34:55
DB: What advice would you have for the Twitters and Facebooks and LINEs and WhatsApps, and you name it, of the world?
35:07
AT: Yeah. So, just before our election, we said to all of them that we're not making a law to kind of punish them. However, we're sharing this very simple fact that there is this norm in Taiwan that we even have a separate branch of the government, the control branch, that published the campaign donation and expense. And it just so occurred to us that in the previous election, the mayoral one, there was a lot of candidates that did not include any social media advertisements in their expense to the Control Yuan. And so essentially, that means that there is a separate amount of political donation and expense that evades public scrutiny. And our Control Yuan published their numbers in raw data form, that is to say, they're not statistics, but individual records of who donated for what cause, when, where, and investigative journalists are very happy, because they can then make investigative reports about the connections between the candidates and the people who fund them.
36:11
But they cannot work with the same material from the global social media companies. So I said, "Look, this is very simple. This is the social norm here, I don't really care about other jurisdictions. You either adhere to the social norm that is set by the Control Yuan and the investigative journalists, or maybe you will face social sanctions. And this is not the government mandate, but it's the people fed up with, you know, black box, and that's part of the Sunflower Occupy's demands, also. And so Facebook actually published in the Ad Library, I think at that time, one of the fastest response strategies, where everybody who has basically any dark pattern advertisement will get revealed very quickly, and investigative journalists work with the local civic technologists to make sure that if anybody dare to use social media in such a divisive way, within an hour, there will be a report out condemning that. So nobody tried that during the previous presidential election season.
37:13
DB: So change is possible.
37:15 AT: Mhm.
37:19
WPR: Hey there, we have some more questions from the community. There is an anonymous one that says, "I believe Taiwan is outside WHO entirely and has a 130-part preparation program -- developed entirely on its own -- to what extent does it credit its preparation to building its own system?"
37:39
AT: Well, a little bit, I guess. We tried to warn the WHO, but at that point -- we are not totally outside, we have limited scientific access. But we do not have any ministerial access. And this is very different, right? If you only have limited scientific access, unless the other side's top epidemiologist happens to be the vice president, like in Taiwan's case, they don't always do the storytelling well enough to translate that into political action as our vice president did, right? So the lack of ministerial access, I think, is to the detriment of the global community, because otherwise, people could have responded as we did in the first day of January, instead of having to wait for weeks before the WHO declared that this is something, that there's definitely human to human transmission, that you should inspect people coming in from Wuhan, which they eventually did, but that's already two weeks or three weeks after what we did.
38:43
WPR: Makes a lot of sense.
38:45
DB: More scientists and technologists in politics. That sounds like that's the answer.
38:50 AT: Yeah.
38:54
WPR: And then we have another question here from Kamal Srinivasan about your reopening strategy. "How are you enabling restaurants and retailers to open safely in Taiwan?"
39:04
AT: Oh, they never closed, so ... (Laughs)
39:06 WPR: Oh!
39:08
AT: Yeah, they never closed, there was no lockdown, there was no closure. We just said a very simple thing in the CECC press conference, that there's going to be physical distancing. You maintain one and a half meters indoors or wear a mask. And that's it. And so there are some restaurants that put up, I guess, red curtains, some put very cute teddy bears and so on, on the chairs, to make sure that people spread evenly, some installed see-through glass or plastic walls between the seats. There's various social innovations happening around. And I think the only shops that got closed for a while, because they could not innovate quick enough to respond to these rules, was the intimate escort bars. But eventually, even they invented new ways, by handing out these caps that are plastic shielding, but still leaves room for drinking behind it. And so they opened with that social innovation.
40:13 DB: That's amazing.
40:15
WPR: It is, yeah, it's a lot to learn from your strategies there. Thank you, I'll be back towards the end with some final questions.
40:25
DB: I'm very happy to hear that the restaurants were not closed down, because I think Taipei has some of the best food in the world of any city that I've visited, so, you know, kudos to you for that. So the big concern when it comes to using digital tools for COVID or using digital tools for democracy is always privacy. You've talked about that a little bit, but I'm sure the citizens of Taiwan are perhaps equally concerned about their privacy, especially given the geopolitical context.
41:06 AT: Definitely.
41:07
DB: So how do you cope with those demands?
41:10
AT: Yeah, we design with not only defensive strategy, like minimization of data collection, but also proactive measures, such as privacy-enhancing technologies. One of the top teams that emerged out of our cohack, the TW response from the Polis, how to make contact tracing easier, focused not on the contact tracers, not on the medical officers, but on the person. So they basically said, "OK, you have a phone, you can record your temperatures, you can record your whereabouts and things like that, but that is strictly in your phone. It doesn't even use Bluetooth. So there's no transmission. Technology uses open-source, you can check it, you can use it in airplane mode. And when the contact tracer eventually tells you that you are part of a high-risk group, and they really want your contact history, this tool can then generate a single-use URL that only contains the precise information, anonymized, that the contact tracers want.
