2020-11-16 Interview with Sarah Gonzalez and Darian Woods

My name’s Darian Woods. I am a producer for National Public Radio’s show, “Planet Money.” We’re a economics podcast that tells story that highlight something about the world. This is my colleague, Sarah Gonzalez, who can introduce herself.

I’m one of the hosts of the show. I’m going to start by giving you this little disclaimer that we normally do really long interviews, and we don’t have that much time with you for Planet Money.

You actually do. I don’t have anything for the next, let’s see, two hours and half.

Oh, great! That’s wonderful to hear in case we end up having to talk to you a little bit longer than we had originally scheduled. That’s great. Thank you for that. My little disclaimer is that we may interrupt you a little bit. To make sure we get all the points we need, we’ll jump in a bit.

Do you want to say your name and title for us?

My name is Audrey Tang. I’m Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, youth engagement.

Can you say that slower for us?

Also, I have a disclaimer. We will make a transcript out of this however-long conversation, and we will publish it to the Commons after you publish, if that’s OK with you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good. So, slower. Hello, I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

Great.

Great.

For our piece, what are your preferred pronouns and gender.

Whatever.

Whatever?

You can’t offend me.

[laughs]

We will have to pick something. We’ve noticed that a lot of media use the pronoun she/her. Is that a good one for you?

That’s, of course, fine. There was a Israeli journalist that alternated between the feminine and masculine forms every word in their reporting. That’s interesting because there’s no neutral pronouns in Hebrew. She/her is just fine.

We could also do they/them. You tell us. We’ll chose whichever one.

I really don’t have a preference because it shows more about you than about me. I don’t really have a pronoun. My pronoun, if you really want to know, is whatever. I share it on my Twitter, the profile. I say */*, which literally means whatever.

Ah.

It means whatever?

It’s a geek thing. In negotiating what kind of language you speak for a browser, for example, it can say accept JavaScript or it can say accept some other language. When you say "Accept: */*", you mean whatever language is fine.

We can say whatever, if that’s your preferred pronoun.

Sure.

Great.

Where are you talking to us from?

From Earth, quite obviously, but in Taiwan, in Taipei City. I’m currently in the place where I live. It’s near the Daan Central Park and also near my office, the Social Innovation Lab. It’s at the heart of Taipei City.

From Earth, is the best answer we’ve ever gotten to where are we talking to you from.

That’s right, the same place as you are.

That’s right.

Ah, that makes me feel so much closer to you. We’re going to get right into this. Take us back to the early, early days of the pandemic, like maybe before it had spread all over the world. What were you thinking in Taiwan? What were people feeling in Taiwan?

Last December when Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower for PRC, posted on their social media there were “seven new SARS cases in the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market,” it raised an alarm almost immediately when it gets reposted to the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, or the PTT.

Turns out, the young director that reposted it made sure that people can upvote it with crowdsource fact-checking to make the SARS information shared by Dr. Li Wenliang seems more legit by the minute.

At the end of that day, not only did the medical officers in Taiwan notice it and send a email to WHO, but the very next day, the first day of 2020, we made sure that all the flights coming in from Wuhan are subject to health inspections.

This is because of our collective trauma back in 2003 when SARS 1.0 hit Taiwan. We were very much unprepared. The municipal government were saying completely different thing from the central government and so on. We learned from this, so anyone who are above 30 years old, when they see SARS, they immediately go into this drill mode where we practice every year on how to react to this sort of thing.

By January 1st, 2020, Taiwan was already screening flights from Wuhan?

That’s right.

Super early. Tell us again, for our listeners who may not know, how Taiwan was hit pretty hard by the SARS 1.0, as you said.

In 2003, when SARS 1.0 hit, we had to lock down an entire hospital, unannounced, the Hoping Hospital. There were, in total, around 73 people dead because of SARS 1.0, which nowadays doesn’t seem like a huge number. It did seem like a huge number back then.

Our Constitutional Court ruled right after SARS 1.0 that this unannounced lockdown thing is barely constitutional. It would be unconstitutional if not for the fact that we did not have a prepared way against the pandemic.

They charged the legislature to set up new ideas, like the Central Epidemic Command Center, the daily press conferences, the whole chain of command thing, that prepare us better for the next pandemic. In the sense of SARS 1.0, of societal inoculation, the main thing that we learned is that communication, especially early on, is paramount. It’s the most important thing.

Communication, early is the most important thing?

Mm-hmm.

Could I follow up on that? Was personal protective equipment running low during the first SARS epidemic?

That’s one of the communication failures we had in 2003. People mistakenly believed that only N95 was of any use against a coronavirus. People panic-buyed N95. Even the medical workers, for a time, the supply is very low and there’s a lot of panic-buying as well.

This whole infodemic, as now they call it – at the time, it’s just misinformation – was also one of the main reason why the Central Epidemic Command Center settled on a hotline, the 1922, that will answer every and all questions related to the pandemic this time around. That was a identified as what’s missing during the early days in 2003.

This hotline is basically like a daily press conference? Are daily conferences held, but people can call into this hotline to ask…

24 hours a day, yes. The idea, very simply put is that anyone can call into the hotline and get their questions answered about any of the new announcements. Anything that call center people cannot answer gets escalated to the Central Epidemic Command Center.

For example, back in April, there was a young boy that called saying, “Hey, you’re rationing our masks, but all I get is pink medical masks. I don’t want to wear it to school. My schoolmates may laugh at me.” The call center people did not have anything to answer that. It’s not in their frequently asked questions.

They escalated to the CECC. The very next day, the next 2:00 PM, everybody in the CECC, including the Minister of Health and Welfare, wore pink medical mask. The Minister even said the pink panther was his childhood hero or something. The boy become not only the most hip boy in the class, for only he has the color the heroes wear, but also the hero’s hero wear.

That’s amazing.

You said he was wearing the color that heroes wear?

That’s right because the medical officers were referred to, the quint, the five people who appeared almost every day, every 2:00 PM, to answer each and every questions, and were seen as heroes. That’s the color that the heroes choose to wear. A lot of brands, fashion brands and so on, just colored their social media avatars pink for that very reason.

Wow, because of this little boy?

That’s right. That is the kind of fast, collective intelligence system that could be enabled through very inexpensive means. Nothing about this landline, this 1922 or this live press conference, which could travel over radio and over television, requires any new investment or any new data collection. It’s just a new way to put it together.

When I hear a hotline, me coming from a US experience, [laughs] I think a hotline like I’m going to leave a voicemail. Nothing’s going to happen with it. You’re saying your hotline is different. Someone is constantly answering this line?

Definitely. Every day, if there is a spike or if there is a new development, as much as 40k people will call into that hotline that day. Since the hotline established right after SARS 1.0, that’s 2004, on average, every day, the pickup rate is around 95 percent or more.

Chances are, you will talk to a very empathetic human being that will not only listen to your story, answer your questions, but also escalate your new idea if needed.

Wow, 95 percent pickup rate, meaning 95 percent of the time, someone picks up the phone?

That’s right.

That’s great. This was put in place in 2004 after SARS 1.0, and the infrastructure for this stayed around? It wasn’t like, “Oh, gosh, that was 16 years ago. We forgot about that thing”?

There were, as I mentioned, yearly drills where we practice against this sort of thing. Most importantly, because the CECC, the Central Epidemic Command Center, is pre-authorized by law to basically make sure that the municipal governments, the local governments, the medical officers, municipalities in rural areas, and so all respond to the same CECC command structure.

This time around, the report line is very clear. We do not have to go back to the bad old days where every level of government was saying a very different thing.

You keep saying the CECC. Will you just tell me what that is?

It’s the Central Epidemic Command Center.

Is that a center that is around for epidemics? Has this been around since 2004?

