 Hello, I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister. I'm really happy to be here virtually to share with you how Taiwan countered the pandemic with no lockdowns. But first I would like to say the social innovation that is to say the people who trust each other to innovate on how to improve as we encounter a novel situation, a novel coronavirus in this case, it's really the cornerstone of Taiwan's collective intelligence. In Taiwan, we have the fast, fair, fun as the three pillars of social innovation. I'd like to talk first about the fast part. Democracy improves as more people participate and digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation as long as the focus is on listening at scale, not just broadcasting and finding common ground and rough consensus rather than so in this court. So whereas many economies began countering the coronavirus only this year, in Taiwan, we started last year and we thank Dr. Li Wenliang from Wuhan, the whistleblower who posted that there were seven new source cases last year. In the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, the PTT, there's someone with the name No More Pie reposting Dr. Li Wenliang's message early morning of December 31st. And it got upvoted so that our medical officers immediately noticed this post and issued an order that says all passengers flying in from Wuhan to Taiwan need to start health inspections. And that was the first day of 2020. It says to me two things. First, the civil society trusts each other and the government enough to talk about possible new source cases in a public forum and that the government trusts the citizens enough to take it seriously and treat it as if SARS has happened again. It's something that we have been always preparing since 2003. And the reason of this trust is because according to the CIVICAS Monitor, the Human Rights Watch Group, Taiwan is the most open indeed, the only completely open society in the whole of Asia. We enjoy the same freedom of speech, the same freedom of assembly, the same freedom of the press and so on as other liberal democratic countries. But with the emphasis on keeping an open mind on novel technologies because in Taiwan, democracy itself is a technology. We only got to direct presidential election thanks to the late president Li Denghui in 1996. And there's a saying that anything that's invented after we're born is technology. So in Taiwan, we're constantly looking at ways to improve democracy as a set of social technologies. One example. Every day our central epidemic command center during the pandemic holds a live-streamed press conference. And the simple collective intelligence system in this case is a toll-free number that is 1922. Anyone with any idea coming in from the civil society can just pick up their phone and dial this number. Not only there's more than 90% chance of it getting picked up, you can actually ask anything about epidemiology as well as contributing your thoughts to the CECC daily press conference. For example, it was one day in April when a young boy's family called, saying, hey, my boy doesn't want to go to school because their schoolmates may laugh at him for wearing a pink medical mask. You'll see when you're rationing mask, you don't get to pick the color. Well, the very next day, everybody in the CECC press conference started wearing pink medical mask, making sure that everybody learns about gender mainstreaming. And the person in the middle, Minister Chen Shizhong, our commander, even said that his favorite childhood icon was the pink panther. And this kind of fast response builds trust between the government and the civil society. Another focus here is fairness. For example, when we ramped up the facial mask production, making sure that everybody can use their national health insurance card to collect masks from nearby pharmacies, fairness is the guiding principle. But the system to distribute the mask was not a government technology project. In the beginning, it's a GovZero project. In Taiwan, for each government website, that always ends in something.gov.tw, for example, our national participation portal is joined at Gov.tw. The civil society, the civic hackers can always change the domain name from the O to a zero. So once you do this change in your browser bar, you get into the shadow government that uses the same data, the same ideas, but take it to a different direction. And we call it forking the government. Important pronunciation, fork the government. Fork means not erasing what's already there, but taking it to a new exciting direction. And because the GovZero movement always relinquish the copyright of the work, actually mostly using the MIT license, people can very easily change that source code also to try different variations. And at the end, if there's something that's really liked by the general public, the government can always take it in. One example is that there is this map that was created by Howard Wu or Wu Zhangwei from Thailand City. In early February, he observed that when people go to the nearby stores for mask purchase, there's no telling which store runs out of masks and which store still have them in stock. So instead of relying on social media, which may not be up to date, and also is quite chaotic, he created this map similar to the Ushahidi map where people can voluntarily report which convenience stores, which pharmacies near their places still have masks or whether they run out of masks. The only problem about this is that, well, because he used the Google API, soon the API usage is astronomically high so he cannot afford to write it anymore. So he joined the GovZero movement's Slack channel