Jonas Parello-Plesner: Good afternoon here in Europe. Good morning if you’re watching in the US. Good evening in Asia and particularly in Taiwan. Welcome to today’s event featuring Digital Minister Audrey Tang from Taiwan talking about how Taiwan handled COVID-19, including using civic tech solutions.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I’m Jonas Parello-Plesner. I’m Executive Director of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation. I’m broadcasting here from Copenhagen, Denmark to you. It’s fantastic to kick off our second virtual session under the catchphrase and hashtag DefendDemocracy.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: The reason is that COVID-19 virus is not only putting our health system under strain, it’s also straining our shared democratic values. Freedom of movement and assembly has been curtailed in worldwide lockdowns.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Governments, sometimes with full transparency and sometimes with none at all, are using electronic tracking and health data collection to spot and follow infected citizens. Some leaders are seizing on this moment to consolidate power. In Europe, Hungary stands out. In Cambodia, the crisis has been used to clamp down on opposition politicians by using fake and use legislation.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: We all want to come out of this crisis alive, but we also want our political systems, our freedom, and democracy to survive. That is the priority we are pursuing in the Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Last week, we did our first session on how democracies and autocracies handle the coronavirus with Julie Smith, Director of The German Marshall Fund in Washington, DC, and Tobby Simon, CEO of Synergia Foundation, from Bangalore, India. If you haven’t watched that already, I highly recommend it. It’s on our YouTube and Facebook pages. To subscribe and like, if you like it of course.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Let me also mention that all of this here being on screen, this way is new for us. Bear over with us if there are any technical mishaps. Today, we are on Skype. Last week, we were on Zoom. We are trying out different methods. We are democracy defenders, not YouTubers. We’re learning on the go.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Fittingly, today is also National Health Day. Let me also express my thoughts with all the people suffering around the world due to the COVID-19 virus. My sympathy goes out especially to anybody listening in who themselves have been infected with coronavirus or who has family members or close relatives who are.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Also, on this day, a big shout-out to the many heroic health personnel performing under very difficult circumstances. These are extraordinary and tough times all of us around the globe.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Now let’s turn to Taiwan, that we are going to talk about today. Taiwan has very few cases of COVID-19 although the country is only around 100 kilometers away from China. Taiwan has 23 million citizens, of which over 800,000 reside in and 400,000 work in China. In 2019, 2.71 million visitors from the mainland traveled to Taiwan.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: With that background, it is astonishing that Taiwan until now has managed so well. Let me just here for a moment share my screen and show you an info graphic here. Come over here. Here. On this one here, you see, which is John Hopkins that has a really good tracker of the global spread of the virus.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: You see the two big epicenters in now the US, Europe, and of course China where it all originated. Out here, you have Taiwan. It also shows Taiwan up here with only five, in global comparison, a very small five deaths, and 376 confirmed cases. That shows, I would say, the uniqueness of Taiwan’s case.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Our guest today, as I mentioned, is Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, from Taiwan. I had the pleasure of meeting Minister Tang during the parliamentary and presidential elections back in January. There I had my first dose of radical transparency, one of the novel elements Minister Tang has brought into government.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: You can still read the full and unedited transcript about talks somewhere on the Internet. Based on that conversation and our interviews during the elections, I did an article for “The American Interest” on Taiwan’s approach to disinformation, which is really fascinating.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Minister Tang is somewhat of a rock star in the field of civic check of civic hacking and came out of that circle before joining government. Minister Tang is also a rock star in social media. When Minister Tang retweeted this event, thousands liked it. I hope many of you are able to join the session and are listening in.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Minister Tang, I’ll now pass the floor to you. I would love for you to explain some of the elements of the Taiwanese historic, including of course the use of technological solutions and empowered citizens so that we can all learn from it?

Audrey Tang: Hello, I am Audrey Tang and good local time to all of you in the great beyond that is the Internet. It is truly my pleasure to share with you some thoughts around our work both in civic technology, as Jonas mentioned, but also how government technology is built upon civic technology and the idea of co-creation.

Audrey Tang: I’m Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation. First, I would like to show you my office.

Audrey Tang: Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, in her second term elected and soon to be embarking on her second term now, said a very inspiring quote from her first term’s inauguration speech. She said, “Before we think of democracy as showdown between two opposing values, but from now on, democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values.”

Audrey Tang: You are looking at my office. This is really my office. We tore down the walls, they owed Airforce HQ, and everybody can just walk in. There’s no walls now, [laughs] and have a conversation with me for 40 minutes every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to the evening.

Audrey Tang: This is the basis of radical transparency meaning that everybody who talk with me need to agree that we put either the transcript or the full video online for everybody to see. Interestingly, in that circumstances, everybody lobbied for the public benefit for environmental sustainability, and nobody lobby for private interest, because they know that other stakeholders will be watching.

Audrey Tang: This is just one of the few social innovations that we experiment here in Taiwan. We designed this not because it’s fun – although it is fun – but because of necessity. Taiwan is one of the freest place in Asia when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Tackling the disinformation crisis, those intentional harmful disinformation that tries to sow discord in the democracy, many jurisdictions adopted to more authoritarian measures that puts a minister’s word somehow above a journalist’s word and encroach on journalistic freedom.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’ve only gained the right to get the presidential election running in 1996. We still remember what it was like to have no freedom of speech and freedom of press, and nobody want to go back there. We’re forced to innovate the ways to counter disinformation as well as other modern source of outrage as a sort of virus. It’s a virus of the mind that puts people into…

Audrey Tang: Now I’m talking ideological camps. One of the main way that we respond to it is what we call humor over rumor, or a rapid response. Whenever there is a rumor, within an hour we have a clarification that is very funny using mimetic engineering ways that make sure that it goes viral.

