 Hello, I'm Audrey Tong, Taiwan's Digital Minister. I'm really happy to be here virtually to share with you some thoughts around Taiwan's digital social innovation at the Transducers 2021 virtual conference. Social innovation, or everyone's business with everyone's help, relies on the three pillars that I call FAST, FAIR, and FUN. The FAST pillar, or collective intelligence, means that whenever people sense something is wrong or something is going on in a society, there must be a way to listen at scale. For example, in 2019, December, there was a forum post on PTT, Taiwan's Equivalent of Reddit, that says there's seven new SARS cases on the Huanan seafood market, as reported by this person called NoMorePype, a young doctor, reposting Dr. Lee Wenliang's message from Wuhan. Now this message immediately gained attention of many people on the PTT, and after just 24 hours, we started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan on the first day of 2020. Now the PTT, unlike Reddit, is in the social sector, meaning it has no shareholders nor advertisers. It's literally a student pet project from the National Taiwan University that has been running for 25 years as an open source community. Because it's in the social sector, the innovations on the PTT concentrates on listening at scale and highlighting not the conspiracy theories or divisiveness, but rather the common sensing of the emergent phenomena. This early warning is not just from the people who has a habit to post in forums. In Taiwan, anyone can call this toll-free number 1922 to make the suggestions or asking for clarifications on anything related to pandemic control. Last April, for example, there was a young boy that called 1922 that said, hey, you're rationing out masks, but all I got was pink medical grade masks. I don't want to wear pink to school. All the boys in my class, he said, had navy blue medical grade masks. Well the very next day, all the medical offices in a daily 2pm press conference wore pink. Now this pink mask is a social innovation, because it's very easy to spread and replicate and remix. Not just pink, but also rainbow masks and various other self-expression-oriented masks soon dominated the conversations around mask use in Taiwan, effectively increased mask use because it's not just a sign of obedience, it's a sign of self-expression. And a team within each ministry that we call participation officers or POs helped devise such listening and scale devices and also respond and engage with hashtags and other trending memes. For example, this pink mask response was from the participation officer of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Altogether there's around 100 people in the public service dedicated to connect to the civil society in this way. If the POs, the participation officers are the bridge from the public sector, the social sector also has their equivalent the bridge that we call the GovZero community or GZeroV. You see the digital services in Taiwan all ends in something.gov.tw, but there's a bunch of volunteers that add a zero, a slash. And so instead of Gov.tw, you can visit GZeroV.tw the prototypes the digital service without any government procurement, but always in open source and contributing to the public service. Now the fairness of PPE distribution last February was such a co-creation case. The people in the GovZero community devised this map that visualizes the availability of PPEs around each position so that people do not have to queue in vain. And because I'm also one of the GovZero contributors, I took the idea to the head of the cabinet to the premier and said we need to trust citizens with open data and not just any open data, real-time open data or open API. And this allowed us to publish every 30 seconds like a distributed legend to more than 100 different tools, including maps, chatbots, and so on. So people who queue in line can literally see the person queuing before them how many amount of mask did they just purchase from that pharmacy. It also led to independent analysis of the demand and supply of the medical grade mask and eventually this formed our vaccine reservation system that we're soon going to deploy. But it's not just about the fast response, it's not just about the fair distribution. In order to make sure that the idea was spreading actually spread, spread more easily than conspiracy theories, it needs to be fun. And we call this humor over rumor. Our counter-infodemic playbook relies on the participation officer's contribution. The participation officer from the Minister of Health and Welfare literally lives with this dog, named Zhongcai or Shiba Inu. And so we explain physical distance saying when you're indoor, please keep three shibas away, outdoor two shibas away. The shiba reminds you to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing. And the shiba reminds you to wear a mask because the mask protects your own face against your own unwashed hands. Now we know the internet is built for cute cats, but cute dogs also works pretty well. And so these messages get remixed, printed, posted, and so on by all the people that find this interesting to share. And so the scientific knowledge about mask use and social distancing soon reached a lot of people to ensure that people understand not just the what of policies, but also the why of policymaking. Another co-creation case pertains to the check-in system that enabled contact tracing. Before entering a venue starting last year, we require people to write their contact as in their phone number and a handle. However, we soon find out during this year that many people were afraid that the phone number they left will be seen by the customers queuing after them, or also if they don't trust a venue owner that much, they would prefer instead to check in directly to the epidemic control sensor. Now the co-creational ability of GovZero Community happens again. Around a month ago in May 2021, GovZero Community together prototyped a SMS-based check-in system that we call the 192.2 SMS. This system basically lets all the venue owners post this shape of QR code in addition to not replacing the paper-based contact system so that people who do not want to write on a piece of paper can instead use their phone to scan the QR code. And the QR code does not require an internet connection because it's based on the SMS-2 protocol. It's SMS to the toll-free 192.2 number with a random code that links to the location, but this link is not known to telecoms. So the telecom basically in a multi-party configuration just stores this check-in information, the time stamp, the telephone number, as well as the location code. And the final thing about this is that it only takes five seconds. Many building cameras indeed are Bluetooth-based Taiwan social distancing app and so on, also as this open standard SMS scanner so that people find completing this easy and safe. And because the SMS text says very clearly that this is for epidemic control use only, people can be informed that