asking, are there better ways to catch the result or to use OpenStreetMap or use some other technology to relieve him of the budget burden? Now, I'm one of the people in the GovZero Slack channel that contributed to the discussion. And it occurred to me that this system is much better than the system that we posted online from the government side about the availability of masks. So I just went to the premier, Su Junchang, saying, hey, this young person here has a much better idea of how to visualize the mask availability, and we need to do all we can to support him. And this is what I call reverse procurement. In traditional procurement, the government says the specification and the citizens, the economic sector, implement it. But here the social sector sets the expectation, the specification. The economic sector, such as Google, eventually waived the API usage fees. And at the end, the public sector's role is just to implement what the social and economic sector wants in a way of realizing the real-time API of our National Health Insurance Agency to make sure that everybody gets access to the level of mask availability in each pharmacy. There were more than 6,000 of them every 30 seconds. And that's why people can participate in accountability when they're queuing in line. Everybody can look at the map or the chat box or voice assistance. There's more than 100 different applications of the same open data in API form. And if they swipe their NHI card and go to a pharmacy, who shows at this moment 58 adult masks available, then they would expect that after the person before them swipe their NHI card and collect nine medical masks, then 58 minus nine, that would be 49. And so everybody would then expect that this sort of like distributed ledger because each map visualization, each toolkits provider have a copy of the real-time API to be consistent. But if instead it doesn't go to 49 but go to, I don't know, 60 or something, they will call 1922 right there. And so this participatory accountability makes sure that the pharmacists earn the trust by opening up their real-time stock and the civil society earn each other's trust by making sure that each transaction is indeed fair. And because the NHI, the National Health Insurance, covers more than 99.99% of not just citizens but also residents, people who show any symptoms will then be able to take the medical mask, go to a local clinic, knowing that they will get treated fairly and without incurring any financial or social burden. And this also enabled the civil society to build dashboards. In this dashboard, we see that we're indeed ramping up the medical mask production. This is the point where we switched from distributing three masks for adults per week to nine medical masks per two weeks. And so the supply is indeed growing and people can see it in real time. And there's also people who analyze this and shows us where in Taiwan we have a oversupply or undersupply. And the pharmacist also has real-time feedback on the kind of supply levels the people's queuing behavior is the one and they can always report it in the real time so that they receive supplies as well as the ordering system is always co-created with the entire society. And based on this analysis, we saw that even though that we reached about 75% of people collecting medical masks and using it regularly, the numeric model shows us that to reduce the R0 value to be under one, it's not enough to only have like 70% of people actually wearing the mask. We need to get to more than 75%, ideally 80% so that the R value will be under one. So we asked the remaining one quarter of population and based on the dashboard and the focus group, they told us that many people who work in the science parks, like near the Taiwan Semiconductor Company in Xinzhou or in the financial sectors in the Taipei or new Taipei cities, they work very long hours actually a longer working hour than the pharmacist. And so before when we only rationed through the 6,000 pharmacies, they could miss the mask collection simply because well, after they went off work, everybody from the pharmacies have already went home. And so we need to ensure fairness of all kinds. And that's when we started in early March to work with convenience stores which opens 24 hours a day. And we use the NHI app which can validate that you are indeed the person that registered in the NHI using the mobile provider's TWID identification so that you can authorize that app, the access to your SIM card. And if your SIM card is registered to your name and it matches your NHI card, then you can use that app as your NHI card and pre-order the mask to your nearby convenience store. And so you see our premier Su Zhencheng smiling very happily here. And that's because that's the day we started working with convenience stores. And because the convenience stores also served many people, there's more than 12,000 of convenience stores and then they also joined this co-creation telling us that even though that this moved the mask availability well above 80%, there's still like 10% or so who could not access this service either because they do not have a mobile phone like they're of the very elderly and they could not queue in the pharmacy either or maybe they're migrant workers who do have a national health insurance card but do not have the mobile phone to their name. Maybe they use prepaid SIMs and so on. And so in early April, we further improved the system so that anyone with the NHI card can just go to any kiosk in their nearby convenience store, insert the NHI card to pre-order to the same convenience store to collect it a week afterwards. And that's when we distribute