Audrey Tang: This is just one of the pre-COVID examples. It used to be that there was a rumor that says perming your hair will be subject to one million-dollar fine starting next week, and that’s of course not true. If the government simply say, “It’s not true,” research shows that it only reinforces people’s…what the stereotypes they have.

Audrey Tang: If they distrust the government, the government says it’s not true makes people distrust the government more. What’s important here is the government need to trust the citizen and trust the citizen with a sense of humor.

Audrey Tang: You’re seeing now the Premier, the Prime Minister of Taiwan posting this an hour after the disinformation goes online. He said, “I may be bald now, but I will not punish people with hair.” He additionally says in a fine print, “The labeling requirement for hair product is being introduced in 2021.”

Audrey Tang: Now that was a photo when the Premier was younger, but now the photo as Premier looks now says, “However, if you keep perming your hair multiple times a week, it will not damage your pocket, but it will damage your hair, and when serious you can just look at me to see the result.”

Audrey Tang: It’s a good kind of humor. He makes fun of himself. He’s not make fun in the expense of other people. This goes viral far more than the disinformation type, so much so that if you search for perming hair fine of whatever, you always find this picture. The original rumor is forgotten, and that way we ensure that we only add to the clarification without censoring anyone.

Audrey Tang: This of course relies on collaboration with journalists. We never use the f-word, the fake news word, we always say that disinformation is the best counter strategy is to make everybody a journalist, everybody a news producer.

Audrey Tang: In our basic education starting from the first grade, starting last year, we teach not media literacy which is about being consumers of media, but media competence, being producers of media so that people can collaboratively join fact-checking communities and work with the international fact-checking network.

Audrey Tang: So that people, whenever they feel that something may be a scam or disinformation or whatever, they can forward it to a chatbot, and a chatbot then forwards it to a Wikipedia-like civic type of community called CoFacts. That in turn inspires many private sector tools that enable people to very quickly get into the clarifications and disseminate the clarifications to people.

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan FactCheck Center is a independent social-sector organization that are professional journalists, and they work with those sources to make sure that everybody see the honest advertisements and whichever things that has been deemed by the Taiwan FactCheck Center or other international fact-checking network members as misleading or as untrue.

Audrey Tang: Instead of taking it down, people see a “see also blank” is social media. Social media leads them to learn more about the clarification instead of taking anything down. Our strategy is to add more information for a participatory journalism.

Audrey Tang: During elections, of course, we have special clauses that says we have a separate branch of the government called Control Yuan that publishes, in raw data, open data, for everybody to analyze, how campaign donation and expense work. Since the mayoral election, we discover that a lot of social media advertisements was not filed as political donation or expense.

Audrey Tang: We did a semi-diplomatic conversation with Facebook and the like saying that you either ban the use of political advertisement during elections, or you publish it using our Control Yuan format, the raw format for everybody to analyze to make sure no dark operation is going on. Facebook chose the latter. Twitter and Google chose the former.

Audrey Tang: The idea is always that this is social norm. People already understand that the Control Yuan publish this number, and the independent media already works with it, so it’s very hard for social media to say that, “OK, we don’t do this in Taiwan.” They have to do this in Taiwan. Otherwise, they may both be looking at social sanction instead of government sanctions.

Audrey Tang: I would use two examples before I go into our Q&A session to show you how this fact-checking system, through radical transparency, works in action. For example, before the election, there was a popular disinformation campaign that says the Hong Kong protestors were “exposed” to be “paid to murder police,” which is, of course, a very serious accusation.

Audrey Tang: For example, this is a popular picture that was making the rounds on Taiwanese social media that says this 13-year-old that bought new iPhones, things like that. Except, of course, the original photo came from Reuters, and the Reuters’ caption says nothing about iPhones or things like that. It’s just a matter-of-fact reporting.

Audrey Tang: We adopt a strategy we call notice and public notice. That is to say, instead of taking any of this down, the Taiwan FactCheck Center, working with their international counterparts, located the source of this disinformation to the central legal and political unit of the CCP.

Audrey Tang: What they have done is they’ve posted that in the Weibo, and people started remixing that propaganda, which is obviously untrue, not to mention copyright violation on the Reuter’s photo, into the social media and remixing into it. Instead of taking it down, we make sure that everybody look at this picture, learn where the source comes from, and that, in turn, makes people aware that there is propaganda going on.

Audrey Tang: There’s another one about making invisible inks for ballots [laughs] during the casting process. Again, this is resolved through radical transparency by making sure that everybody, YouTubers and so on, can live-stream the balloting counting process in each individual voting places.

Audrey Tang: People can see with their own eyes. It’s actually very popular to look at how the counting went, and so ensure that there’s no invisible ink or whatever going on.

Audrey Tang: I understand that this event is marketed with a COVID’s angle, so I will end my example with a COVID example. This is in the early onset of COVID. We know that this is going on last year, December 31. We announced measures starting early January.

Audrey Tang: By February, everybody knows what’s going on, and there’s a large demand of surgical masks, medical masks. There was a disinformation that says a certain manufacturer sponsored 2,000 boxes mask. Get a box free by clicking share of this post. Of course, it’s a scam. Nobody really gain anything other than maybe spearphishing them. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, this start making the rounds. Again, this is solved through radical transparency by working with the civil society. This is actually more than 100 tools, including maps, apps and chatbots. Everybody can see, very easily, where the pharmacists near them are, which masks are in stock, whether adult ones or the children’s ones.