it's not going to, for example, result in advertisers or other people who want to misuse this check-in information because it's stored only in the telecoms that the person already registered the phone to. And fun also needs to be inclusive. We designed specifically so that the location code is printed right below the QR code. So even for people with no smartphones, no QR code scanners, they can use a feature phone like a flip phone and manually SMS-2192.2, this 15-digit location code. Again, completing the check-in service in a very short time without any privacy detail being shared with the venue owner. And we promise, as through contract now enforced, that all the five major telecom providers will only keep it for four weeks before rotating it away. And because of this, people understand if the contact tracers do not find a need to send exposure notification or to get aware about of people with confirmed COVID-19, then this data will not be retained forever. After four weeks, it will be rotated away. And for the venue owners, all they need to do is to use their smartphone and not even sending an SMS because the five telecoms can authenticate for G or 5G connection directly to the SIM cards owner. So after using this TWID self-identifying way, they just connect to this URL and they can download and print the QR code by themselves or send it virtually to a nearby convenience store printing machine and walk to the convenience store and print it out. And all together, this very easy to deploy service resulted in more than 350 million SMS sent in the first four weeks. So I shared this anecdote, this example, to show that it's about people, public, private, partnership. The social sector first discovers an existing way for the sensors, well in this case the QR code scanners, on their smartphones to serve a public welfare purpose. And after prototyping it on GovZero because it's open innovation, the government switched from simply saying that there's pen and paper option available to an additional option available. And then the private sector joins such as the convenience store and so on to help to facilitate this QR code printing. But all the while conforming to the social norm set by the social sector. And so building upon universal health coverage, universal broadband and universal media competence, not just literacy education, we were able to counter the pandemic with no lockdown so far by amplifying the best ideas from the civil society. And this corresponds to our President Dr. Tsai Ing-wen's inauguration speech in 2016 where she said, before we think of democracy as a showdown between opposing values. But nowadays we need to reimagine democracy to become a conversation between many diverse values. You're looking at the social innovation lab, my office, at a heart of Taipei City. This soccer field you see here is strong by people with Down syndrome with treatment differences. They look at the world not as UML charts but as something like Van Gogh's painting. After stepping into this place, we find that many public servants get inspired to think beyond the existing solutions, to think beyond their silos and co-create useful social innovations with the civil society. And this place also allowed us to work with these self-driving tricycles to gather we set the norm of what's to expect on self-driving vehicles without any top-down or lockdown or shutdown or takedowns. The Taiwan grassroots innovation makes sure that people can adapt through open data, open hardware and open API to make sure that people can remodel those self-driving vehicles to serve for example as self-driving shopping cart companions among other things. We hold such hackathons all the time in the social innovation lab to foster effective partnerships. And the largest one annually in the social innovation lab is the presidential hackathon. Every year we highlight five social innovators who work across sectors to solve a small-scale social issue. For example in 2018 the water savior team you see they save water work with machine learning experts and IoT experts to build a companion to these water service pipe repair people to highlight the likely place for water leaks to happen to ensure fresh water supply something Taiwan has truly benefited from in the past year. And although their initial prototype was only at a smaller Jilong city, they won one of the five trophies that the president hands out every year. The trophy shaped like Taiwan has a micro projector underneath and once you turn on the micro projector it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing the trophy to the team. It's a very meta trophy. What this symbolizes is that the president will treat it as a presidential promise to amplify it from being just applying to Jilong to the national skill within the next year with all the budgetary with all the personnel as well as the regulatory adjustments that's needed. So many of our innovations including telemedicine QR code-based virtual health card and so on can all find its roots in the presidential hackathon winners. And these winners are not just from one party often they form a multi-party data collaborative because as I said in Taiwan we teach data and digital competence not literacy because you see literacy is like radio and television a few people speaks most people just consume the information but competence is about creating your own data collaboratives contributing to distributed ledgers contributing to such data service platforms and make sure that people can ensure the reliability of data together. For example many primary schoolers in Taiwan nowadays learns data competence from the air box you see here again another Gov Zero visualization of PM 2.5 among other climate and weather related things that are measured by primary schoolers and so after contributing to this network it makes it much easier for the children to learn about data stewardship about joint data controllership about data bias among other things as well as nbiot and laura and other zero g network and what's missing on the map usually in the industrial areas well the social sector negotiates with the municipalities so that they have to for example find the lamps in the industrial parks and install the air boxes on top of it because although the primary schoolers cannot break and enter into industrial parks they can work with existing environmental activists to ensure that the municipalities take the device designed in the social sector and again require collaboration from the private sector and this is a global citizenship educational tool many people in other jurisdictions also join the air box network or use the existing code and open hardware and adapt to build their own and how do we prioritize the sustainable development goals because you see the presidential hackathon teams each need to correspond to one or more of the 169 SDG targets well we use a novel voting method which is also a social innovation it's pioneered in the aetherian community where they work with mechanisms