the mask to more than 95% of the population. And so we ensure fairness of all kinds. And I would also like to share the fun part in fast, fair and fun because this is a stressful time and people do feel anxious. There was a lot of panic buying, a lot of conspiracy theories. And in Taiwan, our counter disinformation strategy is based on this simple idea. It's called humor over rumor. One example, when there was panic buying of tissue papers, there was a rumor that says, and a quote, they're a same material of the medical mask that's being produced in the tissue paper factories. And these were being rationed out to the medical mask production facility. So we will very soon run out of tissue papers, unquote. Of course, that's not true. The tissue papers and the medical masks are not of the same material. But because this travels out outrage, it maybe has a R value of three, like every hour on average, each person would share two, three people on social media. And so there was panic buying. And the same premiere you saw smiling in the previous slide, after not even two hours, wrote this meme out. And in this internet meme, in this picture, the premiere Su Zhenchang shows his backside, wiggles his bottom a little bit and say in very large print, each of us only have one pair of Botox. And they say we're playing because in Mandarin, tuan to stockpile sounds the same as tuan Botox. And so this is, of course, hilarious. Many people laughed about it. And because this travels on joy, on humor, it has maybe a R value of five. So even if this rolls out after the original conspiracy theory, after a day or two, this reached more people. And there's also a table here that says the tissue papers came from South American materials, but then the medical masks came from domestic materials. So they're completely different. There is no need to panic buy. And of course, people who laughed about this specific meme is literally unable to feel outrage because they've laughed about it and the fact checking can then enter a fact. And so we finally found out that people who spread the conspiracy theory in the first place and they were tissue paper sellers. Anyway, this was not just a single short point in the social media. This kind of vaccination of the mind is very important in our CECC daily press conference as well. You see, in each ministry, there is a team of what we call participation officers or POs, just like media officer that talks to the journalist and the parliamentary officer that talked to the MPs. The participation officers talk to hashtags. Whenever there's a trending emerging hashtags such as the conspiracy theory about tissue papers, the participation officers need to engage the hashtag. Instead of inviting the representative, there's no representative for most hashtags, one would just join, engage the hashtag and to share hilarious memes that always is inviting and make sure that scientific humor, the clarification spreads easier and wider and invites people to co-create it. And so our Ministry of Health and Welfare's participation officer live with this dog, this Shiba Inu and the name is Zongchai, or the dog CEO that translates the physical distancing signs on the top left corner. For example, if you're outdoor, you have to keep two Shiba Inu away from one another. If you're indoor, you need to keep three dogs away from each other or the sanitation, hence sanitation importance. Remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing. Don't do what this dog does or remember to pre-order your mask. But why don't you just wear the mask because wearing a mask is not very useful unless you also wash your hands with soap. And so we always connect the two memes together. And so you order the mask in order to protect you from your own unwashed hands. And this is what this picture is saying. I like, the mask is here to protect you from your own hands and please use a soap to wash your hands much more diligently. And so that's how we make sure Taiwanese people still feel calm and collected even during the pandemic. Hi, as you can see in my first video, that's my talk, the most frequently asked question from journalists think tanks and journalists around the world are about how Taiwan use our digital technology and innovations to foster the social all of society initiative against the epidemic, also the infodemic. We empower the social sector and collaborate with the public sector and business sectors in order to maintain mutual trust between the government and the people. The mask availability map happens to be a suitable example of this. Taiwan's national health insurance administration have posted real-time information on mask availability at all pharmacies on a national level. And the open data platform updates every 30 seconds. So it's an open API in less than a week since the beginning of February, over a hundred apps were developed by various groups to channel this real-time information through maps, chatbots, voice assistants, and so on. It is equivalent of establishing a mutually accountable distributed ledger. As time passes by, people continue to contribute in this way. Trust continue to accumulate. And the fast, fair and fun principles indeed have contributed to the effectiveness of Taiwan's all of society response. These three pillars to counter COVID-19 would not have been possible without the groundwork laid in the years before. The policy was to propel open data, social innovation, crowdsourcing to actively involve people in the policymaking process. Particularly people who are savvy in the ways of digital have come together at this conference. One instrument for this in Taiwan is the presidential