That’s right. We have a act, the Act for Countering Communicable Diseases, that authorizes whenever something like a epidemic or pandemic happens. Then the CECC assumes the authority where it can command over the resources of other ministries, other bureaus, and so on.

This is a little bit like a emergency state, but with a very narrowly defined duties and so on. We do not have to go to the questionably constitutional way of declaring a state of emergency.

I’m going to switch now. I’m going to get back into the drills later. For now, I’m going to switch back to Howard Wu, or switch to Howard Wu and his maps app. We talked to Howard Wu last week. He told us that there are a bunch of things that he has done. He told us about a bunch of hacks that he’s done to save himself time. Apparently, he was very against wasting time.

He told us about a garbage truck app that he made where you track the garbage truck. He said this is one of the reasons why he made his mask availability map. There’s too many people waiting in lines, looking for masks. How did you first hear about Howard’s map?

I found it through the news, like everyone else. [laughs] It was all over the news. People, because they see the news, went to the Howard’s app and almost bankrupted him by creating a lot of bills that he owe Google, which later, of course, was waived by the CSR department of Google.

The real point here is that Howard himself went to the g0v, or the gov-zero, movement. We have a slack channel that anyone who runs into any problems creating the social sector alternative of public service can just log on and ask for the collective intelligence of thousands of people.

Not only did I make acquaintance with Howard through just typing on the chat room, but I discovered that he’s running into the bottleneck where the data quality, or what we say crowdsourced quality, of mask availability wasn’t that good to begin with because it depends on individual customers to report those data voluntarily.

I brought his work to the head of our cabinet, Premier Su Tseng-chang, and say, “Look, we need to support this young person by giving him high-quality data, a real-time API of mask availability from all the pharmacies.”

We’re going to do that again a little bit slower. I’m going to go step-by-step first. You found out about his map on the news. Did you type on, “where is the closest map near me?” Did you use the map?

I did, so I contributed to his bill, yes.

What did you think? Describe what the map looked like for us.

It looks just like any other map, except that it highlights the place where masks are sold. Each of those place of interest is color-coded. If it still has plenty of mask, as reported by the previous volunteer, then it’s colored green. If it’s almost running out, then it’s colored red, and so on.

Because of that, I was then able to find out that, in the neighborhoods around here, all the convenience stores, all the pharmacies, have already run out of masks according to volunteer’s report. I don’t even need to set about to try to queue in line, because they’re all run out. It was the very beginning of February.

That saved you some time.

That’s exactly right. I don’t have to queue in vain.

[laughs]

It worked, I think in part, because my understanding is someone in Taiwan’s government made a decision that they were only going to sell masks at convenience stories. Is that correct? That was one of the early decisions?

No, that’s not quite right. We already sell medical-grade masks in pharmacies, in convenience stores, and so on. Basically, anywhere that can legally sell masks sold masks. The reason why convenience store was chosen by Howard as the first target of visualization is mostly that there is more of them.

We have 6,000 or so pharmacies, but we do have more than 12,000 convenience stores, so it’s easier for Howard to begin his crowdsourcing. Later on, right after he rolled out the map, we made a conscious decision to switch to rationing.

In the beginning of the rationing regime, that’s the 6th of February, we worked only with pharmacies and not with convenience stores. The pharmacies were trusted by the neighborhood, especially by elderly people who go there to refill their chronic prescriptions.

Initially, we really care about getting the people’s habits of using the mask right. That is to say, if you wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands, that combines mask use and hand sanitation together. If these two are not combined together, masks are not especially useful.

Just so that I get this clear, I get this right, was it that the government decided convenience stores and pharmacies could sell masks? Was that a decision that someone made?

In the very beginning, both convenience stores and pharmacies can sell masks. That’s always the case. They very soon run out of the stock. That’s when Howard Wu wrote his first prototype working with only convenience stores.

Around the time that I saw his map, in very early February, we decided that working with pharmacies on the rationing makes more sense because it will distribute it to more people. Even if it’s less efficient, in a sense, it made sure that three-quarters of population do have access to masks and can use it more properly because the pharmacists are more trusted by their neighborhood.

When we implemented rationing, it’s pharmacies only. Then, in March – that’s around a month afterward – we restarted working with convenience stores.

I’m trying to think about it like in the United States. No one ever said, “Hey, Americans. The masks are always going to be at convenience stores and pharmacies, so don’t waste your time going to Costco or Target. They’re not going to have masks.”

Everyone was going everywhere, to gas stations, to any store imaginable, looking for masks. In Taiwan, the people knew these two stores are the two stores that will sell masks.

That’s exactly right.

Did that mean that a gas station will never have a mask, so don’t even waste your time?

That’s the reason why I keep talking about medical masks. Medical mask of a grade that is fit for hospital use, for example, that is classified as something that’s medical purpose, which is why it’s sold in pharmacies.

The convenience stores also applied for the license for selling medical kits, including the masks. That’s why they have the license to sell medical-quality masks. In large stores, in gas stations and so on, they also sell masks, but these are not medical masks. They’re not medical grade. Maybe they…out of other materials, but they’re not lab-tested or certified.

I see. The convenience stores would have applied for the license to sell medical-grade masks before the pandemic even hit?

That’s right.

They were selling them already?

Exactly.

That’s smart. It’s so simple to know there’s two stores in the whole country that will sell medical-grade masks. Don’t waste your time going anywhere else. Just go to these two types of stores only.

That’s right.

It’s so simple and so smart. Howard does the convenience store version of the map. Howard told us that, on day one, he had a bill for $2,000. He was expecting $10, $20. He saw the $2,000 bill and he thought, “You know what? This is worth it. I’m helping out my people. I’ll pay the $2,000.”

The next day, he logged on, and the bill from Google was $26,000. Maybe this isn’t right, but I’d want to make sure. We heard that you offered to help pay for some of that.

It’s not quite that. I offered to negotiate with the corporate social responsibility department of Google, making sure that, when we do ration out the mask, the Google developer group Tainan, which is the group that Howard Wu was leading, would get featured prominently – on the first link actually – and say that it’s proudly sponsored by Google Cloud or something.

The next map, which is based on OpenStreetMap, I agreed to put it on the second place. In exchange, I may have indicated that I would really like to see the API usage fee waived from Google to Howard. Otherwise, why don’t we just use the OpenStreetMap version anyway?

[laughs] You were going to negotiate the bill for Howard?

Mm-hmm.

I know you said that you and Howard had already met on g0v. How did you guys end up talking? Did you just Slack him, “Howard, I heard you got a bill”?

We met only in the sense that we typed messages at each other. We’ve never met in person. We actually didn’t even have a video conference or a audio link well afterward this whole mask availability map thing. To me, he is just Howard on the Slack channel. To him, I’m just AU on the same Slack channel at join.g0v.tw. Sorry, let’s do this again.

To Howard, I’m just a nickname, AU, on the g0v Slack channel. To me, Howard is just Howard on the Slack channel at join.g0v.tw. That channel, initially just called Mask, is later on renamed to COVID-19 because more and more people want to contribute not just about masks, but about dashboards, about public communication, and things like that.

It becomes a much more inclusive channel of all the civic technologies, really across the world, that want to work on COVID-19-related technologies.

Howard said that his convenience store app was up for two days, then the pharmacy data was released, and then he changed it. When did you reach out to Howard? Was it on day one or day two of his mask app?

I think it was around the day two, that is to say when he had to shut it down because of the increasing demand on his bill. Then he asked on g0v, “How can we make sure that we provide the same service without paying Google a lot of bills?”

I’m one of the people on the channel, so, naturally, I look at it from a technical viewpoint. I discovered then that what they really need is a reliable data feed. That is something that I can help provide.

Can I just jump in?

Mm-hmm.

Did you know Howard before the mask availability…

No, I did not, not at all.

You saw the media, then you were on the Slack channel, and then you reached out to him.

