All right, can you see and hear me? Excellent. Good. I’ll just begin very briefly in maybe less than 10 minutes in very broad brushes, and then we can go to the Q&A. I think that the main idea of the Taiwan model, how we countered the pandemic with no lockdown, and also the infodemic with no takedown, is because of trust.

By trust I mean the government, through making ourselves transparent to the citizen, not the other way round, we show radical trust to the citizens and to the co-creation potentials. This is how we have moved to post-pandemic for quite some time now, and also managed to have a fair election earlier this year that is largely free of disinformation, which just as short as two years ago was a major issue for us from the disinformation campaigns.

I think the CIVICUS Monitor, which is a human right group, still rates Taiwan as the only country in Asia that has the completely open, in terms of freedom of press, speech, and other human rights. This is after our presidential election. It means that our counter-disinformation strategy did not sacrifice human right, just like our counter-pandemic strategy.

There’s three pillars in our digital social innovation – that’s fast, fair, and fun, very easy to remember. The fast part is a collective intelligence system. Last December, when Dr. Li Wenliang, the PRC whistleblower, shared on various social media that there’s seven new SARS cases in Wuhan, it gets immediately noticed by a very young doctor in Taiwan.

She posted it on PPT, which is a Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, except it’s run by a bunch of very young people for decades now because it’s part of National Taiwan University. Instead of answering to surveillance capitalism on one side or authoritarian intelligence on the other, this is just pure social sector intelligence.

They upvoted and collectively fact-checked Dr. Li Wenliang’s message so that the very next day, which is the first day of January, it convinced all the medical officers in Taiwan. We started health inspections for all the flights coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. This shows how a vibrant free speech society can contribute as a advanced radar warning to the counter pandemic.

We set up this Central Epidemic Command Center that gets this toll-free number, 1922. Of course, there’s chatbots and everything. We set up this toll-free number just so that people don’t have to use smartphones or any fancy technology. Anyone, any young people, can pick up their phone, call 1922.

For example, back in April, there was a very young boy, I think, primary school, that called 1922 saying that he doesn’t want to go to school because we were rationing mask, all he had was pink medical mask and his classmates are wearing other colors, and they may laugh at him he said. The very next day, on the daily CBCC Press Conference, all the medical officers, regardless of gender, wore a pink medical mask.

Minister Chen, the commander even said the Pink Panther was his favorite childhood idol or something. Suddenly, the young boy become the most hip boy in his class [laughs] because only he has the color of the mask that the heroes wear. The fair part pertains to participatory accountability. When we’re rationing out the masks we work with the pharmacists, thousands of them that gets the trust from the local neighborhoods already.

We really use the same way that people refill their prescriptions using their National Health Insurance card that covers 99.99 percent of not just citizen but also residents. Including immigrant workers and so on, all often have to just show up to the pharmacy and the pharmacy will explain – they wear a mask to protect oneself from one’s own unwashed hands and connect it to hand sanitization, which is the only way the mask has any effect.

The pharmacists face a problem because people queuing in line don’t necessarily know how many mask there are in stock. Again, a very young, I think, in his early 30s, civic technologist, his name is Howard Wu in Tainan City, came up with this great idea of coding up a map that lets people report where the masks are available or not.

He paid Google in API-used fees for more than 20k Euros overnight because it went too popular. It’s my job then as digital minister to both talk to Google to waive his fees but also to work with the OpenStreetMap and other open-source community to make sure we have a open-source implementation of this idea.

If you add, there’s more than 100 different applications so that when we queue in line in any pharmacy, now there is every two weeks 9 masks per adult or 10 per children. This enables people queuing in line to refresh their phone or chatbot or voice assistant and understand that this gets deducted in real-time so that if people see that erratic creases in availability after a purchase they will call 1922 right there.

This also enable people to analyze the distribution, about fairness, and so on. When an MP, previously data analytics VP from Foxconn, made a interpolation to Minister Chen Shih-chung saying, “The OpenStreetMap community is saying that your distribution looks fair on the map, but it’s actually unfair because you haven’t taken care of people who use public transport or have to walk, the time that they have to spend to get a mask is not fair.”