hackathon, which I want to introduce now in the second part of my talk of how Taiwan has implemented digital social innovation that would also help us dealing with structural issues including climate change. Unlike many people today, I'm an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the wild web, and all my textbooks were out of date. So I told my teachers I want to quit school and begin my education on the wild web. Surprisingly, all my teachers agree with it. And I found out a few web startups after that and discovered this wonderful internet community that runs with this crazy idea, a open multi-stakeholder political system that still powers the internet today. Today, as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm bringing the lessons that I learned when I was 15 years old. That's radical transparency, voluntary association, and a commitment to location independence. Surprisingly, it's working and is transforming the public service in our society. And first of all, I would like to show you my office. This is the Social Innovation Lab, and I'm at the moment here in the Social Innovation Lab in a recording session to produce this hologram. The lab is co-created by hundreds of social innovators. For example, the contribution from people with Down syndrome is the soccer field. You can see there's a unique geometric vision of the world. And every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. is my office hour. Everybody can come and talk to me for 40 minutes, including social workers and rough sleepers, as long as they agree to have their transcript posted publicly online. And so this combines the radical transparency methodology with the location independence, wherever I am, I am working. In addition to those human visitors, we also have AI visitors, like those self-driving tricycles here from the MIT Media Lab. They're open hardware and they're open source, meaning that the local community can freely take it and tinker them according to our actual social needs. For example, my favorite flower market, the Jian Guo Flower Market, is just across the street from the lab. As I pick up flowers, those tricycles can follow me and form a assisted fleet. And I can hop on one to carry me home after several of them carry the orchid flowers that I purchased from the flower market. So as you can see, those tricycles is evolving, co-domesticating with human beings. Now they have two eyes, they make eye contact and they can blink at you. And so to me, AI always stands for assistive intelligence, in the sense that they co-evolve with the collective intelligence into something for the social benefit for everyone. And two and a half years ago, our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, said an inspiring speech in her inauguration. She said, before, democracy was a clash between two opposing values. But from now on, democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values. And indeed, in conventional thinking, social benefits on one side and private sector profits on the other, for example, are often seen as opposite and often contradict each other, forcing the government to make trade-offs. However, the idea of social innovation brings a brand new way of thinking. For people working here in a social innovation lab, our core objective is achieve by developing business models to address social environmental issues and the government's role has changed. Instead of being the arbiter or the planner to trade between the different-sized trade-offs, we're now asking a different set of questions. We ask, what are our common values despite our different positions? And we say, once we have the common values, can we find solutions that works for everyone? And indeed, in the past couple of years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked as the top country internationally on open data, on internet participation, on women's digital access, digital inclusivity, and has ranked one of the top four super innovators by the world economic forum. And to encourage social innovation, we invite everyone to challenge or to fork existing laws and regulations and through an innovative sandbox system. Any innovator can ask an experiment for one year on platform economy, on fintech, self-driving vehicles, 5G telecommunication, you name it. Anyone can prove that their new rules work better than existing rules for everyone involved in a community. If the society feels it's a good idea, then we adopt this amendment as a regulation. If it's not a good idea after a year, the entire society learns something from it and a new innovator can try a different angle. So for example, with autonomous vehicles, Taiwan is the first jurisdiction in the world to legally encourage hybrid experiments of land, sea, and air modalities. So it all needs to correspond to a local need for transportation. For example, the remote islands in Taiwan can really benefit from drone delivery and from self-driving ships. And finally, if the MPs need time to make this into a new law, they can at any time take the regulatory co-creation and consider it in the parliament. And the innovator then can continue to operate for up to three years or four years to serve people's societal needs and essentially becoming a local monopoly because everybody else is illegal. But of course, after three or four years of deliberation, the new law will pass and other providers will enter the area. Now, the Ministry of Justice always reminds me at this point that while all the regulations from all ministries are fair game for sandbox experiments, there are two things that are outside of the scope. You cannot experiment with money laundering or