42:12
But it will not, like in a traditional interview, let you ask -- they ask a question, they only want to know your whereabouts, but you answer with such accuracy that you end up compromising other people's privacy. So basically, this is about designing with an aim to enhance other people's privacy, because personal data is never truly personal. It's always social, it's always intersectional. If I take a selfie at a party, I inadvertently also take pretty much everybody else's who are in the picture, the surroundings, the ambiance, and so on, and if I upload it to a cloud service, then I actually decimate the bargaining power, the negotiation power of everybody around me, because then their data is part of the cloud, and the cloud doesn't have to compensate them or get their agreement for it.
43:03
And so only by designing the tools with privacy enhancing as a positive value, and not enhancing only the person's own privacy, just like a medical mask, it protects you, but mostly it also protects others, right? So if we design tools using that idea, and always open-source and with an open API, then we're in a much better shape than in centralized or so-called cloud-based services.
43:31
DB: Well, you're clearly living in the future, and I guess that's quite literal, in the sense of, it's tomorrow morning there.
43:39 AT: Twelve hours.
43:40
DB: Yes. Tell me, what do you see in the future? What comes next?
43:48
AT: Yes, so I see the coronavirus as a great amplifier. If you start with an authoritarian society, the coronavirus, with all its lockdowns and so on, has the potential of making it even a more totalitarian society. If people place their trust, however, on the social sector, on the ingenuity of social innovators, then the pandemic, as in Taiwan, actually strengthens our democracy, so that people feel, truly, that everybody can think of something that improves the welfare of not just Taiwan, but pretty much everybody else in the world.
44:24
And so, my point here is that the great amplifier comes if no matter you want it or not, but the society, what they can do, is do what Taiwan did after SARS. In 2003, when SARS came, we had to shut down an entire hospital, barricading it with no definite termination date. It was very traumatic, everybody above the age of 30 remembers how traumatic it was. The municipalities and the central government were saying very different things, and that is why after SARS, the constitutional courts charged the legislature to set up the system as you see today, and also that is why, when people responding to that crisis back in 2003 built this very robust response system that there's early drills.
45:09
So just as the Sunflower Occupy, because of the crisis in trust let us build new tools that put trust first, I think the coronavirus is the chance for everybody who have survived through the first wave to settle on a new set of norms that will reinforce your founding values, instead of taking on alien values in the name of survival.
45:36
DB: Yeah, let's hope so, and let's hope the rest of the world is as prepared as Taiwan the next time around. When it comes to digital democracy, though, and digital citizenship, where do you see that going, both in Taiwan and maybe in the rest of the world?
45:56
AT: Well, I have my job description here, which I will read to you. It's literally my job description and the answer to that question. And so, here goes. When we see the internet of things, let's make it the internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening.
46:36
DB: Wow. I have to give that a little clap, that was beautiful.
46:42 (Laughs)
46:43
Quite a job description too. So, conservative anarchist, digital minister, and with that job description -- that's pretty impressive.
46:51 AT: A poetician, yes.
46:53
DB: (Laughs) So I struggle to imagine an adoption of these techniques in the US, and that may be my pessimism weighing in. But what words of hope do you have for the US, as we cope with COVID?
47:15
AT: Well, as I mentioned, during SARS in Taiwan, nobody imagined we could have CECC and a cute spokesdog. Before the Sunflower movement, during a large protest, there was, I think, half a million people on the street, and many more. Nobody thought that we could have a collective intelligence system that puts open government data as a way to rebuild citizen participation. And so, never lose hope. As my favorite singer, Leonard Cohen -- a poet, also -- is fond of saying, "Ring the bells that still can ring and forget any perfect offering. There is a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in."
47:58
WPR: Wow. That's so beautiful, and it feels like such a great message to, sort of, leave the audience with, and sharing the sentiment that everyone seems to be so grateful for what you've shared, Audrey, and all the great information and insight into Taiwan's strategies.
48:18 AT: Thank you.
48:19 WPR: And David --
48:21
DB: I was just going to say, thank you so much for that, thank you for that beautiful job description, and for all the wisdom you shared in rapid-fire fashion. I think it wasn't just one idea that you shared, but maybe, I don't know, 20, 30, 40? I lost count at some point.
48:39
AT: Well, it's called Ideas Worth Spreading, it's a plural form.
48:42 (Laughter)
48:44
DB: Very true. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
48:48 WPR: Thank you, Audrey.
48:49
DB: And I wish you luck with everything.
48:52
AT: Thank you, and have a good local time. Stay safe.