The Minister Chen, he didn’t defend the policy at all. He just said, “Legislator, teach us,” and the very next day, we co-created a new algorithm that’s more fair, and also enable people to pick up the mask 24 hours a day in a convenient store.

This illustrate this fairness principle that is maximally inclusive, not just people who are enabled by mobile phones or things like that, but anyone who have a trust with the local pharmacies, and later on, convenience stores.

Finally, the fun part. There is nothing fun about COVID, but if we make sure that our scientific information is shared by a cute spokesdog, a Shiba Inu that is so cute that people can’t help but laugh at, “Don’t put your hand to your mouth,” and it shows a dog doing that.

When we’re introducing physical distancing, it’s, “When you’re outdoor, keep two Shiba Inu away. When you’re indoor, keep three dogs away from each other,” and so on. This is the humor over rumor principle.

For each trending rumor, there’s this is very funny, with a higher basic transmission rate, humor that gets rolled out so people would share it voluntarily. This way, we don’t have to take anything down.

We just make a notice, and public notice, making sure that Facebook and other global multinational adhere to the same norm that the PTT has already implemented, which is to ban foreign sponsorship of advertisements for political issues during our election, and for the domestic ones, they need to be radically transparent in terms of what message it reaches.

Also, if there is fact-check as false disinformation, the public attribution is posted to each and every of those social media URLs without taking anything down, and so everybody learns something.

To conclude, I would want to say, last year onward, we made sure that in our K-12 curriculum, we stopped talking about media literacy, or digital literacy, or data literacy, because that’s a old regime where the older people makes media, and the younger people consume media, but we all know it’s the other way around.

It’s the younger people making media now, and so, because in Taiwan, broadband is a human right, anywhere in Taiwan, even top of Taiwan, 4,000 meters high, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second both ways for just €15 a month, otherwise it’s my fault.

The younger people need to be educated, thinking they are data producers, media producers, and instead of just consumers. That in turn makes sure that they can crowdsource and crowdfund the conversations around getting the epidemiological and also infodemic knowledge to everybody.

A bunch of very young YouTubers crowdsourced and crowdfunded taiwancanhelp.us, and if you go to that website, everything I just said and many more material are there at taiwancanhelp.us. That’s my 10-minute speech.

Yeah. Just reiterating your question, because I only record my side.

Sure. I was saying that I’m going to reiterate your question because I’m only recording my side, so I have to paraphrase after each question. In short, how are we responding to the misinformation that came from, say, the PRC without infringing on the freedom of speech and expression?

It’s very simple. It’s making sure that people become aware that there is such a disinformation campaign going on, and also making sure that people can participate easily into the fact-checking work.

Anytime that people on even end-to-end chat channels such as LINE, which is like WhatsApp, whenever they see a scam or spam, there’s existing mechanism already for flagging an incoming email as spam. I’m sure that Germany has that too, part of the Spamhaus initiative, and so people can voluntarily dedicate any samples of scam or spam into public scrutiny.

We piggyback this ability for people to long-press any message that they think maybe…For example, last December, one of the most trending disinformation on the end-to-end encrypted channels was that, and I quote, “13 people in Hong Kong gets paid $20 million to murder a police,” and there was a scary-looking photo.

When people flag that as possible disinformation, it doesn’t go to the state.

It goes to the social sector, the Taiwan FactChecking Center, the MyGoPen, and so on, professional journalists that work within the International Fact-Checking Network, and then they will work with the crowdsource, the people, anyone who flagged this trending disinformation, to find out where does the photo come from, for example.

It turns out it’s from “Reuters” photo. It’s a real photo. It’s just the original caption says nothing about being paid, or murdering police. Who added those captions?

They did some investigative work and found out it’s Zhongyang zhengfawei zhineng zhuanxing, the central political and law unit of the Communist Party in the PRC regime.