Audrey Tang: They can very easily locate the pharmacies that still has the masks in stocks. The number is refreshed every three minutes or so. Although the numbers may not be entirely real-time, it’s still very useful. If you see a pharmacy is runs out of stock, it’s out of stock. People don’t waste their time going to the pharmacy that doesn’t have the masks.

Audrey Tang: We use the national health insurance card to claim the mask. Now you can get nine medical masks every two weeks. This kind of rationing through this NHI system is a lot of credit to the NHI to be able to work with the pharmacies and the pharmacies to agree for the social accountability of their work so that you can check for yourself.

Audrey Tang: If you go to a pharmacy, you swipe your NHI card. You get nine mask. After a few minutes, you can refresh the browser and see the stock deplete by nine. Of course, we add to it a online ordering component, but the core principle is the same. It is trusting citizens with open data because we are a republic of citizens or 民國.

Audrey Tang: The citizens then, in turn, trust each other more because everybody can see what’s going on. This is a crash course [laughs] of the radical transparency and how it has been working, countering disinformation, including COVID disinformation.

Audrey Tang: Now, over to you.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Thank you. Thanks a lot, Minister Tang. There is one of the examples among the 100-plus that you mentioned that I followed a little bit and it would be great to hear here during the COVID was this whole real-time mask map that came out first of civic tech, then bot, as I understand it, also used by government.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: It’s what you’ve been doing with e-mask. Could you, for all of us and all the listeners, explain this type of interaction between civic tech and government. I think that will be really fascinating.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. The e-mask system is our newest iteration, where people can pre-order masks instead of getting them in real time from the pharmacies. Before I explain about the e-mask, I need to go back to why the real-time mask map was produced.

Audrey Tang: In the very, very beginning, the mask distribution was through convenience stores, but there was no NHI card component to it. The result is that people who know that a certain convenience stores start replenishing their stock around 2:00 AM, you see people riding motorcycles, scooters around 2:15 and start going to convenience store after convenience store [laughs] to get all the masks.

Audrey Tang: Not necessarily because of hoarding, but because of people who don’t know for certain whether the production will be enough. There’s a lot of disinformation and misinformation going around.

Audrey Tang: There’s a civic hacker named Howard Wu, Wu Chan Wei in Tainan, started working for the convenience stores to be mapped on the Google Map so that they can see which convenience stores still have stock, relying on people to report their experience to this map.

Audrey Tang: He’s designed this just for his friends and family. He certainly did not design it to be used by the entire country, but people started using it for real. Very quickly his Google Map API built started to soar, and he has to close the service.

Audrey Tang: This is the spirit of social innovation. It is something that we did not anticipate from the government side. We see that there’s a real social demand of it. We need help from the private sector. For example, Google eventually waives all their Google Map fees. Also, based upon the public sector, so that when we switch to pharmacies, I showed the Premier who is in a much higher resolution here.

Audrey Tang: I showed Premier Su, this is the convenience store mask map, that was the map back then. He immediately understood what this was about. He said, “Oh, this is just like a GPS navigation application. If there’s a busy lane, it shows red. It takes me to a detour, which was green means that it’s more available and things like that.

Audrey Tang: He understood that immediately. Then we worked with the NHI on the open data. One of the other applications is that we have a shared dashboard. Everybody can quickly see how many adult masks there are, how many masks are in store, how many masks are available, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That enables us to rapidly change our pharmacy supply chain so that we issue more masks to the pharmacies that has the more requirement. We stop issuing masks to the pharmacies that is already struggling to sell their mask rationing portions.

Audrey Tang: This also enable with evidence-based policy-making that everybody can confirm instead of a black box between the pharmacies and a NHI. It is actually everybody can confirm that yes, it really makes sense for us to make such adjustments.

Audrey Tang: The e-mask part is to solve a specific problem that this put a lot of strain on pharmacies because still, first in the line wins. Pharmacies has to spend two hours up to five hours a day just satisfying this mask buying experience.

Audrey Tang: Although it is very fair, it is also causing a long queue, which is less of a problem now because we don’t have as much of a community spread but may become a problem in the future. We have to anticipate that.

Audrey Tang: Even with the mask map in the pharmacies, we see that there’s a lot of people who are struggling to get masks because the pharmacies may close around 9:00 PM. There’s many people, especially in the large municipalities, that work well after that. Because of that, we have to design some way that opens 24 hours a day.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s not by asking the pharmacies to work 24 hours. We’re asking the convenience stores. The convenience stores are all very OK with that, because they know with the pre-order, it is actually to their benefit if they can bring in a million people every week to collect the masks.

Audrey Tang: There’s twice the number of convenience stores compared to pharmacies. It’s not replacing pharmacies. It’s adding to the pharmacies. We’ve tripled the amounts of places where you can get the mask rationing.

Audrey Tang: I spend personally, less than one minute collecting my pre-order. This week, we’re beta testing this idea of taking my NHI card and renew my pre-order as soon as I collect it. There’s a few convenience stores already working with the journalist to ask a random 80-years-old or 70-years-old elderly person, to try out the process. I timed my process.

Audrey Tang: It took me 55 seconds. TVBS, a local media, measured that an elderly person well in their 70s took a minute and 5 seconds, which is only 10 seconds more. It means that our user experience is pretty good. That will then soon enables them instead of queuing, go to a nearby convenience store and use their NHI card to both collect and pre-order their masks.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s great. Taiwan even have that many masks in store that you’re able to give masks also to Europe, for example. I would say, as a European, thank you for that. It’s good that you had a good system to take care of your stock.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I forgot to say initially that, but I see they’re already taking in, that we take questions also from our Facebook live session. Do type in your questions if you haven’t done already. I see a lot of people are, even though I haven’t announced it already, doing that.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: One more question before turning to some of the audience question is if you think about one element that’s been really for you the success story behind Taiwan’s handling of COVID-19, what would that be?