DB: What advice would you have for the Twitters and Facebooks and LINEs and WhatsApps, and you name it, of the world?
35:07
AT: Yeah. So, just before our election, we said to all of them that we're not making a law to kind of punish them. However, we're sharing this very simple fact that there is this norm in Taiwan that we even have a separate branch of the government, the control branch, that published the campaign donation and expense. And it just so occurred to us that in the previous election, the mayoral one, there was a lot of candidates that did not include any social media advertisements in their expense to the Control Yuan. And so essentially, that means that there is a separate amount of political donation and expense that evades public scrutiny. And our Control Yuan published their numbers in raw data form, that is to say, they're not statistics, but individual records of who donated for what cause, when, where, and investigative journalists are very happy, because they can then make investigative reports about the connections between the candidates and the people who fund them.
36:11
But they cannot work with the same material from the global social media companies. So I said, "Look, this is very simple. This is the social norm here, I don't really care about other jurisdictions. You either adhere to the social norm that is set by the Control Yuan and the investigative journalists, or maybe you will face social sanctions. And this is not the government mandate, but it's the people fed up with, you know, black box, and that's part of the Sunflower Occupy's demands, also. And so Facebook actually published in the Ad Library, I think at that time, one of the fastest response strategies, where everybody who has basically any dark pattern advertisement will get revealed very quickly, and investigative journalists work with the local civic technologists to make sure that if anybody dare to use social media in such a divisive way, within an hour, there will be a report out condemning that. So nobody tried that during the previous presidential election season.
37:13
DB: So change is possible.
37:15 AT: Mhm.
37:19
WPR: Hey there, we have some more questions from the community. There is an anonymous one that says, "I believe Taiwan is outside WHO entirely and has a 130-part preparation program -- developed entirely on its own -- to what extent does it credit its preparation to building its own system?"
37:39
AT: Well, a little bit, I guess. We tried to warn the WHO, but at that point -- we are not totally outside, we have limited scientific access. But we do not have any ministerial access. And this is very different, right? If you only have limited scientific access, unless the other side's top epidemiologist happens to be the vice president, like in Taiwan's case, they don't always do the storytelling well enough to translate that into political action as our vice president did, right? So the lack of ministerial access, I think, is to the detriment of the global community, because otherwise, people could have responded as we did in the first day of January, instead of having to wait for weeks before the WHO declared that this is something, that there's definitely human to human transmission, that you should inspect people coming in from Wuhan, which they eventually did, but that's already two weeks or three weeks after what we did.
38:43
WPR: Makes a lot of sense.
38:45
DB: More scientists and technologists in politics. That sounds like that's the answer.
38:50 AT: Yeah.
38:54
WPR: And then we have another question here from Kamal Srinivasan about your reopening strategy. "How are you enabling restaurants and retailers to open safely in Taiwan?"
39:04
AT: Oh, they never closed, so ... (Laughs)
39:06 WPR: Oh!
39:08
AT: Yeah, they never closed, there was no lockdown, there was no closure. We just said a very simple thing in the CECC press conference, that there's going to be physical distancing. You maintain one and a half meters indoors or wear a mask. And that's it. And so there are some restaurants that put up, I guess, red curtains, some put very cute teddy bears and so on, on the chairs, to make sure that people spread evenly, some installed see-through glass or plastic walls between the seats. There's various social innovations happening around. And I think the only shops that got closed for a while, because they could not innovate quick enough to respond to these rules, was the intimate escort bars. But eventually, even they invented new ways, by handing out these caps that are plastic shielding, but still leaves room for drinking behind it. And so they opened with that social innovation.
40:13 DB: That's amazing.
40:15
WPR: It is, yeah, it's a lot to learn from your strategies there. Thank you, I'll be back towards the end with some final questions.
40:25
DB: I'm very happy to hear that the restaurants were not closed down, because I think Taipei has some of the best food in the world of any city that I've visited, so, you know, kudos to you for that. So the big concern when it comes to using digital tools for COVID or using digital tools for democracy is always privacy. You've talked about that a little bit, but I'm sure the citizens of Taiwan are perhaps equally concerned about their privacy, especially given the geopolitical context.
41:06 AT: Definitely.
41:07
DB: So how do you cope with those demands?
41:10
AT: Yeah, we design with not only defensive strategy, like minimization of data collection, but also proactive measures, such as privacy-enhancing technologies. One of the top teams that emerged out of our cohack, the TW response from the Polis, how to make contact tracing easier, focused not on the contact tracers, not on the medical officers, but on the person. So they basically said, "OK, you have a phone, you can record your temperatures, you can record your whereabouts and things like that, but that is strictly in your phone. It doesn't even use Bluetooth. So there's no transmission. Technology uses open-source, you can check it, you can use it in airplane mode. And when the contact tracer eventually tells you that you are part of a high-risk group, and they really want your contact history, this tool can then generate a single-use URL that only contains the precise information, anonymized, that the contact tracers want.