Mm-hmm, that’s exactly right. It’s not just for him. At that thread, there’s many people having the conversation. For example, there’s another guy from Tainan, name is 江明宗, who I already knew who was working on the OpenStreetMap version that I just mentioned.

There’s also this quite random person called Frank I’ve never met, I’ve never even seen the ID, and he just appears saying, “Is data only for the map-makers because I’m building a chatbot. Is it OK for chatbot makers to use it too?” I’m like, “This is open data. Of course you can use it.”

It turns out that Frank runs the official chatbot of the CDC, of the Center of Transmittable Diseases. That chatbot alone has maybe two million users. On the first day of the new map with the pharmacies, we have three very good implementation that reach to millions of people.

On day two of…he goes on Slack and he says, “Hey, guys. I got this huge bill from Google. Does anyone know how I can continue this kind of service but without having to pay this bill?”

That’s right.

You see the Slack message in the group, and you say, “Hey, Howard. Talk to me.”

Mm-hmm.

OK, cool.

I said the Center for Disease Control will switch to pharmacies soon, so hold your code, and I will get you the API. Then I got them back the API, I think less than 48 hours after the initial conversation.

Wait, tell me again. What did you message him on Slack, more or less?

It’s a public thing, so I did not message him as much as joining the public thread, which is logged. I say, basically, “Instead of perfecting the convenience store map, I know that we’re switching to rationing on pharmacies soon.

“And we’re still working out the API, how machines talk to machines on mask availability for the pharmacy side. So please hold it for a while, and very soon I will provide you the kind of API that the pharmacies will give you in a moment.” Then I deliver on that promise just a day or so afterward.

You chatted this in the public chat room or the channel because you had already approached the premier in Taiwan and said, “Hey, we should switch to pharmacies only”?

Because I showed the head of the cabinet Howard’s work. The premier grasped the importance immediately and say, “Hey, this is just like a navigation map. When you see red, it means it’s closer to you maybe, but it’s jammed. It’s a traffic jam.

“If you see green, it means it may be farther away from you, but it’s worth taking that longer route,” which is a pretty solid metaphor. Then he said, “Yeah, let’s just do whatever to support the young people who already built such apps.”

Wow. Then is it accurate to say that you are the reason why the government moved to selling masks in pharmacies only for a while?

I would say that at the time, the pharmacists, really they should get the credit because they volunteered to do so at no cost whatsoever, no payment whatsoever. Then they volunteered because they already have a fiber optic connection to the National Health Insurance agency. It’s by far the easiest way to get a mask rationing going.

I’m not the one that made a decision. That’s the head of the cabinet’s, premier’s, work, but I’m the one that connects this pharmacy rationing idea to Howard’s visualization idea. These were two very different groups of people. I served as a bridge between the two.

Just so that I can make sure I understand what your thinking was, was it like, “Huh. Well, we don’t actually need Google Maps to do this. We have real-time data available from pharmacies. We can do this all in-house”? Is that the thinking?

No, not at all. You see, Google Maps is on the visualization layer. It displays the navigation tips and things like that. What I was thinking is that instead of having the people queuing in line, report from the customer side what they see, whether it’s out of mask or not.

Therefore, in the places where there’s less volunteers available, we don’t have a accurate picture if we rely only on crowdsourcing. What I see is that with a pharmacist rationing, we can have the data not on the customer side but on the pharmacy side.

Basically, the availability of their masks can be automatically deduced every time that people hold out their IC card, their health insurance card, and receive the mask from the pharmacist. The availability can automatically decrease instead of having someone to key in them or to report them. That’s the automation.

The upshot is that if we update this number every 30 seconds, then it becomes kind of like a distributed ledger where everybody queuing in line can use their phone to check that people queuing before them are actually making the purchase in real-time.

If the availability rather increase after the people queuing before them make a purchase, they will call 1922 right there. That’s participatory accountability. That’s another insight.

The leading map still use the Google Maps technologies, this time sponsored by Google, waiving the API usage fees. This is not about a in-house map that replace the Google Maps. This is more about a real-time API that obviates the need of the customers queuing in line doing the manual reporting or the pharmacists doing the manual reporting for the map so it could be automated.

We learned a term from Howard which is called forking. Is this what Taiwan did? Did Taiwan fork Howard’s map?

Yeah. Howard created the initial map. We forked that idea. Then Finjon Kiang and then Howard’s friends at the Google developer group forked that a little bit more. People who prefer a chatbots learned from Frank’s fork of the HTC DeepQ team, which is the team that Frank worked in. That become very popular as well.

At the end of the day or the week, there’s more than one hundred different forks all working with the same data source but visualizing or speaking or however displaying the data in various different ways that’s more inclusive. Depending on your modality, your preferred way to receive the information, you will choose the voice assistance or the chatbot and so on.

Wow. Just so we can understand, explain to us how the pharmacies already had existing infrastructure where they could track what leaves their shelves in real-time. Why? Why was that system there?

In Taiwan, we have a single-payer national healthcare system. This healthcare system ensured that anyone who, for example, refill on their chronic prescriptions in any of the pharmacies, the pharmacist can check that they did not dispense the same prescriptions somewhere else within the same timeframe. That is one of the use cases. There’s many other use cases.

In order to do that, they need to have a high-speed link to the National Health Insurance registry. Also, in order to identify this person is the same person, we have a IC card that, back in 2003, when SARS 1.0 came, it’s on small-scale pilot testing in Penghu, in the Pescadore Island, and not on the main island of Taiwan or any of the other islands.

It turns out having an IC card is really helpful when there is a pandemic because you can do rationing at basically zero cost reusing existing infrastructure.

In the time since 2003, the IC card has been used for pretty much all the hospitals, all the pharmacies, all the clinics, and so that the same person going to different clinics can access all the prescriptions and all the records, X-ray scans, or whatever using just that card and their home computer or phone, as the case may be now.

This is basic infrastructure that covers 99.99 percent of not just citizens but also residents. Anyone who work in Taiwan for more than half a year also get this national IC card.

Was it your job? You said you were the bridge between the cabinet and the pharmacies. Were you going to pharmacies and saying, “Hey, guys. Can you adapt this real-time data tracking that you have for masks?” What exactly did the pharmacies have to do to tweak their current system?

The pharmacists, basically, they need to learn two new things. First, when the mask shipments comes every day, they need to key that in into a new page of the National Health Insurance system that tells the world, the 100 visualization developers, that, “Hey, I have received my daily ration.”

Next, they need to, whenever anyone swipe their IC card, to check whether this someone has already collected their mask ration somewhere else within the same time period so there’s no double spending or double buying of medical mask across different pharmacies. That’s the two thing that they have to learn.

I’m referring to myself as a liaison to the developer side that take care of the National Health Insurance system and the pharmacy system, but also Howard Wu, Finjon Kiang, Frank, and many other people who are very eager to display this real-time availability to the population. These two sides do not always have the same goal or the same incentive.

For example, the pharmacists, initially, many of them would actually, instead of swiping the National Health Insurance card and handing out the mask, some of them actually collected all the cards in the morning in exchange of the take-a-number system…

And tell the people to take back those numbers on the evenings and get their rationed mask while they, in the lunch break and so on, processed the IC cards. That’s called batch processing. It saves some time for the pharmacist, but it also renders the map completely useless.

On the map, you will see that this pharmacy has the most number of masks, but suddenly, around lunch breaks, drops to zero. Actually, they’ve already handed out those numbers way before that. It creates discrepancies between the two visions of reality.

It’s my job to say sorry to the pharmacist, to say, “We apologize. We didn’t anticipate the take-a-number system. We promise we will fix it next Thursday. We will add one extra column to the data so that you can declare ‘We’re open from 9:00 to 10:00 to send the IC cards in. We’re open again from 6:00 to 7:00 to collect your rationed mask,’ for example.”