Audrey Tang: We started really early on. That is the number one reason. We started last year. Not many countries can say that. Most countries started this year. That makes a crucial difference.

Audrey Tang: Back when people were still saying, “Oh, it’s limited to person-to-person transmission,” and things like that, we already started everything that we’ve learned during SARS. Of course, the nCoV, the COVID-19 is not SARS.

Audrey Tang: It turns out that mask-use is even more important than during SARS because of people who doesn’t have symptoms who are still contagious in Taiwan. Deploying all the defenses as if it is SARS coming back again, starting last year, really helped because we were inoculated as a society.

Audrey Tang: People who are above 20 years old remember how bad it was during SARS. People then want to mobilize as a society, not fully trusting the government. In fact, not fully trusting anyone, but just as a society to mobilize ourselves against the defense.

Audrey Tang: Now, of course, the CECC, the Central Epidemic Command Center really helps also, because every day, they hold a press conference working with the journalists, as I said, provide real-time clarifications. All the press conferences is like “Ask me anything.” Everybody can ask the Minister of Health and Welfare anything.

Audrey Tang: The press helped a lot in, for example, contact tracing and things like that. Working with civic sector, working with journalists, not for the people, is the key to the success of Taiwan.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s great. Minister Tang, remembering you have to stop screen sharing. We would love to see you, but now we have the blank…There you go. Perfect.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Let me turn to some of the questions, as I imagine from Europe, where you have a lot on privacy issues, which is something that’s very big here, on how does this potentially change the relationship with government on health data. How much are you allowed to track infected people.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I have one here. Is it true there are also apps that show where COVID-19 infected people are or have been, and how does this match with the privacy issue? That’s a good one to hear Taiwan’s experiences, and as Europe is grappling with this, how you see this and what, practically, is in place in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: There’s no app, per se. There is a civic sector-developed tool that allows people to compare their personal digital trail, the Google Map related data and things like that, against published trails of people who are infected.

Audrey Tang: We do not, as a rule, publish such trails of infected people. We only do so if the CECC can safely say that it affects a large number of people, and they cannot do the contact tracing all by them self.

Audrey Tang: I can share my screen again. This probably doesn’t work without a screen share.

Audrey Tang: This is how the website, not an app, looks like. As you can see, this is used in a four-step process.

Audrey Tang: The first one is making sure that this website is authorized to download your personal data from the Google Maps Timeline. This is strictly in your browser. It’s never transmitted out of your device. It’s not government-developed, otherwise it would have a gov.tw in its website address.

Audrey Tang: The second is to self-select the period to download. The third is to select available data.

Audrey Tang: There was one published case from Israel, one from Korea, and now one from the recent holiday. The CECC just announced a area with very high population density.

Audrey Tang: This tool enables you to compare your own personal trail from the Google Maps against the declared high population density areas. That’s it. There’s nothing more than that.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the same technology has been used also for people in Israel and in Korea to compare against the cases. For example, the Korean website that shows the detailed location of confirmed cases.

Audrey Tang: At the moment we’re not, as a rule, publishing that from the CECC, but we are publishing the high population density, highly risky areas, and so on, but without revealing any personal information. We think it strikes a balance.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: No, that’s very interesting. Also, has there been any thoughts, then, in Taiwan, as a follow-up question, on private company involvement, in the sense that I know in the US there was also an idea of an app. It was through a Google subsidiary company.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: There is a bit of a backlash, at least in one article I read, about that, of giving a private company that much access to people’s health data in this situation. Has there been any discussion, since you use Google Maps for this?

Audrey Tang: The Google Map relationship with the website that I just showed is non-governmental. It’s strictly a tool – a open-source tool, at that – that allows people to query their existing data stored at Google.

Audrey Tang: We’re not making tools, for example, enabling the sharing of their digital trails to the CECC. That need to be said very clearly.

Audrey Tang: We’re not encouraging, from CECC, the use of people who report their own data for a number of reasons. First, application level doesn’t tend to enable the fine-grained contact tracing that is necessary.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, for each domestic person diagnosed on average we contact trace around 200, 300 people. Then this contact tracing is done not by people voluntarily opting in data, nor is there opting out. There’s nothing like that. It is by traditional contact tracing technologies.

Audrey Tang: For people who are under quarantine there is a digital fence. Again, it’s not by installing an app or anything like that. It is by the five telecoms voluntarily working with the legal basis that is ruled as constitutional.

Audrey Tang: Right after SARS there was a challenge in the constitutional court whether it makes sense to physically barricade people from leaving their quarantined places. The constitutional court said, “Yeah, it’s somewhat constitutional, but there needs to be a due process, and things like that,” and so we worked on the due process.

Audrey Tang: For people who travel from abroad who are under home quarantine, if they don’t have a mobile phone we give them one. Otherwise, their own personal phone is used.

Audrey Tang: The five telecoms, in a data collaborative, makes sure that if they break the digital fence the contact traces are after them within five minutes. The private companies are working in a much more fundamental level, the telecom level, rather than from the app level.

Audrey Tang: Especially if you have played any location-based games, you know how easy the app level data can be manufactured. It’s much more difficult for the telecom data to be manufactured.