It’s their Weibo account, so they’re not even covert about it. They’re very overt about it, and then we just make sure that on Facebook or any other social media platform where people share this miscaptioned photo, there is a public notice saying Taiwan FactCheck Center has a reminder that this is sponsored by the PRC.

We didn’t say that you can’t share this. We didn’t take anything down. We just make sure that people are aware that there’s state-sponsored propaganda going on.

I am Taiwan’s Digital Minister, but I’m also on the advisory board of Governance Lab. That’s a Beth Noveck, New York University thing. I’m also a co-board member with Vitalik Buterin, known for the Ethereum, and Glen Weyl, and Danielle Allen, and friends at the RadicalxChange, which is an international social innovation organization.

I’m also on the board of the Digital Future Society, part of the Mobile World Capital in Barcelona. I’m also part of the board member in Council Democracy, which originally started from Spain but is now a Europe-wide community on participatory budgeting and things like that. I wear many, many hats.

In my view, I work with the Taiwanese government but I don’t work for the Taiwanese government. I work with the Taiwanese people but not just for the Taiwanese people.

I’m more like a bridge between this international participatory democracy, social innovation community, and making sure that in the day-to-day operation in the Taiwanese government, for example through the Presidential Hackathon, through the participation platform that has more than 10 million visitors out of a country of 23 million, we can use the latest innovations like quadratic voting and so on, from those international social innovation organizations.

I also guest blog at Nesta, which is UK, and the persuasion platform, Join, I just mentioned, draw it’s inspiration from Better Reykjavik, which is Iceland. The Polis system that we use to crowdsource common values out of different positions is a not-for-profit started in Seattle, and so on.

The list goes on, but this is an international community on participatory democracy. Taiwan is just one of the many labs in it.

The question is about, is there any contributors from the Chinese continent to the various endeavors that we’re working on. Of course, most of the conversation happens on places such as GitHub, which is open-source. Anyone can make contributions.

I personally worked with the MoE dictionary, that’s our Ministry of Education dictionary, which would include Taiwanese Holo, Taiwanese Hakka, and also Taiwanese Mandarin, of course. When people from the continental China contributes, a lot of their definitions of the same terms, written the same but means very different things. Like [non-English speech] , which means very warm, very happy in Taiwan but means very unhappy in the PRC. [laughs]

If they contribute this kind of input in a way that relinquish the copyright, in a way that’s open-source, then, of course, we collaborate just as we would with any international people. That’s all based on the idea of open collaboration and innovation. That’s the answer to your question.

The question, to paraphrase, is how are we rolling out contact tracing apps, and any challenges, especially from a freedom and human rights perspective. Also similarly, for the assembly, the freedom of assembly.

In Taiwan, we never declare a state of emergency. Anything we do must be constitutional and subject to the interpretation and approval by the parliament. We very early on had this principle, we do not collect new information that we were not already collecting before this pandemic.

This is, I think, a really good rule of thumb, because any data collection method that already works before the pandemic, people already understand the privacy implications.

If you write new code during the pandemic, that’s very short time frame for people to vet. Because of this, we have never introduced apps based on either GPS, Bluetooth, 4G, 5G, you name it, for contact tracing. We simply didn’t.

What we did is that we used a physical quarantine hotel that for people who returned to Taiwan to go to the hotel physically and spend there for 14 days. It’s as simple as that. Or if they live in the place that has their own bathroom, they can also choose home quarantine, but it’s opt-in.

If they do that, their phone, or if they don’t have a phone, we give them one for two weeks, is put into the digital quarantine, but it doesn’t require any app to be installed. It’s the same signal strength that telecoms are already measuring anyway.

If you go outside of the 50 meters radius or so, losing the signal strength from the triangulation, then all the telecom does is it sends an SMS to the local health workers, and that’s it.