and designers to ensure public funding using quadratic funding while quadratic voting is a similar idea each person participation counts in 99 points and each person that's everyone in Taiwan can go to the join platform log in get the 99 points and on the presidential hackathon website choose among the 200 or so cases every year and start to vote if they vote one vote that's going to cost one point but if you like a project so much you want to do two votes well that's going to cost you four and three votes will cost you nine and so with 99 points one can only vote nine votes to anything because well it costs 81 in total and 10 votes would cost 100 but we don't have 100 per person and so with the 18 points left people will be motivated to look into some other projects unlike many other voting systems this actually ensures that people look through four or five or more projects and find the synergies between them best yet the 20 best teams determined by quadratic voting we know for sure through the qv which other teams 200 teams have synergy with those 20 teams and so we can dissolve these 200 teams but individual team members may be reassigned re recruited into the top 20 teams that was delivering the most public benefits as judged by the quadratic voting system so this again ensures common values out of different positions not polarization or zero sum games and we discover such ideas for social innovation not by people sitting in the office but rather through telecommunication i'm very excited about the potential of 5g and beyond 5g because i've been touring around taiwan and using fiber optics to connect together the people who are closest to the pain to the potential contributors to the presidential hackathon in other municipalities as well as to the 12 participation officer oriented ministries in the social innovation plan in the lab in Taipei that i just show you so each of such social innovation tools connect five or more spaces and the local people can explain their story without condensing it to some PowerPoint slides or to some documents instead they can have the full attention of the cross sectoral innovators and central government to listen to what's going on and with existing technology we of course can do the immersive connection but only between one building to another it's quite difficult actually to go to the most remote places the most rural places and enjoy the same co-presence that we have built through the social innovation tours so to the people working on co-presence in the audience i sincerely wish that we can work together more closely so that one day through beyond 5g or through novel transmission and co-presence devices we can actually listen to the people in the more remote places instead of asking anyone to come to the town to the town hall and only then can we ensure responsive inclusive and representative decision-making for this is not just about representatives representing people this is about the co-presence device representing people making sure that people can share just as we share through this video conference right now their true feelings to each other and this will also allow much more meaningful sandboxes in Taiwan we have a saying the more remote you are the more advanced you should be meaning that for example when we auction off our 5g spectrum we allocate especially for a millimeter wave applications the uses are the most remote and rural places to enable health to enable learning to enable communication and so on those guaranteed rights that finds an application maybe not in the business sense first but still in the social sense like in the presidential hackathon in the most remote places and the open innovation that's built in our sandbox related laws and regulations means that if something doesn't work well at least it delivers some social value and people can learn from the mistakes and adapt and create something better together indeed back in 2015 we used one such AI-powered conversation to listen at scale called polis nowadays polis is already part of our public infrastructure in polis.gov.tw anyone any public servant that is can start such a conversation to gauge people's response to any emergent topic back in 2015 what you're looking at is a real response to the uber x phenomenon instead of deliberating on the abstract topics like whether it's gig economy or sharing economy or platform economy people just look at the facts and share their feelings and for three to four weeks people just resonated against each other's feelings until the best idea that take care of everyone's feelings emerge and then we implement those ideas into the multi-purpose taxi act and then uber x becomes a solved problem so in concrete terms that means that if you agree with my feeling that passenger liability insurance is very important while you move toward me but if you click disagree you move farther away from me but there is no reply button so there's no room for troll to grow and always after three weeks we always find this shape which may be the most important slide that i'm going to show you today these divisive statement ideological statement people agree to disagree but unlike in the other anti-social corners of social media this pro-social corner of social media ensure that people focus their calories on the consensus statements good enough consensus or rough consensus is bread and butter of standard making on the internet so this allows people to visualize what does it mean to build a good enough consensus it's like visual humming so in the uber x case for example everyone agreed that registration insurance not under cutting existing meters and so on are the most important and once we legalize that the local temples and churches now also legally operate their response-based services to serve their transportation needs and so again this norm is set by the society amplified by the government and then implemented in the private sector people public private partnership and the measurement of progress the key of the key performance metrics are determined collaboratively through crowdsourced agenda setting and only then can we say that innovation is there to deliver under common values instead of disrupting the common values and only then can we say that the sustainable goals is furthered by the digital in the middle in the 17s to conclude my initial remarks i would like to read you my job description back in 2016 when i first became digital minister the administration asked okay so what does a digital minister do i'm like oh it's simple it's just school 1717 effective partnership target 1718 reliable data and target 1716 open innovation and they said well minister the sdgs was just published 2015 in 2016 nobody memorizes the 169 targets so i translated these important targets into well poetry a form of prayer and that's my job description it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that the singularity is near let us always remember the plurality is here thank you for listening live long and prosper