Audrey Tang: I must say that once you are outside of quarantine we no longer have the legal basis to work with the telecoms to trace your whereabouts. This is strictly for people who are under quarantine.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: No, that’s an interesting clarification. I did read an article in the “Guardian” with a Canadian who came from South Korea and had opted into that program, but then had to change Airbnb. Then it gave him messages that he was outside his zone.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Then he called the police. They said it was fine. I would say that at least shows the benign use of this.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I have a good question here to you, Minister, as well, by Mohan Adhikari. What do you suggest for poor countries with poor technology, like Nepal? I imagine this is a question from Nepal.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s definitely a very good issue of how much, not just in Europe we can learn from it, but in countries that don’t necessarily have the same access to technology.

Audrey Tang: It’s vastly important that the public health information is disseminated even to the most rural places. The places with the least digital access. The place that relies on landlines and things like that, because if you don’t have sufficient information people get curious.

Audrey Tang: People get curious, they tend to buy into disinformation or conspiracy theories that actually works against any public health measures. A consistent communication, even through traditional radio, even through traditional broadcasting mechanisms is vastly important.

Audrey Tang: That’s why the CECC Command Center press conference is so important. Every time they do a press conference not only they live stream and show it on a public channel, but they also communicate it and translate it, also.

Audrey Tang: There’s a Taiwan Sign Language interpreter next to each of the press conference speakers. Ministry of Health and Welfare have a spokesdog that then translated these into memes, into songs, lyrics, and catchy tunes.

Audrey Tang: This is a catchy tune that says something about the psychological importance of people under quarantine. That people who are their friends and family should give them plenty of Skype calls – not Zoom calls, which is banned, the use of Zoom for government today [laughs] – and making sure

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Or whatever. It’s important these things are cute and interesting by themselves, so that people will be compelled to print it out, to post it as community posters, to share them in a word of mouth, and in very simple words and bandwidth that makes sure that is actually much more convincing and much more useful a way of communication than scholarly papers, which is very important.

Audrey Tang: We backed everything with academic research, but it’s important to have viral video and viral posters, as well.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s cool. I have a question in that regard from Rasmus Bertelsen, whether anyone in the Taiwanese society have opposed these ICT initiatives? That would be interesting to hear, if there is any discussion in the Taiwanese society about where is the borderline and if there are people that feel that it’s already being crossed.

Audrey Tang: Obviously, because, as I said, a minister’s word is only as good, maybe less, than a journalist’s word. We have plenty of people challenging not only the constitutional basis, but the amount of proportional doctrine of application of law in that regard. People are also challenging, for example, the ICT technologies like what is the data retention rules, who audits it, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: There are two responses to this. One is that is it showed that really we need a data protection authority in the GDPR style that is independent of the administration.

Audrey Tang: We do have a Privacy Office under the National Democratic Council, and we do have the Department of Cyber Security. They are not independent organs, and so people tend to consider them a part of the administration instead of part of a oversight unit.

Audrey Tang: This year we had a change in the formulation of the National Human Right Council in the Control Yuan, which is a separate branch. It’s a separate branch that only controls and audits our human right violations from the administration.

Audrey Tang: We would say that if the Human Right Council forms in the Control Yuan, and if our Personal Data Protection Unit becomes a independent organ, as GDPR requires us to do – that’s the only thing between Taiwan and the GDPR adequacy – it will have a much more agreeable legitimacy platform.

Audrey Tang: This is a matter of public debate. People are publically debating it. We’re not resting on our laurels, saying 91 percent of people supporting the CECC. That means, still, there’s nine percent of people who do not support the CECC and its measures.

Audrey Tang: The second response, also from Rasmus , is that has any actor attempted rent seeking? I’m also looking at the comments. It’s a fair question.

Audrey Tang: Our National Health Insurance system is a single payer. Very fair system that makes sure that everybody, even people who are not national citizens, but are residents, and/or migrant workers, and things like that all have access to universal healthcare.

Audrey Tang: That system, in itself, has already a very balanced and nuanced system that ensures if you show symptoms you know very well that it will not cost you much, or even anything, to get treated, to get diagnosed, to get PCR tested, and so on.

Audrey Tang: If any of the NHI system is expensive that creates opportunities of rent seeking for obvious economic reasons, but because NHI is universal access and single payer we don’t faced as much rent seeking as other jurisdictions do.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I had a general question for you. How much of a difference it has made that Taiwanese democracy in the way you’ve handled it?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: You of course have the contrast, over on the other side of the strait, with the Republic of China and their much more authoritarian handling of this. How…?

Audrey Tang: I may be biased because both my parents are journalists. The freedom of journalism is everything, because without the freedom of the press, without journalists and citizens motivating to participate in journalistic work, that’s a fact finding, even the cabinet ministers knows nothing about what’s really happening.

Audrey Tang: The journalism branch, if I may call it a branch, is the branch that keeps everybody honest and accountable for their actions. Without the journalistic branch a single whistleblower cannot do much, even in the age of digital media.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan benefits a lot from a robust journalistic community. The journalists who work very hard, like the CECC Command Center, tells to the journalist community that you are like a army of detectives. Then he offered to teach them free classes in public health and epidemiology.

Audrey Tang: Them, as people who hold, first, the CECC and all the private sector actors accountable make sure that people get alert, early warning, of any new developments of the coronavirus situations, even before the cabinet ministers do.