The computer code need to be changed not on Howard and Finjon and Frank’s side but also on our side of the National Health Insurance system. Then the pharmacist will tell me, “Hey, I want to click something and disappear from the map soon as my last take-a-number card hands out.” We also implemented that.

There’s a lot of details like this. My work is mostly just like a facilitator, a bridge between the civic technologist on one side and the pharmacist and the government technologist on the other.

You mentioned these are medical-grade masks. Are these N95 medical-grade masks? What kind of masks are we talking about that are being sold in the pharmacies?

These are not N95 mask. The problem of N95 masks that we learned the hard way during SARS 1.0 is that there really is a lot of self-discipline required to wear it all day long because they are kind of thick.

The medical mask that we mean is that it has a good bacterial filtration efficiency as well as particle filtration efficiency and virus filtration efficiency as well. There’s national standards to test those. These are extremely lightweight so it doesn’t inhibit your breathing that much. You can wear it for all day without feeling that you’re choking or something.

Is it like the baby blue folding mask that you see doctors in movies wear? Is that what it looks like?

Yeah, it’s something like that. What you’re referring to are surgical masks, which is a kind of medical mask. What we’re saying is that of course it’s not quite surgical level that’s needed. We just need good virus filtration capabilities. It’s something like surgical mask but even thinner so that you can wear it for even longer amount of time.

Do we have this mask that you’re using in the United States?

Probably do. We send a lot of them to United States, actually.

[laughs]

Also, we share the blueprints of how to make the autonomous plants that just churns two millions of these out every day in the blueprint that we share. I’m pretty sure that you do have that. Most of the Taiwanese people nowadays do not rely on the rationed mask anymore.

Although the rationing is still going on, there’s a lot of masks on the market that are slightly more expensive but carries a – I don’t know – fashion statement or political statement. [laughs] That’s becoming more of a fashion item now. This is still medical mask but just colored differently.

Can you describe what you’re holding up?

Wait. I need to see.

Yes, you need to see it.

Show me.

For our radio listeners.

It’s a rainbow mask that is designed for the pride parade, Taiwan being one of the very few places in the world this year to have a physical pride parade. This is just celebrating that. If you just allow me a couple of seconds…

The same vendor that makes most of the rationed masks are also making these so-called my color or fashion mask line. This, while not being a rainbow mask, are rainbow-colored if you take all the six masks that I’m holding. [laughs]

These are all medical-grade masks. They are all colored quite differently. These become fashion items that people wear to express themselves, which is great because it means that they keep it on for a longer amount of time.

Now I’m looking at it, it does look like the regular surgical mask. It’s just not blue.

It’s just colored in a fashionable way, I guess.

Those masks work?

Every time I see them, I’m like, “They’re so small and thin. They can’t possibly be doing anything.”

[laughs] The point is that because we sell the mask using the idea of rational self-interest, we say, “You wear those medical mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands.” That’s the entire message that was sent.

I’m going to move on to phone tracking. Then Darian’s going to take over for most of it. Sorry I’ve taken over so much already. I just really enjoy talking to you. It was not just the masks that Taiwan did. Taiwan has used technology to do a bunch of things to respond to the pandemic. One of the things is if someone flew into Taiwan or back into Taiwan, you made them quarantine.

Yeah, 14 days. That’s exactly right. They either go to a quarantine hotel, where they are physically barred from leaving for 14 days. Or if they have a flat with a bathroom to their own, then they can choose home quarantine.

In which case, their phone – if they don’t have a phone, we give them a phone for a couple weeks – is put into the digital quarantine, in which case, they can’t turn off the phone. The phone need to stay in that general quarter.

We do not use an app. It’s not GPS or Bluetooth or WiFi or whatever. It’s just cell phone tower strength. We don’t know which room they’re in, but we do know, to 50-meter radius or so, the general vicinity, which district, which block they are in.

If the phone turns off or if the phone goes outside of that perimeter, that fence, then a SMS is sent automatically not only to them but the local health officers.

Wait. You put people’s phones in a digital quarantine?

That’s exactly right, for 14 days. If they stay in the quarantine for 14 days, every day we pay them around $33 US as a stipend. If they break the quarantine and gets discovered by the medical officer, then they pay us back 1,000 times that as a fine, so they don’t tend to break the quarantine.

1,000 times each day? 1,000 times 33?

That’s right.

Darian What if their phone just runs out of batteries?

The medical officer will show up. If the phone really has a bad battery or something, we help them to replace the battery. The point is that when the medical officer or the police shows up, then you better be at home.

[laughs] Wait. I’m going to do this a little slower. You put people’s phones in a digital quarantine. You said that you’re not allowed or you can’t turn off your phone for 14 days. It’s not something that you do to the phone. You just tell the person, “Don’t turn off your phone”?

That’s right.

Don’t turn off your phone and keep it charged. Don’t fall asleep with that thing off.

Yeah. From time to time, we may also SMS them, asking, “What’s your temperature? Do you have any COVID-like symptoms? Also, what do you think about this experience? Can you suggest better improvements?”

[laughs] What a nice message. This part is really interesting to me. I had a friend who flew into Puerto Rico from Florida. Then she flew back into the US. There are many examples of people flying around, in and out of the country, in the United States, or within the state. People were told self-quarantine.

Then people would be like, “Well, I went and walked my dog. I’m still quarantining. I’m not doing anything. I just went and walked my dog,” or like, “Well, I had to go to the grocery store to pick up food.” [laughs]

I’m like, “That’s not quarantining. If you’re walking your dog when you’re supposed to self-quarantine, that’s not quarantining.” This is you guys ensuring that people were actually, actually quarantining.

That’s right. Or they can pay a fine that will support 1,000 people for a day.

[laughs]

What do you think of stories like that, like when I tell you that in the US there are people who are like, “Oh, if I walk my dog, is that not me quarantining”? What do you think of that, people walking their dog?

I think the whole point of quarantining is making sure that each of us who return to Taiwan suffer from this 14 days of quarantine. I will not pretend that it’s not a huge restriction on freedom of movement or the freedom of walking your dog, but it’s fair. It’s time-limited. It’s just 14 days.

We do everything we can to give the care packs and things like [laughs] that to make sure that you stay well and healthy and have good access to broadband.

When people in the quarantine hotels and quarantine places email me, some of them email me saying, “Hey we don’t have broadband here. Minister, you promised 10 megabits per second as a human right. We don’t have that human right because a building that’s blocking it from a telecom tower.”

Within a couple weeks, we actually set up a new telecom tower just to make sure that they can watch their movies during the quarantine. The whole point of ensuring a good experience is that people don’t feel the social stigma or the financial burden of those 14 days.

After they get released, they know, because it’s not a app or anything – it’s just cell phone tower strength – they couldn’t be labeled as such, profiled as such, subject to targeted advertisements or whatever discrimination because each of us need to go through 14 days. It applies equally to everyone returning to Taiwan.

I think this is the kind of idea, the rational self-interest, that basically says if you comply with this 14 days, for a while you may lose some of the freedom of movement, but in the long run, it means you can go to the pride parade.

[laughs] You said this applied to people who were returning to Taiwan. What if you just got sick, you got COVID in Taiwan? I imagine it applied to them as well, quarantining?

We never had a community spread, so we never had a lockdown. If you’re one of the few people that did get the local transmission mostly in the early February and March, of course, you’re also subject to home isolation, which is the same as home quarantine, except instead of a medical officer showing up, it will be the police showing up. [laughs] Otherwise, this is the same idea, yes.

Why police?

Because if you are already confirmed with COVID, then just walking about is a public danger. Instead of quarantining which because we’re not sure whether you have COVID or not, once you’re diagnosed, you’re then prohibited from infecting more people.

Oh, right. The police show up and say, “You are walking danger.”