funding terrorism. We know what will happen so we don't need any experiments on those two regards. So to discover the common value in each community, I personally tour around Taiwan. So in addition to the Wednesday office hour here, I go every other Tuesday or so to the rural, indigenous, remote islands and other places to talk with the local social innovators. And all the social innovation labs in Taiwan join through telepresence. So people in Taipei, people in Taichung and so on, public servants in all the 12 different ministries involved always meet at one of the social innovation labs. And they see through my eyes what the local people there sees. And the local people there also sees the central government's ministries and the public servants. Because it's truly multi-stakeholder. Anything that gets asked by any innovator here usually it's under the purview of many different ministries. And because all those people are literally sitting next to each other, it's impossible for them to say, oh, I'll have to consult with the minister of interior because they're sitting right next to them. And so they have to brainstorm among themselves. And usually just in a couple of weeks, they have to either say, okay, we have a new idea and this will interpret the law and regulations so the social innovation can happen. Or say, oh, we really don't have an idea. So let's experiment for one year and see what happens. Almost always 90% of the time they choose re-interpreting their regulations and that gives the social innovators a lot more room to pursue their innovations. And if they do enter the sandbox, of course, we have the demo field for the people to experience it first on too. So starting this March, anyone can see those self-driving tricycles and vehicles and buses and whatever running around in the Shaolin Smart Energy Green City. And the city is called the Taiwan Car Lab. The Taiwan Car Lab lets people like visiting a zoo see how they react to real-world situations and share how they feel about it. And to listen to people's feelings, we often create an interactive survey called Polis. And on Polis, we ask people how they feel about, for example, autonomous driving and or about FinTech sandbox system or about, you know, social enterprises in the law or about platform economy in general. And instead of a pre-written poll, any citizen can contribute their policy suggestions in a multi-week conversation moderated by an AI. And anyone in our national e-participating platform, the joint platform, can collect 5,000 signatures and summon me anywhere to run this kind of consultations. So we choose the focus conversation method or the ORID method invented in Canada that involves four stages. The first stage is called FACTS, where we collect evidence, firsthand experience, objective data that anyone can contribute. And then after that is confirmed by all the stakeholders, we send them out as a handbook and collect everybody's feelings about the same facts. You may feel angry, I may feel happy, and it's all okay. And after a few weeks, people eventually converge on their feelings that resonate strongly with everybody. Then we talk about ideas. The best ideas are the one that can answer a common how-my-wee question that addressed the most people's feelings. And finally, we hand them to the Premier, to the ministers who integrate this into legalese and sign them into collective decisions. The main innovation in the policy system is that they show each group how their shared sentiments are received by other groups. And because it lowers people's antagonism because they can see that the people on different sides are actually your social media friends, you just didn't maybe talk about this thing over dinner, but they're not nameless enemies. And also, because we take away the reply button, it's impossible to make a personal attack to some other person. If you see a few sentiments that doesn't resonate with you, you're then motivated to propose more eclectic, more nuanced sentiments for other people to vote about. So instead of distracting over time, we attract consensus over time. And after we get a set of feelings that resonates with practically everybody, we always see this particular shape. That is to say, most of the people agree with most of their neighbors, most of the time, about most of the things. While the social media and the popular media may focus on the five things that are divisive, actually on the 95% of things, people do have a rough consensus. And so then it makes it much easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders and check with them on the rough consensus one by one. And so by collaborating with the civic sector, we're building a robust environment suitable for social entrepreneurship to grow with the power of the civil society brought into the full play by giving the people the power to set the agenda. And in fact, Taiwan is home to one of the world's largest civic technology communities called Gov Zero, which started in late 2012. In the very beginning, Gov Zero was just a domain name, GZOV.TW. And whenever the civic tech community sees anything that the government does and they want to do something that's better, that's more open, more inclusive, more collaborative, instead of protesting, they can just tell people to change the website address which is always something that GOV.TW into something that GZOV.TW by changing the O to a zero, you get into the shadow government. So in the last six years, not only the GOV Zero communities created hundreds of alternatives or forks of public services, but all of them is open source, meaning that if citizens think it's a good idea, then in the next