Audrey Tang: A authoritarian regime, a top-down regime without this freedom of journalistic doesn’t have this access of early warning system and may make decisions based on poor information.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s a very good point. We all, including WHO, relied on Chinese data in the beginning of the outbreak, which made that 14th of January now a little bit infamous. The WHO could send out statements saying that there was, based on Chinese sources, no credible human-to-human transmission.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: As you were saying, from the Taiwanese case you already started to take precautions, even two or three weeks before that, where a lot of the rest of the world trusted what came from the WHO based on China.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I also think, which I read in articles, that had there been media freedom in China – and you had great doctors that were alerting already in December as well – then it would have been a different situation for all of us. In that sense, for me as well, the lesson to take away is that that press and media freedom, even though my parents are not journalists, is also. I agree with you, Minister, on that.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That leads us to WHO, where I have a question here from Mr. Denborg. What is your reaction to WHO not acknowledging Taiwan, most clearly shown by Bruce Aylward, who talked about China instead? How will you think it will affect the fight against corona in Taiwan, as well as worldwide?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Before I do that, I can also do a share my screen.

Audrey Tang: Remind everybody of the moment, will you?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Now I have trouble finding it. Here it is. Let me…

Bruce Aylward: With that, I’d like to thank you very much.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: A little bit further back.

Audrey Tang: You spoil it.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Now I’m here.

Yvonne Tong: Would the WHO consider Taiwan’s membership?

Yvonne Tong: Hello?

Bruce Aylward: The sound’s not good. I couldn’t hear your question.

Yvonne Tong: Let me repeat the question.

Bruce Aylward: No, that’s OK. Let’s move to another one, then.

Yvonne Tong: I’m actually curious on talking about Taiwan, as well. On Taiwan’s case.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: This, here, pretty much shows, and is of course the one that many people have been watching. Now I have to stop sharing my screen, as well.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That pretty encapsulates, some of the WHO reaction. We would love to have had Yvonne Tong, the Hong Kong journalist asking these question, also.

Audrey Tang: I will never hang up on her.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: We would, exactly, promise her not to hang up, and that any question on Taiwan would be free and would be answered.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s a good segue to the question here about WHO, asked my Mr. Denborg.

Audrey Tang: It really is a problem, and not specifically of a problem to people in Taiwan, but people from all over world, that our early warnings were unheeded.

Audrey Tang: This is a very sad situation because we’ve been saying loudly and clearly about the medical evidences that we’ve gathered. Even before the WHO said anything about this being a people-to-people transmission we’ve been saying this very clearly, as well.

Audrey Tang: The early numbers of prediction of the R₀ value, of the exponential growth, and things like that. Of course, our scientific community offered to the preference surveys and things like that, but for the political people, for the appointees, as well as the ministers all over the world, unless they were, themselves, epidemiologists, such as our Vice President, who literally wrote the textbook of the epidemiology.

Audrey Tang: Unless they also participate in the scientific community they could not get early access of Taiwan’s information. Just as journalistic community is very important in the Taiwanese society, Taiwan is very important in the global society for access to other ministers and to talk about the early evidences, as well as the ongoing contributions that we’re making.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: There, as digital minister, do you have some suggestions how to, I would say, almost bypass that? The links between civic society, between civic tech? That there were other ways of sharing this?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I had personally thought, this is maybe a bit old school, the WHO could have a whistleblower function so they don’t only get information from the countries, where they can’t rely on all member states, as we’ve seen with China.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Maybe you have some minister’s knowledge of ideas there of what would be the way to share these things. It doesn’t necessarily all have to go through the WHO.

Audrey Tang: There are a lot of collaboration, for example, between Taiwan and Japan on the counter-COVID strategies.

Audrey Tang: This is one example. This is a pretty nice-looking dashboard. It’s developed by people from COVID Japan, but also from many other contributors.

Audrey Tang: I contributed a single word here. It used to say traditional Chinese characters, and with the wrong character. I was responsible for fixing that character.

Audrey Tang: Many people from the g0v community in Taiwan helped in the translation of this so that if you are visiting Tokyo from Taiwan this is very useful information for you to see. This is also, because this is GitHub, being forked, meaning more than 1,600 people changed this to fit their own purposes.

Audrey Tang: You can very easily see, not only it’s been translated to I don’t know how many languages now. It’s also been adopted by people all over the world, not just in Tokyo, and also all over Japan, so that you can, for example a civil society contributor, take a look at that dashboard and decide that, “Hey, why don’t we put the CECC data in?” Then you have the same data from here.

Audrey Tang: That ensures not only a compatible API and format, but also a robust civil society that can work across countries and jurisdictions. All this because it happens in open source without any copy or patent restrictions. I can contribute as a civic technologist, not as a digital minister.

Audrey Tang: The COVID Japan people can then adopt my contributions, improve their own websites, and then share it all over the world. This kind of open source contribution, or open innovation, as we prefer to call it, is key in not being barricaded by the multilateral rules that currently precludes a lot of Taiwanese meaningful participation.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That makes sense. I have another WHO related question by Mousumi Mizushima. The WHO is still negative on the public use of masks and asks what about the promotion of mask use from the very beginning, and having the citizens, or even experts, ask for scientific evidence at that time.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I don’t know the scientific, whether masks. Would love to hear your thoughts on that question.

Audrey Tang: We know very early on that without good hand sanitation habits mask may be counterproductive because it gives people a sense of security that then makes them touch their faces more, which is detrimental to any virus.

Audrey Tang: There’s two obvious lessons to draw from this widely agreed study. One is that you should recommend against wearing mask, but one is that you should ensure that everybody learns how to wash their hands properly.

Audrey Tang: Washing hands with soap properly was a social innovation hundreds of years ago. This is not something that by a decree, a regulation, or a penalty in a top-down way authoritarian government can somehow, over the course of a week, force everybody to wash hands properly. I don’t know of any invasive technology that can make people do that.