That’s right.

“We can’t let you out of the house.” When you said that if you’re one of the few people who contracted it locally, you mean few people, right? [laughs]

Yeah, very few, actually.

What are your numbers right now? How many people have had COVID locally in Taiwan?

In Taiwan, it’s been more than 200 days, was no local transmissions. It’s a low number. [laughs] All in all, I think it’s around 600 people who are confirmed.

The vast majority of them are just people who returned to Taiwan and get found have COVID symptoms during the quarantine. The real local cases, I think it’s around 100 or so. I have to check, but it’s not that many.

Around 600 total confirmed cases of COVID in Taiwan out of 23 million or so people?

Yup.

Wow. What do you think of that?

I think it shows that we learned from SARS 1.0.

Do countries call you or message you on Slack like, “Hey, Taiwan. I think maybe you should teach us how to respond to COVID-19”?

I said barely 100 or less than 100. The right number is around 600 confirmed cases, and more than 500 of which are from people who returned to Taiwan. The people who contracted domestically is just 55 people.

55 people?

For the record. The countries around the world want to know how do we manage to not get caught into this false dilemma of freedom, market growth, economic activity, and also the pride parade on one side, and public health, mental health, also, and so on on the other side.

In many countries the argument was that it’s like a sliding way of thinking about this thing. It’s zero sum. The more you care about public health, the less you must care about the freedom of movement and civic rights. The more you care about the individual freedom, then you need to suffer a little bit more on the COVID side.

In Taiwan we managed to do both. We deepened our democracy, thanks to the civic technologies and the pharmacists. We also managed to record a GDP growth. Not only for this quarter. For the entire year. We also managed to keep to 55 cases.

The main lesson of Taiwan model is that the collective intelligence, the wisdom at the edges, at the frontline, the civic technology, and the pharmacists, they are smarter combined than any expert in the CECC. The more we can involve people in the day-to-day policymaking, with the hotlines and so on, the better our response would be.

That gets us to the next chunk of the interview, which is about trust in government and digital technology. Before we get into that, very quickly, will you tell me again that the people who were flying back into Taiwan or into Taiwan had two options, whether to stay in a hotel or…Tell me again slowly, please.

If you flied back to Taiwan you have two choices. One is that you go to a quarantine hotel, a fixed place where you’re physically barred from leaving for 14 days.

Or, if you live in a place with your own bathroom, you can also choose home quarantine, in which case your phone, or if you don’t have a phone we give you one for a couple weeks, is put into the digital quarantine.

If you turn off the phone or if the phone goes outside of the range determined by the cell phone tower strength – there’s no app for that. It’s cell phone tower strength. The 50-meter radius – then a SMS is sent to you and also to the local medical officers, who will then check your whereabouts.

In either case, we pay you US$33 a day as a stipend, but if you break out of the quarantine you pay us back up to 1,000 times that as a fine, and so very few people break the 14-day quarantine.

When you say you’re given the option that if you have your own bathroom you can stay home, the way you…is track the right word? Are you tracking people’s phones? Is that the right way to describe that?

The telecom operators, five of them, already have a system in place that sends SMS as advanced warnings of earthquake or flood evacuation warnings, and so on. That targets all sorts of different brands of phones. As long as they have a signal we can send an SMS to that area based on where they are.

It is very coarse-grained. The tech is triangulation. The three closest cell phone tower measures the signal and draw three circles. The place where the three circles overlap is roughly where your phone is.

The great thing about this scheme is that we do not need to collect any new data. The telecom towers already know your phone’s whereabouts anyway. They already have the capability of sending SMS.

They don’t have to contract it out to a private sector processor. They don’t need to apply to new cyber security audits or privacy evaluations because we already know how it works based on the earthquake and the flood warnings.

Because no new data is collected, people feel more comfortable that this SMS sending way will not read their WhatsApp message, interfere with their email or whatever Bluetooth apps they have installed, or anything like that.

Also, this method, it doesn’t tell you where in the house you are. It would tell you where on the block you?

That’s exactly right.

What’s the level of detail?

That depends on the density of telecom towers, but in a average urban area the level of detail’s around 50 meters.

I don’t know what 50 meters is. Is that a house?

It’s a block.

25 feet or a block.

Darian knows meters. He’s from New Zealand.

It’s so hard to envision that people in the United States would feel comfortable with something like this. We have a very different relationship with this kind of stuff, even though, yes, our cell phone towers know where we are already. I can’t imagine the United States doing something like this.

We didn’t imagine that the first time around, in 2003, either. The whole point is this recap work.

Right after the SARS, and prompted by the Constitutional Court, we systematically look at all the options we have. We decided that because we’re a constitutional liberal democracy we do not want the government collecting more data in the premise of countering the pandemic. Because of that, we need to preauthorize all the data collection methods in the Parliament before the next epidemic.

That is what people around the world must do after the vaccine for SARS 2.0 become available. We must look at whatever worked and didn’t work during this coronavirus and prepare ourselves for the SARS 3.0.

Has this been controversial? Are some people out there in Taiwan arguing that this tracking of cell phone locations is too much?

The approval rate of those measures was around 91 percent, and then the 9 percent of people who did feel uncomfortable, we thanked them for keeping us honest and accountable so that they work with some parliamentarians.

Because we never declare a state of emergency, everything we do need to be pre-authorized by the parliamentarians. The MPs held a public hearing where the architect, also heard of Department of Cyber Security, explained exactly how this system works and how it’s based on the same principle as the forest fire, flood, or earthquake warnings.

After that public explanation, which was televised, the approval rate jumped to 94 percent. We still thank the 6 percent for keeping us honest and accountable, as it should be in a democracy.

I’d be surprised if there was any policy that had 94 percent agreement in the US.

Nothing.

Maybe the national parks. Everyone likes the national parks, right?

Was there anything involving the hacker/developer community, open source? In general, this digital quarantine, the digital fence, in that realm, was there any input from the wider developer community?

Yes, and I’m glad you asked, because concentrating the data processing in the five major telecom operators is still seen as too centralized by many civic technologists, so a lot of them volunteered to work on the more distributed ways.

Nowadays we know there’s Exposure Notification API, developed by Google and Apple, but around the time of the digital quarantine gets introduced, all throughout March, April, and so on, there’s people in the g0v community, in the AI labs, and so on that work on very similar principle of community transmission likelihood of risk assessment, or even specialized devices, so it doesn’t have to live on your phone.

It could be a dongle or something. That would later be the path that Singapore took for the contact tracing.

Because in Taiwan we never entered the stage of community spread, because we knew early on if three-quarters of people gets this physical vaccine, which is called a mask, if three-quarter of people gets physically vaccinated, the R-value will be under one, and so there’s no need to do community spread-tracking.

The developers in Taiwan, who feel uneasy about the digital quarantine and work on the decentralized contact tracing, eventually contributed their work to the UK or the other governments that are rolling such things out. Now in Taiwan it’s not a problem anymore because it’s been, as I said, more than 200 days with no community transmission.

That’s really interesting. What about the very narrow topic of the location tracing? Was there any input around the developer/hacker community there?

It’s mostly the telecom operators, because we’re repurposing an existing system. Anything that is newly built, a new data collection method, will have to wait until the next epidemic because the heuristic we’re operating with, and the reason why we use the health IC card, did the mask rationing based on the refilling of chronic prescriptions, and we based this digital quarantine on the earthquake and flood warnings, was that we do not want to collect new data.

While the civic technologists do have a lot of pretty good ideas…One of them is the log board that use the phone to track one’s own whereabouts, and so on, but it’s completely airplane mode. It doesn’t transmit anything out.

Only when the contact tracer come and find you do you press a button, generate this one-time website. That website contains exactly the kind of information they need, without divulging the privacy of your friends and families as the traditional interview would.

