as free software, but it sounds less anti commercial. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Open source means exactly the same, but it now says, “Look at the maintenance cost you’re paying. Look at the portability of your software. If you open up the core of your technologies for community you maintain, you can massively save on the cost that you have to continuously pay to maintain your software stack or something like that.”

Audrey Tang: That’s the original open source argument. The argument is that, if Google have to pay for each hardware they own license fee to Windows, there would never be Google because they will never be able to bootstrap their search engine processing unit.

Audrey Tang: Only because they can use Linux in a way free of cost, but also in a way free from copyright restrictions, they can adapt Linux which used to be only for small computers into very huge supercomputing centers.

Audrey Tang: They can cleave off with the Linux community to do business. We need to do similar things when proposing social innovations.

Audrey Tang: We need to take those purely linear terms of hype, of technology, and create equally attractive terms for the investors to look at that ultimately save everybody time and reduce the risk for everybody.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, that’s my job description. In 2016, when I became digital minister, I said, “This is going to be my work.” The HR Department said, “Minister, I don’t think people memorize as DGs. You have to explain in everyday language.” I’m like, “Sure. Let’s explain that.”

Audrey Tang: It goes like this. This is my job description. When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it an 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. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let’s always remember the plurality here. We need to make a business case out of plurality.

Malaysian Moderator: There is another. I’ll pick this as the final question for this session from the participant Pieter, “How do you persuade common business, besides the Defense Ministry, to embrace open data?”

Audrey Tang: Before open data, if things goes wrong, the public servant always gets the blame because only they have access to the evidence.

Audrey Tang: The opposition party will hold them to account and blame for everything. If things goes right, only the Minister get the credit. The public service never gets any credit. If you embrace open data and co creation, it flips it around.

Audrey Tang: When things go wrong, because we publish on collection, you never did any censorship, it cannot be you’re to blame. You can simply ask the opposition party, “So, yeah, you say our idea is bad. You have the same data. Give us a better idea.” They actually have to do that. You don’t get blames.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if there are good innovations coming from the government or public sector, the individuals get the credit because in the public transcripts you can see exactly who is the leader, and who is the director general.

Audrey Tang: Even just a head of the department or head of a section that came up with those innovation in the first place, they get the full credit because of the full context that is published alongside the open data. I think anyone working in the public service has their mind on improving the benefit of all, but if they can avoid the blame and get the credit, they will be happier too.

Malaysian Moderator: That’s all. Thank you for your answer. That wraps up our session for today. We are up one hour since we started. A really big thank you to Mr. Tang for spending your valuable time, one hour time business for the audience in Malaysia here. Hope we can have more conversations in the future.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. We will only be easier the next time. Thank you for the very good questions. Live long and prosper. Bye.

Malaysian Moderator: Hi.

Malaysian Host: Thank you. Do have a good day.

Malaysian Moderator: Thank you.