It relies on a lot of very labor-intensive, I guess, like contact tracing interviews and things like that. People can feel very assured that this automated sending of SMS, which is exactly the same as sending an earthquake warning or a flood evacuation warning, would never read their email or anything like that.

That’s how we counter the pandemic without sacrificing human rights, but simply collecting no new data. In the freedom assembly, we didn’t run into that much of a problem, because like in our school, we never closed down the schools, not even for one day.

It’s true that we delayed a semester for a couple of weeks to make sure all schools have sufficient masks and have hand sanitizers, but that’s because all of us know in the very beginning, if three quarter of people wear the medical mask and use hand sanitation correctly, it’s as good as a vaccine. It’s as good as herd immunity.

The R value will be under 1, and they can do pretty much whatever under these circumstances. When that theory gets proven, I think around mid April, where we basically understood that there’s no risk of R value going up above 1 after all, I think on late April, people just assembled however they want, but, of course, they are all wearing masks if they cannot keep a social distance.

Yeah, in Taiwan, we consider health and education as…We’re a social democracy when it comes to those two things, and communication too. For everything else, we may be a liberal democracy. [laughs]

In the rural places, indigenous nations, and so on, your question pertains to what’s the government’s role in ensuring not just broadband as human right, but other human rights. For example, the Digital Opportunity Center, which has been operating for decades now, enables people who don’t have a device to lend a tablet that’s guaranteed to be new as of the last three years to make full use of their broadband subscription.

Or in indigenous land, it also doubles as a health…like a local clinic, that enable telehealth services in more than 100 different places so that they can also have access to the best medical help without the doctor having to travel for a very long distance.

Also, they are digital companions which pairs undergraduate students in urban places with middle school or even younger people in the rural or indigenous places or remote islands, not to teach them anything, but just show them that there is this open knowledge, open access, open innovation community online, and they can learn a lot of those by co-creation with those communities. Again, that has been going on for quite a while.

The latest one is our 5G auction, which we designed the spectrum auction so that there’s a lot of surplus money, and we earmarked those to go to the telecom providers under-resourced places so that they don’t have to worry about return of investment as long as there’s a social return of investment.

The more rural or remote it is, the faster we do the millimeter wave and other 5G deployment so that people can start their startups that has a social impact and prove in sandboxes in those places that, hey, this is a good use of 5G. We do that, again, based on the broad idea of broadband as human right. The first applications are always communication, education, and health.

To give no trust is to get no trust. To me, trustworthiness is something that could be earned by just admitting one’s mistakes early on and showing competence to fix that as quickly as possible and inviting people who complain as co-creators.

I talk about a mask availability map. The fact is that in early February, when we first rolled it out, there’s many pharmacists that invent their own systems, like take a number plate in exchange for the health cards.

They give out those plates, numbered tokens, in the morning and tell the people to go back in the afternoon, maybe 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM to pick up the masks. They process the IC card during lunch break. The availability map shows inaccurate numbers because we didn’t take that into account.

The CECC never said that “We know the best. The pharmacists should follow our order.” We didn’t say that. We say, “We’re sorry.” We understood some pharmacists has taken to write very large letters in the front of their store saying, “Don’t trust the app.” That’s our fault. We’re sorry.

Next Thursday, we will introduce a new data schema so that they can have the opening hours and collecting hours and so on in different fields for the map to reflect. The map applications also have a forum where they can invent new ideas. For example, press a button to disappear from the map, which they later on implemented. This is about the fast iteration cycle that really wins a lot of trust.

Also, even more important is to make sure that people don’t label each other as others, which is very easy to happen in a pandemic. People are very eager to blame others for spreading the disease or whatever that others mean.

There’s a anecdote I want to share very quickly. When we were talking about the mask ration, there was one meeting that was interrupted. It happened, at that day, during the meeting that a previously diagnosed with COVID worker a day before that finally, in the contact tracing interview that day, admitted that she wasn’t just stay at home contacting nobody, no idea why she contracted the disease.

She admitted the day afterward, saying that “I work in a intimate drinking bar. I’m a nightlife professional. I initially lied because I want to protect my customers’ privacy.”