That’s a great idea, but we still have not deployed it because it’s essentially still new data collection. You will probably have to wait until the next pandemic.

Audrey, so that I’m clear, it seems like you did not have a role in determining that we should track people’s location to make sure that they’re quarantining. This was something that was put in place after SARS 1.0.

The basic design principles of the telecom tower-based triangulation, that’s already in place. I did have a role in applying it to more than one situations, including earthquake warnings, flood warnings, and things like that, as a broader effort that we called the Civil IoT project at ci.taiwan.gov.tw.

I’m one of the architects of that broad ecosystem, but for this particular quarantining use that’s essentially a CECC decision. I’m in that role more as a science popularizer than anything, because the CECC have already settled on that method.

Everything you’re talking about is quite impressive. It’s not necessarily that these programs, software, or technologies are more advanced, but the Taiwanese government is harnessing the enthusiasm and the public spiritedness of people throughout the country to help fight the coronavirus. Is that fair?

That’s right. This is why we call policymaking building something behind open doors. Instead of behind closed doors, where we never give an explanation, it’s behind open door. If people complain, they’re invited to join, create, and fork.

Anyone can fork.

“Fork.” I love this. Everyone can fork.

I’m going to repeat that story about 91 percent of people supporting the location tracking. That going up to 94 after the nuts and bolts were explained on television. Can you see any Western country getting that kind of public license to do similar things?

Do you classify New Zealand as a Western country?

It depends whether you’re talking about its location or not.

It’s quite close to what I was describing. They also have their own quint – five people that appears to live stream press conferences, answer each and every questions, and dealing with the discrepancies between the mathematical models and the things on the front line in a very honest, accountable, but also competent way. In that sense, New Zealand is one of the closest countries in terms of the Taiwan model.

That’s true. I’m from New Zealand myself. I’ve been watching the live streams from my apartment in Queens, New York, even though there’s no real need for me to keep up to date with every single new case. I completely understand what you’re talking about.

New Zealand is very close to the Taiwan model, and I know is inspired by Taiwan in a lot of ways. I do find the use of technology does seem to be one step ahead or one step deeper in Taiwan. Would you say that’s fair?

That’s probably fair. The single-payer national IC system, the health card system, it’s because people understand that by law it’s protected by an act that says the National Health Insurance Card must never be used on anything other than public service.

Only the authorized doctors, nurses, and so on can write to that card. All the readers, again, must be pre-registered and approved by the National Health Insurance Agency. That’s why we trust it that much, because we know it will not be harvested to do precision advertisement, or anything like that.

One thing about using technology to improve government services, a lot of people in the US and Europe, we’ve gotten a bit jaded that technology can help anything at all, in the sense where big, big tech is a dirty word to a lot of people now. Seeing disinformation spread around the Internet, it seems to be a real problem at the moment.

How do we get to a stage where we see technology as a way to improve government services, and both politicians and the public are working in tandem to do that?

One of the main things about technology is that there’s nothing that says only the private sector can use it. The social sector can use it, too.

Most of the digital technologies actually started with a social sector use case. I’m referring to, for example, the World Wide Web or, for example, the Internet Archive, the Wikipedia, and so on. These are not, strictly speaking, commercial ventures. It exists to serve the scientific community, the research community, or whatever voluntary sector that the communities work on those technologies work.

Even nowadays in things like Ethereum, it’s not, strictly speaking, a company or a startup trying to sell a product. It’s more like public utility. The main person holding it together, Vitalik Buterin, seems to imagine it as a way to prototype future democracy, and things like that. Again, serving a social purpose.

One of the main suggestions I would have is to think about democracy itself as a technology. It is a technology. It’s applied social science, applied political science.

Like any technology, you can change it. You can fork it. If you don’t like the bit rate of your democracy, which is maybe three bits every four years per person uploaded – it’s called voting – you can improve the bandwidth in various ways through crowdsourced agenda setting. A lot of that is describing crowd.law. It’s a website.

Also, you can improve it with participatory budgeting, sandbox applications, Presidential Hackathon. It’s all the things that we use to improve the bandwidth of technology in democracy, or democracy as technology. Once we see it this way, then it becomes quite natural to think across the sectorial limitations.

Only in a world where you think technology is only about private sector will you have this fear, uncertainty, and doubt about, say, the social media all becoming anti-social media, or things like that. Because in Taiwan we understand, “Well, we can build pro-social media.”

I heard in the middle of that, your talking, we could almost fork the government. Is that a phrase?

Exactly, fork the government. Pronunciation very important. Fork the government.

Fork the government. That’s right. Make sure we get the “R.”

Tell me about some of the other ways that technology was used to fight the coronavirus. I’ve read that Taiwan fought misinformation online in quite an interesting way.

Let me first say that the chemical technology, that is the soap, hand sanitizers, and the physical vaccine, these are the main things that keep the R-value down. All the digital technology that we just talked about are in a assistive role. Wear the mask and wash your hands.

With the public announcement done, let’s move on to digital ones.

PSA over. [laughs]

How do we get people to wear the mask and wash their hands? If it’s me saying it, maybe you’ll remember it, but maybe you will not share it on social media. That is to say, the idea, in many cases, do not spread as fast as conspiracy theories, as misinformation, and even intentionally fabricated disinformation. Those have a higher R-value on social media. The science and the clarifications, they need to find some way to spread even faster than the disinformation.

We looked at all the options and discovered that fun, joy, or, as I call it, humor over rumor is the most potent way to do so. The reason is that when people feel the outrage of a injustice. For example, “Hey, the tissue papers are running out. The nation confiscated the tissue papers producers to make medical mask instead.”

It’s a rumor. It’s not true, but it has a sense of injustice and outrage to it, so people will click Share to vent that upsetness. If it goes into revenge mode or discrimination mode, then it becomes very polarized and divisive.

If people in the same news cycle, however, see a very funny picture, for example, our Premier, Head of Cabinet, wiggling his bottom and say, in very large font, “Each of us only have a pair of buttocks.” It’s a word play, because in Mandarin bottoms, tún, sounds the same as to stockpile, tún. It says, “Stockpile does you no good.”

This is hilarious. Once you laugh about it, you’re vaccinated. You’re literally unable to feel the kind of revenge, hatred, or discrimination about tissue paper makers.

Then, the table that says, “Tissue papers are made out of South American materials and medical masks are produced domestically. They have completely different supply chains.” You’re likely to remember it and share.

Within a couple of days humor over rumor worked, and the people don’t panic buy the tissue papers anymore.

What is the Mandarin word for stockpile/buttocks?

It’s 囤 as in stockpile, but also 臀 as in buttocks.

I’ve learned something. That’s great. [laughs]

That’s fascinating. It’s obvious that you have thought about this ahead of time in a very deep way, but I imagine a lot of politicians around the world may not have thought about viral social media in quite the same way. It must be quite important in a moment of crisis to have thinkers like you in positions in power to do something about it.

A cute spokesdog also always helps. We have a very, very cute spokesdog that will translate the physical distancing, for example. Instead of saying how many meters or feet, we say, “When you’re indoor keep three Shiba Inus away. When you’re outdoors keep two Shiba Inus away. “

A Shiba Inu?

A Shiba Inu, very cute spokesdog wins praise from pretty much all walks of life, because it’s certainly nonpartisan. Everybody loves the cute dog.

It’s true, although there are the cat partisans.

One of the social media campaign that talks about digital transformation post-COVID dressed me up as Doraemon, a robot cat. You have the cute cat in a deformed digital minister.

[laughs] I have to see it. I want to move on to, also, you talked a bit about contact tracing. Can you describe a little bit of the lessons from the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how digital technology learned some of those lessons and helped build a better contact tracing system?

I want to say two things about this. The first thing is that the cute cat thing is in my Instagram. This is me with cat’s ears, and things like that.