Audrey Tang: It is actually a social innovation in the sense that everybody can improve on it and share how they wash hands much more effectively. Also, make sure that people remember the mantra of how to wash hands properly, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It gives a lot of good opportunities for the cultural innovators, that is to say memetic workers, and making sure that everybody can remember the most important seven characters, or 內外夾弓大立腕, which is how to wash hands properly.

Audrey Tang: On how to wash hands properly there is any number of memes, remixes, comics, and whatever that tells about hand sanitation. Our Deputy Premier, as well as a lot of people, serve as hand models and shared whichever way that they consider to be the most viral when it comes to getting people wash their hands, and so on.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at…

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Do you have a hand video, Audrey Tang?

Audrey Tang: The corona hand washing video?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Do you have your own hand washing video?

Audrey Tang: I have one about using a electric rice cooker to revitalize mask. I have not just one. I have 10 now. It’s in many languages. I don’t know which languages strikes your fancy. Maybe we will do a German one.

Audrey Tang: I’m required by the CECC to say that this procedure to apply dry heat with electric rice cooker can only be repeated to up to five times. It’s applicable only in indoor and low-risk places. You use a electric cooker, a IH cooker, you need to maintain a certain temperature for this to be useful.

Audrey Tang: This shows social innovation also, because this is not a government decree. In fact, it was contributed by research of Professor Lai Chane-yu in a research that was published way before the TFDA approved of it.

Audrey Tang: Now, after TFDA did their own independent experiment, we can start rolling out these viral videos to make social innovation also something that people can learn throughout multiple languages and in their mother tongue.

Audrey Tang: What we have drawn from the conclusion of this widely accepted research is that instead of us not trusting the people to wash their hands properly, and therefore advise against mask use, we’re saying what if we make washing hands really hip, really memetic, and really cool, so everybody wash their hands properly, and then we can make sure that people wear masks the right way.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Thanks, that’s great. Also, shout-out from me on the fact that you have them in different languages.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Something I’ve seen here in my own home country during this is that we’ve had regular press briefings by the Prime Minister. All the time we had sign language, but not subtitles for all the citizens and residents that are living here that don’t understand Danish.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s important that you had it, I could see in YouTube, in all the different languages.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: We have a question from Emily McElwee, “I’m curious to know if Taiwan is working on recovery data from COVID-19 patients that fully recovered, whether you’re building a database or GitHub that is part of the data that’s still missing?”

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The thing with Taiwan is that our data of that is also small. [laughs] We have a small number of cases. There’s few samples to draw scientific conclusions from. We do, of course, publish studies from the few cases that go through the full treatment.

Audrey Tang: By full treatment, we say here that you have to test three times negative to go out of a negative-pressure ward. It’s far more strict. We don’t have people who go out of the ward, and then test again as positive and go back to hospital. We don’t have that.

Audrey Tang: More than at GitHub page, I think this whole process of a very strict clinic using hospitalization guidelines, that is what the CECC regularly publishes. They also publish guidelines when it comes to public gatherings and so on.

Audrey Tang: Prime Minister Ardern from New Zealand said, “When it comes to guidelines of that sort, whatever Taiwan does New Zealand follows.” [laughs] We do have some contributions to like-minded democracies. That is a really good question. I don’t know whether we have enough samples to draw scientific conclusions but I will check with the CECC.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Thank you. I was curious about also, and I’ve talked with you about this before. I’ve seen you’re ted talk where you talk about co-regulations and new ways of making laws also through Internet conversations. I was thinking whether you’re planning to use this in Taiwan.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Maybe not during short term but again, just longer term of how do we after…Right now it’s about curbing the pandemic. It’s also about the longer term. What is the new division between government, citizens, data, and health tracking? Whether this is an area that you’re looking at, making it a co-regulation?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Maybe explain to people who joined us here a little bit more about your approach to making regulation that way.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. In my office, which is the Social Innovation Lab without walls that everybody can visit. I hope you still remember that. Everybody can just go here and propose the social innovations that are potentially against the law.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes, it is the law that needs to be adjusted. Sometimes, it is the social expectation of technology that needs to be shown, a first-hand experience, but no dialogue can happen without actually visiting the site where innovation is.

Audrey Tang: For example, I tour around Taiwan to the most rural places, to the indigenous lands, to off-shore islands. Because in Taiwan, broadband access is a human right, even on the top of the Saviah, the Yu Shan Mountain, it is actually very easy to get broadband access for €15 a month at 10 megabits per second of unlimited bandwidth.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, anywhere in Taiwan that doesn’t have this kind of broadband connectivity is personally my fault. You can let me know. I will look into that.

Audrey Tang: Wherever I go, I’m guaranteed to have a connectivity back to the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei, but also in the other five municipalities, to make sure that all the section chief level officials can hear straight from the social innovators what kind of social innovation they are considering that is a common problem that aligns with the SDGs. That in itself is an SDG. That ensures responsive, inclusive, and representational decision making.

Audrey Tang: Every year, we hold a Presidential Hackathon that shows people whatever they want to change whenever they want to make the society better, as long as it’s about the SDGs, from enabling people who repair water pipe leaks using machine learning to a system to find the places that leak, to people who in remote islands, instead of flying people through a helicopter to the main island for treatment, enabling local nurses to co-diagnose with specialist doctors from the main Taiwan island.

Audrey Tang: All of these ideas gets into the Presidential Hackathon ends up getting into an incubation round where we work with them. Five teams every year won the Presidential trophy, which has no monetary award, no monetary prize. The trophy is a micro-projector.