procurement cycle, the government would just merge it back. And because GOV Zero, the logo, the domain name, there has no patent or trademarks. We see GZOV.IT for Italy and we see the GZOV chapters coming all over the world. The inaugural object of GOV Zero was budget that GZOV.TW that shows the national budget. There used to be hundreds of pages of PDF files, but showing them in a way in the GOV Zero version that's interactive, that's fun and understandable. Anyone can click on one item and drill down to exactly the part of the budget that they care about and start a real-time conversation around that particular budget item and the spending and the procurement and the KPIs around it. And today, in the government website, join the GOV.TW, we actually merge back the civic innovation. So you can see all the hundreds of the ministry's projects, all their KPIs, all their procurements, and anything that you make a public commentary will be met with real-time response from the career public service. And so in this way, when we talk about open data, we're not just talking about open government data, we're talking also about citizen science, open data contributions in data collaboratives around the entire society. So in addition to turning budget items into social object that everybody can talk about, people also make their own data to talk about. For example, this is the GOV Zero Air Pollution Observation Network. This project links the simple air quality sensors called Airbox, which is becoming very popular, more than 3,000, those 100 euro or so devices is applied on all the different schools and so on in balconies in Taiwan, so that all the interested people can provide real-time air quality information on their own places. And an exceptional advantage in Taiwan is the full support, not rejection, of the government. As part of the forward-looking infrastructure plan, we launched the CIVO IoT program with a four-year budget of around 150 million US dollars. And the program all we do is making this enormous amount of environmental data on air products, meteorology, water resource, earthquake, disaster relief, and integrate them into a high-speed computing environment. So everybody can collaboratively discover the correlation between social activity and environmental phenomena. And we use distributed ledgers, for example, to make sure that nobody can change each other's numbers. And previously, establishing effective dialogue about public policies around environments was difficult around the world. And so we're committed to disclose all the factors related to air quality, to the whole society, and indeed to climate change academic communities, and we're very proud that these related product and algorithms are applied all over the world. And so to speak, the CI project, the CIVO IoT project integrates the strengths of both the government and the public. We prove to be capable not only solving our own problems, but also providing such solutions to other countries in similar situations. And to that end, we hold an annual presidential hackathon. Last year, we chose five teams. There is no monetary prize. The prize is the president's promise to integrate those innovative ideas into the public service with all the political will and budget and regulations and make it happen to maximize their social impact. One of the teams last year was the Water Saviour. They used machine learning to detect water leakage, and they visited after the presidential hackathon, they visited New Zealand for three more months to co-create solutions to help solving the problem of water leakage there. So this year, we're also partnering with the TM Forum, with Open Contracting Partnership and so on, an international version of the presidential hackathon. And through this way, Taiwan contributes our innovations, our experience, to the planetary civil society, focusing not only on one or two of the UN's sustainable development goals, but on partnership for all the 17 goals. Anyone working on any of the SDGs are asked to be indexed on Taiwan. It could be through a CSR reporting, through a university USR reporting, through social entrepreneurship reporting, but as long as you're reported and public accountable, all the resources in all our social innovation labs are yours to take. And so the idea is that by encouraging people to form useful partnerships and enhance availability of reliable data, we ensure that people can trust each other on the fact part before we share the reflections and the feelings. And once we have reliable data, we focus on 1717, which is to establish trust across other sectors and also, more importantly, across countries. And then we also hold the focus of 176, earning distrust through social innovation that involves everybody. So think back of the self-driving tricycles. What we do here is essentially evolving a new norm, like co-domesticating a new species to integrate them into the everyday life. And we do so in a way that is fully participatory instead of asking citizens to come to technology or bring in the technology to the space of citizens. And this is behind Taiwan's philosophy of not just broadband connectivity as a human right, but full participation digitally as a human right. And so to conclude this talk, I would like to share with you the job description that I wrote as digital minister back in October, 2016. They asked me what would I do as the digital minister? So instead of a job description, I wrote a prayer. 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 a singularity is near, let us always keep in mind and always remember that the plurality is here. Thank you for listening, live long and prosper.