Very convincing.

Thank you for the convincing part.

I’m team dog. I’m for the cute dog, I’ve got to say.

You’re for the Shiba Inu. [laughs] Sorry, I lost my thread of thought.

That would be a good cover image for this episode, potentially.

I can send you the video of this whole thing.

Sorry, what was your part of the question? I really lost track.

I want to hear a little bit about contact tracing, lessons from the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and where that technology can help with some of those problems.

The HIV-positive community, nowadays the younger generation understand the U=U, undetectable is untransmissible, but it used to be that there’s a real social stigma attached to people who do have to live with HIV-positive conditions.

The people in the CECC, the Central Epidemic Command Center, comprised of people like Philip Lo, who worked closely with HIV-positive communities. When the COVID came and we discovered that there are people who work in hostess bars that were diagnosed with COVID but did not want to report their symptoms we see that there is a very similar problem brewing.

It’s not unique to Taiwan, certainly. All around the world, and especially in nearby East Asian countries, the nightlife district has always been one of the places that’s most difficult to do contract tracing, whether it’s through traditional interviews, through self-reporting mechanisms, or anything like that.

We work with the nightlife district to work on a real contact system, so not a real name system, so that they can keep the pseudonyms, the throwaway phone numbers or email addresses entirely locally, in the business itself, on scratchpads.

When they have a patron that leaves this throwaway email address, SIM card, or whatever, they can be rest assured that none of this information will be uploaded anywhere where the CECC can see.

However, if there is an incident in that business, then we’ll then use these contact email or phone to notify that particular person so that they can be put into isolation or a quarantine, depending on how severe the case is.

It is basically a way to do contact tracing in a decentralized way. It requires enormous amount of trust from this CECC to those nightlife businesses, but it’s proven to work. It works better, actually, than threatening to put people in jail, because otherwise, they don’t even have the option of working with the CECC. They will entirely go underground, as the US did in the Prohibition Era.

You talked a bit about trust. It’s both the government trusting the people and the people trusting the government. It seems to be almost like the oil that the machinery, this technology needs is trust. Trust not to misuse the data, trust that people are doing what they’re meant to be doing, or alerting the government when they need to be alerted. It’s a big question, [laughs] but how do you build trust in a society?

It’s easier to think about trustworthiness than trust, because trustworthiness is something that could accumulate over the course of a relationship by being accountable, by being aligned in the same values, by just admitting mistakes very quickly, like we do to the pharmacies that use take-a-number systems.

Also, show competence by taking their suggestions and amplifying it to real solutions the very next Thursday. I would argue that trustworthiness on specific matters, with specific relationships, that could be earned very methodically, but I do not think that one should trust the government as an abstract entity.

That would mean basically people who want to abuse the trust on other parts that have not yet earned the trustworthiness will see an opening to do so. The government need to trust the citizens on specific measures by basically being competent and accountable.

One this trust relationship builds, co-creation can happen on this particular topic, but it should not be extended automatically to other parts of the government function.

This facilitates part of that, I guess, developer community, g0v and others, contributing because that trustworthiness has built over time. Do you see Taiwan as more engaged with developer communities than other countries?

I don’t know. When we rolled out the mask availability map, almost immediately, we get pings from the South Korean civic technologists, who are trying to convince their government to publish the availability API as well.

Within a few short weeks, I think by March, Fingen Council Map from Tainan is running in South Korea. Even though Cal did not speak Korean, he speaks JavaScript, and that’s all they need.

The developers in South Korea, I’ve met some of them over video conference, as young as 15 years old, with very successful in convincing first the municipality of Seoul, but also, soon the rest of Korea to essentially adopt the same model.

We also work quite closely with Code for Japan, which is the Japanese equivalent of g0v, on the dashboard that shows the COVID situation, first in Tokyo, but spreading, forked, to all sort of different municipalities and rural and township areas.

The person coordinating this, Haruseki-san, earlier this month become the Assistant CTO of the Japanese cabinet. Obviously, there’s some close collaboration going on there as well.

It’s probably an unanswerable question, but it does seem to be true that the experience of Taiwan and that knowledge is being picked up by other countries.

Definitely. When we say, “Taiwan can help,” that’s what we mean.

“Taiwan can help,” yeah. Is there anything on this particular topic, Sarah, that you want to chip in on?

Sure, yeah. You answered it already a couple of times, but I want to just get another version. The interesting thing to Darian, especially, he brought us, it was his idea to do this story. When we talk about it with our co-workers, they’re just like, “Wow, what an interesting relationship to technology.”

It’s not like we can’t do this in the United States. We have hackers in the United States and coders, and we have a lot of really good ones. We just, the relationship between our hackers, it’s not like, they don’t do this with the government’s help. It’s like…

You have Code for America. That’s something. There are states that we talked in an epicenter-to-epicenter way that does a pretty good job engaging the civic technologists. For example, New Jersey, with their Chief Innovation Office, Beth Noveck, did pretty well in engaging the civic technologists early on to build Ask a Scientist or other hotline creations and so on.

The US is a very large place, and so every government, whether it’s state government or municipal government, have a different relationship to the local civic technologists.

Right, but we haven’t used technology in the same way to respond to the coronavirus. When you talk about, it’s just like, even just making, directing people to one store for masks. Just the transparency and the communication, I think that’s the interesting thing to us.

I don’t know if there’s any way that you can just talk to us about how this happened. Was this a slow transition from the government becoming more transparent or releasing data for hackers? Is this something that just happened from 2003? Did it start before?

The 2003, of course, SARS 1.0, that’s the enabler of the National Health Insurance System, the enabler of the Central Epidemic Command Center, the enabler of the hotline, and all the data collection method that’s required for contact tracing, but narrowly defined, so it doesn’t infringe on other civil liberties.

All this is, of course, developed around 2004. 10 years down the line in 2014, something else happened. The Sunflower movement had seen more than 20 NGOs and lots of students occupying the parliament, because at the time, the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA, was being passed without substantial deliberation in the parliament.

The people occupied the parliament’s office doing the work that we elected them to do, or that was the legitimacy theory, anyway. With half a million people on the street and many more online, it’s a very large demonstration in the sense of demo that, with the right digital tools, people can arrive to consensus, a rough consensus, about the CSSTA.

People can behave in a way that’s essentially forking the government. There’s nothing inherently difficult to understand about trade negotiations if you have good people working on the visualization, so that you just enter your company’s name, and it shows exactly how the trade negotiation will affect you, and things like that.

After this large-scale communication demonstration, then everybody in the cabinet shifted their mind around communication. To them, democracy was about showdown between opposing values, about through radio and television, one person or one team speaking to millions.

The Sunflower demonstration showed that this really is about conversation between diverse values and about millions of people listening to one another at scale. We, the facilitators of Sunflower, were then recruited as reverse mentor to the cabinet around the end of 2014.

One crisis brings a silver lining. That is the reconfiguration of the entire national communication strategy.

Explain for our listeners what the Sunflower movement was. What was the…?

It was around three weeks of thoroughly nonviolent occupy of the national parliament, starting around the night of March 17th. Also called the March 18th movement, it basically banded together more than 20 civil society organizations that each analyzed one aspect.

For example, around labor conditions, or around the service industry of publications and communication, around the freedom of the press, and also, around whether we want to allow PRC – that’s the Beijing regime’s – de facto state control components in our then-new 4G telecommunication infrastructure, which is the debate called Clean Path or Clean Network, nowadays, that people are having around the world.

Except we had that deliberation six years ago. All those points were deliberated by people on the street, but with a thoroughly nonviolent machinery of capturing the live-streamed conversations, transcribing it into words, stenography, and then translating it to different languages and visualized in various ways.

Throughout the three weeks, every day, we inched together a little bit more to the core demands, the four demands. At the end of the three weeks, the occupy was a success, because the head of the parliament, Wang Jin-pyng, came out and agreed to all the four demands.