That is, of course, a very classic zero-sum idea at that time. People were very anxious. I was there with Minister Chen Shih-chung and the Premier, talking about this particular issue. The intuitive thing is just to order a nightclub to close down if they refuse to collaborate. This will cause them to go underground and make it even harder to track the pandemic.

Fortunately, CECC has a lot of experts who had a lot of experience working with HIV+ communities. They immediately invented a real contact system. As long as people could be effectively contacted, they say no real names are necessary. As long as you can keep the physical distancing, the business can still stay open.

As a result, the business did a creative approach such as code names, single-use emails, throwaway mobile numbers, hats with plastic shields to maintain social distancing, and so on. Once they reached the physical distancing and real contact, the municipalities allowed them to reopen.

That’s how we recruited even the nightlife workers into the counter-pandemic team. That garnered a lot of social trust so that people won’t just blame them or to ostracize them.

Thank you. Great question. Of course, as the Digital Minister, we work closely with the industry. It’s just the industry innovation, to me, need to be directed by the social innovation. That’s why I always begin with the social innovation viewpoint.

Japan has a very similar philosophy. They call Industry 4.0 but Society 5.0, meaning that [laughs] the society is and needs to be more advanced than the industry. It’s not just the semiconductors industry that is important.

Also, for example, for the biomedical, the microfluidics, which wasn’t designed for the bio use or the medical factory on the chip, but it has such an application. It’s the society demanding that the semiconductor industry to come up with novel applications to their core competence. Then they start working toward such things.

The same goes for making sure that assistive intelligence, or AI, is co-determined by the society for the norms, that not only the small and medium enterprises are OK with not replacing their workers but replacing away those chores that their workers don’t want to do…

But also making sure there’s this full accountability so that those computing chips on the edge and things like that can account for their value alignment to the assistive technology ethos which is about assistive intelligence empowering human dignity instead of taking away human dignity and so on.

We do have a system, the Board of Science and Technology, that I attend every week for the weekly meeting. I do not direct that board. The board is directed by other ministers, in particular Minister of Science and Technology.

As Digital, I work on the people-to-people connection and technology or information technology work on the machine-to-machine connection. These two are both very important, but I tend to focus on the society part.

From crowdfunding [laughs] efforts. Yeah, we have a really thriving – I think top in Asia crowdfunding scene and even subscription-based crowdfunding, even crowdfunding by share, and so on, equity-based crowdfunding. We have enabling legislations for all those things.

It’s important to realize that in Taiwan we have what we call a social sector, which is what in other countries are variously called the volunteer sector, the service sector, or whatever, but they seem to diminish the importance of the social sector.

In Taiwan, maybe because we only had presidential election in 1996, but we have lifted the martial law in ‘87 or so. It means that the civil society, the grassroots, the place-making people, the co-ops, and so on, they had 10 years of head start or more to gain social legitimacy as compared to the president. [laughs]

In ‘96, the president was voted in for the first time. Before that, it was martial law stuff. Because of that, the social sector, even to this day, when there’s a large-scale disaster or something, if the Minister of Interior publish a number and Tzu-Chi, one of the largest social sector leader, publish a number, people are going to believe the social sector number, not the ministry’s number.

When people worry about air pollution, for example, they will crowdfund the Air Boxes which recruits people in primary schools, in their environmental education, just to measure PM 2.5 by themselves and joining the distributed ledger. The system will then show tens of thousands of measurements.

They will then pressure the environment minister to bargain with him, basically, and convince the EPA minister to use their micro sensors in the industry areas, in the industry parks. They can’t break and enter and install them, but it turns out we own the labs. We can install their design into the labs so we have a complete picture of the Civil IoT system.

A lot of it is actually written in the Civil IoT endeavor, which I would encourage you to see. We have a lot of rewards and even investments, like impact investments and purpose-driven investments and so on, in both the Civil IoT and the social innovation platform.