42:12
But it will not, like in a traditional interview, let you ask -- they ask a question, they only want to know your whereabouts, but you answer with such accuracy that you end up compromising other people's privacy. So basically, this is about designing with an aim to enhance other people's privacy, because personal data is never truly personal. It's always social, it's always intersectional. If I take a selfie at a party, I inadvertently also take pretty much everybody else's who are in the picture, the surroundings, the ambiance, and so on, and if I upload it to a cloud service, then I actually decimate the bargaining power, the negotiation power of everybody around me, because then their data is part of the cloud, and the cloud doesn't have to compensate them or get their agreement for it.
43:03
And so only by designing the tools with privacy enhancing as a positive value, and not enhancing only the person's own privacy, just like a medical mask, it protects you, but mostly it also protects others, right? So if we design tools using that idea, and always open-source and with an open API, then we're in a much better shape than in centralized or so-called cloud-based services.
43:31
DB: Well, you're clearly living in the future, and I guess that's quite literal, in the sense of, it's tomorrow morning there.
43:39 AT: Twelve hours.
43:40
DB: Yes. Tell me, what do you see in the future? What comes next?
43:48
AT: Yes, so I see the coronavirus as a great amplifier. If you start with an authoritarian society, the coronavirus, with all its lockdowns and so on, has the potential of making it even a more totalitarian society. If people place their trust, however, on the social sector, on the ingenuity of social innovators, then the pandemic, as in Taiwan, actually strengthens our democracy, so that people feel, truly, that everybody can think of something that improves the welfare of not just Taiwan, but pretty much everybody else in the world.
44:24
And so, my point here is that the great amplifier comes if no matter you want it or not, but the society, what they can do, is do what Taiwan did after SARS. In 2003, when SARS came, we had to shut down an entire hospital, barricading it with no definite termination date. It was very traumatic, everybody above the age of 30 remembers how traumatic it was. The municipalities and the central government were saying very different things, and that is why after SARS, the constitutional courts charged the legislature to set up the system as you see today, and also that is why, when people responding to that crisis back in 2003 built this very robust response system that there's early drills.
45:09
So just as the Sunflower Occupy, because of the crisis in trust let us build new tools that put trust first, I think the coronavirus is the chance for everybody who have survived through the first wave to settle on a new set of norms that will reinforce your founding values, instead of taking on alien values in the name of survival.
45:36
DB: Yeah, let's hope so, and let's hope the rest of the world is as prepared as Taiwan the next time around. When it comes to digital democracy, though, and digital citizenship, where do you see that going, both in Taiwan and maybe in the rest of the world?
45:56
AT: Well, I have my job description here, which I will read to you. It's literally my job description and the answer to that question. And so, here goes. When we see the internet of things, let's make it the internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening.
46:36
DB: Wow. I have to give that a little clap, that was beautiful.
46:42 (Laughs)
46:43
Quite a job description too. So, conservative anarchist, digital minister, and with that job description -- that's pretty impressive.
46:51 AT: A poetician, yes.
46:53
DB: (Laughs) So I struggle to imagine an adoption of these techniques in the US, and that may be my pessimism weighing in. But what words of hope do you have for the US, as we cope with COVID?
47:15
AT: Well, as I mentioned, during SARS in Taiwan, nobody imagined we could have CECC and a cute spokesdog. Before the Sunflower movement, during a large protest, there was, I think, half a million people on the street, and many more. Nobody thought that we could have a collective intelligence system that puts open government data as a way to rebuild citizen participation. And so, never lose hope. As my favorite singer, Leonard Cohen -- a poet, also -- is fond of saying, "Ring the bells that still can ring and forget any perfect offering. There is a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in."
47:58
WPR: Wow. That's so beautiful, and it feels like such a great message to, sort of, leave the audience with, and sharing the sentiment that everyone seems to be so grateful for what you've shared, Audrey, and all the great information and insight into Taiwan's strategies.
48:18 AT: Thank you.
48:19 WPR: And David --
48:21
DB: I was just going to say, thank you so much for that, thank you for that beautiful job description, and for all the wisdom you shared in rapid-fire fashion. I think it wasn't just one idea that you shared, but maybe, I don't know, 20, 30, 40? I lost count at some point.
48:39
AT: Well, it's called Ideas Worth Spreading, it's a plural form.
48:42 (Laughter)
48:44
DB: Very true. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
48:48 WPR: Thank you, Audrey.
48:49
DB: And I wish you luck with everything.
48:52
AT: Thank you, and have a good local time. Stay safe.
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