So was it essentially a trade deal behind…A not-very-transparent trade deal was under negotiation with Beijing.

Behind closed doors, yes.

Many people in Taiwan – a lot of students were involved in this particular movement – were unhappy about that lack of transparency. Is that fair?

Yeah. What they want to do is essentially do the job that the MPs were supposed to do, which is deliberate the social, economic, and environmental impact of that particular trade deal, which they would have done if it’s a trade deal with, say, New Zealand. We signed a deal with New Zealand, the NSAC.

That’s right.

They refused to do that with Beijing, because they were caught in some constitutional loophole that says Beijing is a domestic city of Taiwan or something.

I see.

Was the goal of this movement to…I’m unfamiliar with it, which is good, because it’ll help me understand it better. What was the goal of this, or was one of the goals of this to…I’m trying to understand, was there any hacking involved?

Yeah, definitely.

What was the hacking part of it?

The civic hacking part of it is because we learned from previous occupies, including the Wall Street one, that rumors and disinformation very easily spread when the real-time clarifications of what’s actually being deliberated is not sent immediately to everyone who’s in the street.

The main question is how do we make sure half a million people on the street, and many more online, can constructively deliberate on the parts of the trade deal that we care about, instead of being hijacked by rumors and disinformation?

The solution is a combination of live streaming, of stenography, of, as I mentioned, the interactive website designed to help people understand the issue better, the 20 or so NGOs, each holding their own live-streamed forum, and things like that.

That all in all ensured a nonviolent, matter-of-fact deliberation configuration, so that anyone who show up can contribute to the ongoing deliberation without hijacking the movement into something more violent or revengeful.

Hmm. Audrey, you are a hacker yourself.

I am, yes.

You say civic hacker?

That’s right, a civic hacker. Someone who look at the old system, instead of exploiting its vulnerabilities, its loopholes for personal gain, as a black hat would, or to fix those issues, report those issues, as a white hat would. A civic hacker build new system that doesn’t suffer from the same vulnerabilities.

Doesn’t suffer from the same vulnerabilities, meaning you do things for the greater good, or to benefit more people?

That’s exactly right. Also, to look at how existing democratic systems have failed to work on truly global-scale issues and build new systems of democracy that could work better to work on those global issues.

Now that you are Minister of…Tell me your official title again?

The Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

Now that you’re a Digital Minister, do you still hack?

Yeah, of course, I code all the time. You see, I’m working with the government, I’m not working for the government. In the same sense, I’m working with the people, not for the people. I’m working on systems and spaces that allow better communication between the movements on one side and government on the other.

I’m in the Lagrange point, without getting pulled into the gravity of one or the other.

Before you became Digital Minister, or even during, is there something that you created that you’re particular proud of?

Before being the Digital Minister, I worked with g0v people quite extensively on the MOE Dictionary, or the M-O-E Dictionary, that combines all sort of languages spoken in Taiwan.

Not only English, French, and German, but also Taiwanese Hakka, Daigi, and Mandarin, and also indigenous ones like Amis and so on, into this dictionary that people can also expand and use it however way they want.

It’s important, because it’s a transcultural norm. It enabled people to see their own history from the perspectives of any of the 20 or so national languages in Taiwan.

That’s cool. I have a couple, I have like five questions that I just want to make sure I am understanding them correctly. I’ll just get to them very quickly, and I think Darian might have a couple more, sorry. Thank you so much for all your time.

One point that I want to make clear is you mentioned that the pharmacies were selling the masks, the medical-grade masks. If you couldn’t get to a pharmacy in time, before they all sold out, was there a way that older people or people who work long hours could access masks?

Yeah, that’s a great question. That is the question that we immediately thought to solve, soon as we rolled out the rationing program in February. By March, you can also use your app, the National Health Insurance app, to preorder the masks without any queuing at all.

Then you can get it a couple weeks – actually, a week – after you preorder in your nearby friendly convenience store.

Then you mentioned, and I just wanted to get you to tell me this again. That if you did have COVID in Taiwan, that a police officer of some sort would show up. Just explain how that would work. You would get diagnosed with COVID, and then what? Does an officer get assigned to the outside of your house to make sure you stay there, or what is the relationship there?

If you get diagnosed with COVID, but showing little symptoms, and therefore does not need treatment, per se, you can still choose to home-isolate, but in which case, it’s not the medical officers that will show up if your phone runs out of battery.

It would be the police in the nearby police station that show up when the phone runs out of battery, because according to the Act to Prevent Communicable Disease, basically, one cannot go around knowingly spread the virus to other people.

It’s exactly the same thing. It’s still monitored by the cell phone towers and so on, it’s just the people who receive the SMS switch from being the neighborhood medical managers to the local police station.

Our cell phone towers, they know when we turn off our phone? I guess they do.

Of course, they do.

I don’t know why I never about it like that. Of course, they know when we turn off our phones. Then you mentioned the annual drills that you have after the SARS 1.0, as you’re calling it. What do these drills, how do they work? What do they look like?

One of the main things that we exercised is to make sure that the clinics and the hospitals understand the standard procedures to treat people who are infected by coronavirus.

Also, it made sure that the local household managers, medical officers, police who all reports to different command chains in times of the CECC’s existence, they all need to report to the CECC. This internal communication way is also one of the things that’s exercised in a drill.

There’s many more, but these are the main two things. One is about how to treat patients so that the medical system does not overload. The second is the communication system that switched to a single chain of command in times of coronavirus.

A couple things I want to get you to…All of these efforts, Taiwan has had such a low COVID-19. Everything, you guys have just been in such a unique situation. The mask map, the drills, the quarantining, the contact tracing, all of these things aside from helping you keep COVID-19 numbers low, did it end up helping out the economy? Did it save Taiwan money?

Yeah, certainly. I don’t know [laughs] which angle you want me to answer that. I can say that, of course, because of the counter-COVID success, we’ve recorded the GDP growth, not only for the quarter but for the entire year as well.

Because we also had pretty good stimulus plans for small and medium enterprises and so on, not only do our export grow by 9.9 percent in September, but also the revenue of retail and catering in September reached the highest since the turn of the century.

Taiwan never shut down, right?

Yeah. There was no lockdown in our counter-pandemic this time. There was no takedown in our counter-infodemic either.

That alone helps the economy. If the economy is moving and flowing as normal…

That’s right. Also, the people’s habits of going to, say, Okinawa [laughs] for tourism, of course, they have to channel it inward too within Taiwan or maybe to the Pescador Islands. That’s what drove the revenue of retail and catering to the historical high of this entry in last September.

Sorry, let me do this again.

People in Taiwan often go abroad on tourism and because other places are not that easy to get to for tourism purposes they channel this energy inward and visits different parts of Taiwan or maybe different islands, like the Penghu islands. That’s what drove the revenue of retail and catering this September to the highest points ever since the turn of the century.

People were just going to restaurants more than ever before?

That’s exactly right.

Wow. Were your restaurants socially distanced with Plexiglas?

Yeah, with Plexiglas or curtains, maybe.

Unlike the United States where our restaurant industry has been hit very hard, you had the complete opposite experience. If you were in the restaurant business, you were in the perfect place.

That’s exactly right. Even if you are in a place where your hotel, for example, mostly accommodated oversea visitors, which of course reduced to a trickle, you can also convert the entire hotel into quarantine hotel, which not only have the state subsidy, but also fulfills a very important public good.

Did your bars ever close or your nightclubs? Did they ever close?

Yeah. As I mentioned, the bars and nightclubs for a while, after the April diagnoses of that’s one hostess in a hostess bar, the CECC did recommend them to close until they can figure out a way to keep physical distancing as well as the real contact system. It was just a suggestion. It’s not like we’re putting people in jail.