 Good local time everyone. I'm really happy to be here honored to share with you some thoughts around digital social innovation in Taiwan Taiwan is around 23 million people and in the past two years and a half We've managed to counter the pandemic with no lockdowns and we countered the infodemic that this information crisis was no takedowns and What follows is about 15 minutes of slides talking about how we did that with social innovation And I will come the Q&A that goes after that So social innovation or everyone's business with everyone's help can be distilled into three pillars. That's fast, fair and fun The fast pillar contains this idea of collective intelligence On the last day of 2019 in PTT, which is the civil society equivalent of Reddit in Taiwan There's a young doctor no more pie posted this message from Dr. Lee Wenliang from Wuhan saying there's a few SARS cases Seven SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market Unlike in more anti-social corners of other social media platforms because this platform has no advertisers or shareholders This is purely for purpose people very quickly triaged the information Amplified the legitimacy of this whistleblowing and then we took action the very next day And started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan But connective intelligence is not just about people who frequent text-based bulletin board systems Rather anyone with a phone line a landline can call this toll-free number 1922 to add to the collective Intelligence instead of an answering machine someone with a lot of empathy Receives the phone and for example in 2020 April There was a young boy who calls saying hey, you're rationing out mask which is great But all I got was pink ones, which is not great. I don't want to wear pink to school Well, the very next day on the daily 2 p.m. Press conference Mr. Chen and all the medical offices were pink and Mr. Chen even said that pink panther was a childhood hero So for a couple weeks all the fashion brands were pink until they were rainbow a few months afterward And then must become something of a self expression instead of a top-down order again that adopted The mask rationing and all the mask use became much increased with this fashion self expression based fast collective intelligence Now the rationing system that we adopted for mask and for rapid tests and so on is again based on the idea of open data We update in real-time Every 30 seconds the inventory of rapid test and masking so one in all the thousands of pharmacies So that people in G zero v org of zero Community can take those real-time numbers and make hundreds and hundreds of different tours maps chat boss voice Assistance to guide people to the place where there's still mask and PPEs or rapid tests available and more importantly This allowed the data bias to be discovered very quickly because everyone has real-time visibility Into the distribution the opposition party and the journalists and so on of course they can offer their criticism But because they seed exactly a data as we do we can then say please teach us And then they make better suggestions and then we implement better distribution mechanisms again in 24 hours time So that means that we not only increase the bandwidth of democracy But also shorten the latency the time it takes from one good idea one good innovation to happen to the countrywide adoption In just 24 hours and finally to counter against not just the health but mental health hazard We rely on this idea of humor over rumor The central epidemic command center have this spoke stock named strong chai as she by you knew Whenever we see something inaccurate for example about masks containing 5g antenna or whatever We roll out even more funny memes featuring this dog So this is about physical distancing and this is about the dog putting their hands to the mouse thing Where I must to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands and because humor travels even more fast than conspiracy theories This allowed the science and clarifications to get to people and people after they left about it We'll no longer share the conspiracy theories. Now. How do we know which conspiracy theories which in? In factual ideas are being going viral. Well, we again rely on something like contact tracing So even into an encrypted systems like messenger or signal or in Taiwan's call line People can voluntarily flag incoming messages as spawn And just like flagging your incoming email as bomb this sense this kind of fingerprint of the individual message So we know exactly which viral payloads are Trending and then the fact checkers the independent journalists investigative journalists Spend their time on only the ones that are going viral and then the administration rose out again humor over rumor Memes to out meme the most viral strains of this information. So this is pre-pandemic We see a viral strain that says One million dollar fine for people who pump their hair multiple times a week and the meme that rose out Just four hours afterward says it's not true and features the head of our cabinet our premier Su Zhenchang in his youth Saying I may be bought now that I used to have hair I would not punish people with hair and a fine print that says The labeling crime is just for hair products and then a hair blower saying was the premier I say looks now saying if you put me your hair many times a week It will not damage your bank account, but it would damage your hair Or your hairstyle might become my hairstyle and a lot of people laughed about it and share it and again That this information become kind of inoculated right is it like a viral vaccine that goes viral and even for more Interference that's more tangibly from outside of our jurisdiction for example There was leading to our 2020 January presidential election a disinformation that says the Hong Kong people are not really Protesters they are being hired to kill a police to earn 20 million and so on again We did not take down anything but rather we work with the social media platforms So they carry this mandatory Notice and public notice again from the independent fact checkers We trail traced this to the Chang'an Jian weibo from the Chinese Communist Party And then we then say oh this Message it may be going viral, but actually the payload this particular mutation came from the Chang'an Jian weibo It doesn't come from Reuters which supplied a photo, but the original caption says something else entirely again Instead of taking anything down we rely on this viral inoculation to out meme and in this time Inoculate against the