Audrey Tang: If you turn it on, it shows Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, giving you the trophy and promising that whatever social innovation you have done, what data collaborative you have built, we are committed to make it a national policy in the next year. This is the presidential binding power as an award for co-regulation.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the remote island nurse case was actually…It was illegal for people in the main Taiwan island who are specialty doctors to offer diagnosis and so on through telecommunication to the remote islands. Nowadays, it becomes very fashionable, but back then, it wasn’t.

Audrey Tang: In any case, we worked in a sandbox to try this out for a couple months. People said that they make the local families trust the local medical workers even more.

Audrey Tang: It is very important to show that this shares the knowledge, or the social innovations, to all the remote islands, and also indigenous areas involved. There’s more than 100 places of these.

Audrey Tang: They won the Presidential Hackathon. Their minister said, “OK, this requires a law change, and we have to talk to the Minister of the Interior. That’s not just a thing of Minister of Health and Welfare,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: They turned on the trophy, summoned the President, and then went and have a meeting. They adjusted the telemedicine law for this case. They allocated a budget making sure that everybody in the remote islands, and so on, have the access of such social innovations.

Audrey Tang: Every year, as a Taiwan citizen, anyone can join, literally through the join.gov.tw platform. There’s more than 10 million visitors out of a country of 23 million people.

Audrey Tang: Everybody can vote on the top 20 cases that receive the incubations was the top 20 in the previous year. It’s still ongoing, and you’re very much welcome to look into Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: We also welcome foreign participants. We make sure that even if you for some reason cannot travel, I wonder why, we make sure that you can be telepresent as a robot through a teleprescence robot when it comes to the day of workshops at the Presidential Hackathon.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: That’s fascinating. I’m getting Minister Tang, another question in here about, I would say our session is part of that, how much you’re promoting exporting the approach you’ve taken, particularly on public health data, to other countries, and in particular Europe.

Audrey Tang: As I said, the civic tech level collaboration, as well as the academic level collaboration, that has never stopped. On the major data sharing opportunities we’re all looking very closely into that.

Audrey Tang: There was a Hyperledger initiative in WHO that talks about data sharing. That’s very, very interesting. One of the people who asked the question there, as well, of using distributed ledgers to make sure that people cannot backtrack on the data that they offered.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, of course, with the fintech sandbox was in a lot of Ethereum developers are experts in taking the ledgers into public use, and not just for private interests.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: For the not techies, that distributed ledger, is that the same as a blockchain?

Audrey Tang: This is like saying that whether search engine is the same as Google. Blockchain is a way to implement a distributed ledger, but you don’t have to form a chain. There’s also a cyclic graph, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Instead of showing that I’m a nerd, exhibiting nerd immunity, I will spare you the details and say that I use the term ledger because it enables people to hold each other accountable.

Audrey Tang: To me, that is the main social benefit of adopting that technology, is that instead of relying on a single source of auditing or a single source of failure, this enable, for example, people in Taiwan – I’m sharing my screen again – through the AirBoxes more than 2,000 stations. I think 10,000 stations.

Audrey Tang: All across Taiwan people who are primary school teachers, and so on, measure their air quality PM2.5 and the like, and wrote to a shared ledger maintained by Academia Sinica, our research facility directly within the Presidential Office. That ensures a fair representation of what really is like on the field of people when they report the air quality.

Audrey Tang: This is very rare, by the way, in our part of the world. In many East Asian jurisdictions, when I showed this picture their minister obviously said, “How would you let the social sector gain legitimacy over you?”

Audrey Tang: Because our Environment Minister only have less than 100 measurement stations when this began, but when the civil society, the citizen scientists pooled together their data and formed the data collaborative they gained more legitimacy, because obviously you’re going to trust your child’s primary school teacher, not a faraway measurement device.

Audrey Tang: Because Taiwan has absolute freedom of speech and so on we say we cannot beat them. We must join them. We negotiated with this particular data collaborative, who tells that they would allow the government to inspect and calibrate their algorithm and share their data on the national high-speed computing sensor.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, they ask us to look into some missing spots here that are sometimes industrial parks. One, that’s a private property. They would love to get AirBox, too. It turns out that the municipal government earned the land in the industrial parks. We installed their design of AirBox in a co-sectoral collaboration.

Audrey Tang: It’s very important to say that this is mostly about education for sustainable development and global citizenship, all the steps the private sector want. The manufacturer of such AirBoxes work with distributed ledgers to it and so on. All these are an open hardware so anybody anywhere in the world with Raspberry Pi, or Arduino can just start joining this network.

Audrey Tang: Using air quality is an example that it applies equally to COVID, climate change mitigation, and to many places where you trust the data source that you know without putting a lot of resource into all that people cannot back-track on their numbers.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Thank you, Minister Tang, there. I think that will more or less be our last question. I promised you a half stop here at 30. Probably, we are keeping you maybe from your dinner. I just want to say thank you for spending time with us.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: I’ll give you a little clap here. In these times of social distancing, it’s still good to maintain some of our rituals of society that we used, too. Democratic Taiwan as you’ve really shown has a lot to offer the world, not just when it comes to handling COVID-19 but also more broadly on how we transform into, I would say, world-functioned mutual democracy. There, I think, is a lot to learn.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Again, we’re doing this series of talk under the #defenddemocracy. Stay tuned on our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages for more talks coming to you. Globally, we of course need to combat the COVID-19 virus. We also need to make sure that our democracy stay healthy. With that, I would just say thank you and goodbye.

Audrey Tang: Goodbye. I would say: #TaiwanCanHelp. Thank you.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: A good way to end. Thank you, Minister.

Audrey Tang: All right.