The idea is that the government may invest, but we never invest more than half of the share. If because of pandemic or whatever we sometimes exceed that, we make sure that in our investment term, that we say this is our non-voting shares.

That is to say we never want those social sector organizations, even company-based social enterprises, become state-controlled because they should have a higher legitimacy. That’s the social sector-first configuration.

Full disclosure. When you ask me about the Silicon Valley companies, I must say that right before I joined the cabinet, I was working with Apple as a independent contractor for six years on computational linguistics, specifically the Siri technology. I instinctively do not categorize Apple with the rest of like Google or Facebook.

Specifically for the Siri team, we used a very different thought process. In Apple, the main business, the customers are co-creators, essentially, when it comes to their data. Their data are not analyzed or sold or anything except for improving the user experience for that particular individual.

Even though Apple would have device that has face recognition, the chip will only store the individual’s face for unlocking the device but never transmits it to any other parts of the device or the software. It’s a very single, specific, value-aligned, accountable use of private data.

Of course, nowadays, I’m not working with Apple anymore. I don’t have to defend them [laughs] , but I still think that this idea of mainly aligning the value to the individual, honoring the individual’s dignity, and making a full account is very, very important.

I tend to hold the other multinational platforms to the same standard that I hold myself to when I worked with Apple. If they fall short of that basic – it’s not even good. It’s just basic – bare basic value-alignment accountability criteria, then we work with…

For example, Facebook, we had a conversation with them right after the 2018 election, saying our civic technologist shows that the campaign donation and expenditure, which is published as open data, structured data, in Taiwan at that time, shows that nobody files the advertisements on Facebook as campaign donation and expenditure.

That’s a loophole. It enabled people, either outside of our jurisdiction or inside but want to remain undercover, to influence the election. Facebook would have two choices. Either they value-align. They publish exactly the same way, radically transparent, for all the political and social advertisement, or they may face social sanction.

In Taiwan, the social sector has a higher legitimacy than the business too. If they want to face social sanction, they probably will have no business in Taiwan. They relented and, in 2019, published in real-time the advertisement library, the same radical transparency as PTT and other domestic social media companies. PTT is not a company. It’s really a cooperative.

Anyway, the point is that the social norm is so strong that this kind of trade negotiation-like work is possible. If the PRC-based companies do not like our social norm, then they face social sanction. It’s that simple.

To paraphrase, what levels of collaboration with the Bundestag or other parts of the German government do I have already worked? What kind of exchange has been made? What am I looking for in the future for this kind of collaboration?

The first part of the question is an Ambassador Hsieh question. [laughs] He arranged pretty much all the connections that I had with Germany. Just three days ago there was a teleconference with the Human Rights Council in the German Parliament. Of course, that’s all public information now. You can read all about it on the social media from Ambassador Hsieh.

I, of course, also visited in person to Berlin and exchange a lot of thoughts. I would really like to see something like the Taiwanese Presidential Hackathon, which is, by the way, inspired by the Prototype Fund, which owes no small part to one Julia Kloiber here in the call. [laughs]

Instead of just a Prototype Fund, we just made sure that the President promised to the five winning team every year that whatever they did in the past three months will become public policy, nationally, in the next 12 months. In a sense, executive power as the hackathon award. That’s something that we improved on the Prototype fund infrastructure.

The Presidential Hackathon also has a international track. We would really like to co-work, as we did this year with the AIT, the de facto US embassy, to host the international track of open contracting or sustainable environment, specifically maybe about food safety or about health or things like that.

These are, as I understand, all the things that Germany cares about too. I would really like to work out some sort of formal collaboration, either through the Open Government Partnership or any of those other international frameworks. Then we can work to share not necessarily the best practice, the better practices, that our teams build.

Maybe there’s some Taiwanese teams that actually are better suited to be realized as a public policy in Germany and vice versa. That’s something that I would really want to look forward to as we already had that Coronavirus Hackathon and Presidential Hackathon with the US.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.