disinformation So to quote Dr. Tsai Ing-wen our president in her first inauguration speech in 2016 Democracy of yesterday is about showdown between opposing values But democracy nowadays must become a conversation between many diverse values So instead of showdowns, this is my office by the way in the social innovation lab We meet with all the social innovators and we just asked two questions. How quickly can we get a Rough consensus a good enough consensus given our different positions and a second question once we have the norm The rough consensus how quickly can we scale out the innovation so that it reaches everybody So for example, it used to be that people do not trust the nation's numbers about air pollution Because we only had less than 100 weather stations measuring PM 2.5 But instead of just protesting demonstrating against people demonstrated for so this is a demo with Primary schoolers and their teachers on their balconies and their schools setting up inexpensive PM 2.5 sensing stations Writing a distributed ledger is called airboxes and then instead of beating them We join them and now this form the backbone of our civil IOT system where people can make sense of the PM 2.5 level Together where the industrial areas industrial parks are taken care of by the municipalities According to the design of the social innovators every year our president Dr. Tsai Ing-wen gives five trophies out of 200 or so of those teams And so after proving their concept in a smaller jurisdiction like a town or a municipality The five winners received this trophy shape of Taiwan was a micro projector underneath that when you turn it on it Projects dr. Tsai Ing-wen giving the trophy to you basically saying it's as good as a presidential Idea platform and we will strive to make the budgets the personnel and the regulatory Adjustments needed to scale that idea from one city to the entire country within the next fiscal year And that allow all sort of data collaboratives to bloom And then we tour around Taiwan to not just introduce presidential hackathon But also meet with the local social innovators But of course there are many different stakeholders for each social innovation So we also use assistive intelligence or ai to automate this way of getting the rough consensus from the people The first time we used it on national scale was in 2015 in 2015 when uber experts came to taiwan the taxi drivers the unions And the uber company and their passengers were feeling very differently So again set up a digital public infrastructure polis Entirely free software to ask people just one question even the common facts How do you feel about people writing to work picking up strangers with a professional license and charging them for it Now all those ideas that convince people of different feelings We only hold ourselves to account to get those ideas into the agenda So you actually have to prepare something that convince people of all the four groups Who which are grouped by their sentiments So you see one sentiment from me you agree you move toward me you disagree you move away from me But you have to convince all the four groups with your own sentiments in order to get it into the agenda of regulation So again every time we see that the ideological debates are maybe just five percent But you used to take all the bandwidth in mainstream media and social media But actually most people agree with most of each other On most of the points most of the time and we surface this and then nowadays uber is a legal taxi company the q-taxi But the local churches local temples and so on can also serve the ones in need in places where uber Our existing taxi fleets wouldn't go reusing exactly the same diversified taxi regulation that we pass thanks to this crowd sourcing intelligence So the idea of social innovation is to develop measurement of progress the kpis in a way that's with the people Not just for the people and finally I like to relate to you my job description Which I wrote in 2016 when I first became digital minister I used to say that my work is under three sdg targets effective partnership reliable data and open innovation But at the time people don't memorize the sdg targets, so I translated them to poetry it goes like this 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 that the singularity is here Well, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening and look forward to the questions Minister Tang dear Audrey absolutely fascinating and a whole lot there to digest Who would like to pose a question to Audrey Tang? Could we have a microphone here in the front row? Thank you. Could you put your hand up again so lova finds you? Yeah, there we go Thank you so much for your insights now On the grounds of what you explained your whole philosophy and what is really done on the ground I kept on thinking about for instance the latest endeavor of mask with twitter and The democratization So if I understand well what you're doing in Taiwan It is about also controlling having an open discussion that is controlled from your ministry and And also there are also measures that of course are being put in place For the good of people Now, how do you see this democratization of such a jumbo platform? What can be the consequences of this in your opinion? Thank you. Thank you Is a very important question of our times people often ask me When we hold town halls In taiwan people don't use twitter much. So on facebook Why do we never get the kind of good enough consensus that we consistently get from polis? And my answer is always well I see facebook as the digital equivalent of the entertainment sector like a nightclub If you your mayor holds a town hall in the nightclub, it will be a smoke filled room You have to shout to get heard addictive drinks being served. Maybe not suited for people under 18 Private bouncers waiting to escort you out And so on and so all these is not conductive to a town hall discussion But it's not a function of the people it's a function of the place The place the space was set up by the advertisers and shareholders to maximize addiction and so-called engagement So I think the point here like the polis platform why we took out the reply button And allow people to focus on each other's sentiments reflecting on that instead on flamores and so on Is that because we optimize for a different kind of engagement? It's not about engagement to spend time there but about engagement to find the common grounds despite the different Positions so it all depends on what you're optimizing for now. Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the entertainment sector I'm just saying that we should also have public parks and town halls and universities and museums in the digital's place Thank you very much very interesting indeed take out the reply button to get people to listen and not simply to talk Here we have a question in the back. Please go ahead Hello, my name is Stephanie Babka. I'm a data culture lead at MEAC and um, yeah, I work Also on the topic of people and technology. That's why I really loved your last chart and most of the things you had on there Really, yeah triggered some imagination for me. So internet of beings shared reality human experience But the collaborative learning and the machine learning and then integrating people to it. I didn't really See the vision you have so I wanted to ask what what this is about Certainly for me. AI stands for assistive intelligence meaning that is a assistive technology Now I happen to have an assistive technology with me, which is this eyeglass Uh, and I wear it to to see you more clearly But it's aligned to my values meaning that I see you instead of a 20 minute pop-up advertisement That I have to wait for 20 seconds to close right which would be serving somebody else's best interest So it's aligned again. Uh, it's accountable meaning that if there's something blur if there's bias in someone I don't have to sign an NDA. I don't have to pay three million dollars in a license fee or something I can't fix it myself or take it to the local civic tech people Well, the repair people down the street to repair this eyeglass So if something that is at once aligned and accountable Then it enabled this kind of collaborative learning that we can then empower the people closest To the pain the end users should have the most freedom to innovate based on whatever the actual local need they have From the assistive intelligence any AI regime that doesn't do that would be in my book Authoritarian intelligence. I hope that answered your question All those ayes. Thank you very much. Who else has a question please Good morning. I'm Bertrando La Chapelle. I'm the chief vision officer of the data sphere initiative Just one question you mentioned enhancing and facilitating data collaboratives. Can you give more examples of Things that you've done in taiwan in that regard Yeah, definitely. So, um one thing about data collaborative is that it must serve a common purpose and I believe that in EU is now called data altruism if I'm not mistaken. So serving something that is Beneficial to the general public instead of just the private interest of the Participants in a way that doesn't encroach on the privacy So one example is this contact tracing system that we've run for around one year Until that we thought of all the alpha and delta and the first wave of omicron until the pecs lovid arrived to taiwan We use this contact tracing system Which is the data collaborative uh to shorten the time it takes to contact trace from 24 hours to 24 minutes It works like this On 7 11 or really any venue millions and millions of venues they self-service and print this random qr code And you scan it with your built-in phone no app required It triggers a sms that sends this 15 random digits to 1922 the toll-free Number for counter epidemic that I just mentioned And so what this does is that it stores in your local telecom. We have five telecoms Whatever telecom you have it stores this post-it note there for 28 days And if this venue has a outbreak then The venue learns nothing about you the venue doesn't even know your phone number And the telecom because it's a random code doesn't know which venue you've been to But these two pieces puzzled together allows the contact tracing people to send an automated notification to you So this bootstraps much more easy than bluetooth based exposure notification because it requires no bluetooth Even a flip phone you can manually tweet Those 15 digits into 1922 of course we provide reverse accountability So on this website you can authenticate using your phone and you can download in reverse audit in the past four weeks Which contact tracing which municipality out of which reason have looked at your checking code Of course, everything is deleted permanently after 28 days And so through I think the technical term is a oblivious federated storage People join this Voluntarily and people who don't want to use it of course can always revert back to pen and paper Fascinating. Thank you very much. So I have another question here in the third row Tatiana Rumeau France um, I have a question If you would replicate your progress and success in europe, let's say in france in germany What would you your What would would be the main obstacles? um The main ground on which we stand is a resilient infrastructure that offers broadband as a human rights Indeed anywhere in taiwan even tip of taiwan the yu shan or jade mountain Almost four thousand meters high your guarantee to have Some 10 megabits per second and both ways also Allowing for this kind of data collaboratives to form now if you don't it's my fault like personally my fault I've got people in quarantine places sending me emails Complaining that they're suffering from a human right violation and Within two weeks we set up a repeater tower to solve that by that time They're already out of isolation But they made a point of driving back to measure the speed test and posting on social media to help me to account So that's the first thing broadband as a human right and the second thing is the data and media competence in basic and lifelong education instead of the literacy curriculum, which we used to have in the days of televisions and radio broadcasting where people do not get to be produced us Nowadays as you have seen on the air box example Everyone who wants to learn about data stewardship and so on can actually contribute to the data So for the primary schooler who measured the weather And for the middle schoolers who fact-checked the three presidential candidates on the presidential debate platform and got They're a fact check posted on national Livestreaming tv and so on they get in power even before they turn 18 So I think the digital competence and broadband as human right will be the two pillars on which these ideas stand Thanks very much for that Who else has one final question for audrey tang? No further questions Okay, then Dear minister tang. What a what a fantastic look you've given us at your Achievements in taiwan. I think there's a great deal for all of us to learn From what you've shared with us and we're very grateful that you could join us All the best