 With love I could as well. Yeah, it's a share recording. You can download it. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much I'm so impressed by what you've been doing this chunk of time and Really really excited to speak with you. I got to hear you speak in Berlin and Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Thank you so much. Sure. So I'm working on a few things but one of the things I've been doing is with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and I think Europeans and Americans both have so much that we want to be learning from you But I love your take first on Just I guess how How that's been You know sharing your learnings with the international realm Has that been You know First, you know, what has that been like in terms of sharing those best practices? You know, I remember during our time in Berlin someone asked You know, it was it was for me so interesting to see how many Germans responded and said oh We can't do what you did in Germany and the whole time. I was thinking why not Actually now doing some of those measures that we are doing and so I think this is a game-changer Whereas people feel digitalization or social innovation is a kind of our different timescale of urgency Just like climate change, you know, every jurisdiction is a different urgency Coronavirus brought international collaboration into a new Table of urgency. So just a few days before the World Health Assembly is a virtual forum. It's a 14 nation's mini lateral and It would work perfectly and Just and so on and so that I think brought Taiwan's experience what we are now calling Taiwan model I think to a level where we can share with people this entire package of social innovation Not just bits and pieces because every epicenter is just two months before or two months after each other epicenter And so there's much more that hold us in common Whereas when we talk about this information or climate change or other topics Not every jurisdiction feel the same way when it comes to the urgency So this is the general feeling that I'm having these days Yeah, so it's you you'd say the Well, I guess what what then do you think can most effectively be shared from what you've learned Right, so so I just gave a Media conference to the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada And the idea of humor over rumor our counter disinformation playbook Is the kind of one takeaway that many people came away very interested in because in Taiwan We don't have any lockdown and we don't have a lockdown on our speech, right? There's no censorship There's no takedown possible from the government. So we look at how Conspiracy theories spread and we see the factors that contribute to their basic transmission rate Basically analyze it as a epidemiologist would analyze a human to human transmission Biological virus we see it as a kind of memetic or ideological virus And so we saw that a sense of outrage is the main determining factor and that can be very easily countered and vaccinated using the power of humor as though we shared many cases Where we shared for example, there was a tissue paper panic buying and when people panic by tissue papers They that's because they believe a rumor that says that it's made out of similar material as the facial mask Which we are ramping up production from less than 2 million to 20 million a day And so obviously people will want to hold a mask if they believe the sense of outrage that the government is repurposing Tissue papers to manufacture masks But that died down within just a couple days because within two hours our premier Who you can look at can you see my screen? Yeah, so this is our Prime Minister our premier He wrote this out on his social media showing his Botox and Wiggling it a little bit and saying we only have one pair of Botox each And meaning that it doesn't make sense to hold tissue papers and there is a table here that's the tissue paper came from South American material And this mess medical mask came from Taiwanese domestic material So there's no way that these two can interfere with one another and and so the payload is of course just standard clarification material There's packaged literally with a tissue paper packaging This is what a tissue paper package looks like and so this one absolutely Well, and you laughed about it meaning that the next time you see the conspiracy theory You will not spread it because you've been vaccinated the same psychological motivation that turns upset to outrage has been Repurposed into humor and this is good humor because he makes fun of himself not anybody else And so this idea of humor over rumor I think is one of the things in the Taiwan model of counter and disinformation that everybody can just easily Apply to their communication strategy and if they respond within two hours this kind of viral memes that are designed to inoculate This information will no longer be a such a large problem during the pandemic That's that's brilliant and and you know, so so one of the One of the challenges with disinformation is once it Once it starts once you see it The first time even if it gets corrected, right you you hang on to if you already agreed with the disinformation or the general message of the disinformation It's hard to It's hard to inoculate post, right? Do you feel like you found ways to Responding between two hours is so important because the vaccination doesn't work as a cure, right? It's a different time and when you already Believe in something else then of course, it's harder to correct the message afterward But we do that still using daily press conferences every day there's a live press conference where the journalist and indeed anyone can pick up their phone and spread whatever their conspiracy theories at the Epidemic control sensor and they will develop a counter response for example, and there was one day in April where there's a because we do mass rationing there's a district I think that only get pink medical masks as their supply and There's was a boy that refused to go to school because he doesn't want to wear a pink medical mask saying that their schoolmates will laugh at him and and the people were of course responding to it by encouraging him and so on and but That doesn't quite work because he just thinks he will get bullied for wearing a pink medical mask And so this is a post response, right? so so a day after this happened and One night two two hotline received this Message, this is our counter response a day after we're not two hours Everybody in the central epidemic command center including the minister start wearing pink medical mask Everybody, you know a change to your Facebook posts avatar or whatever pink Saying that gender mainstreaming which is a you know social innovation It is also to be shared in a way that changes people's associations So basically it's not a counter message saying that you know, it's wrong to discriminate against peace pink mask wear Rather, this is the kind of performance art where the inters easy to start wearing pink and so really fine reassociating this message and and this is also seen in many other You know memes like after each press conference There's a spokes dog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare that translates social distancing rules, you know covering your mouth Washing your hands pre-order your mask into very cute memes which still gets into the cognitive space post a disinformation even if The conspiracy theory has already spread because a human to human intervention It's not as viral as a cute dog to human transmission With this dog example, what was the process of coming up with it? Do you do you have a you know? Is it a gut instinct? Is it do a baby test? Yes a process so we have a team called participation officers in each ministry whose whole leg is to work with people Who feedback there are such innovations through e petitions or sandboxes or whatever? Platforms that we're using online. So this is basically an online engagement specialty and they work with professional comedians Such things. So this is a process and in this particular case the PO of the Ministry of Health and Welfare Literally live with that dog and so and their home is like 10 minutes walk from the Ministry of Health and Welfare So anytime they need a new picture instead of paying shutter stock or something like that They should go home and take a new picture of the new post of the dog And so this is basically what people would do on Instagram, right? If they want to garner a lot of followers, they just post a lot of cute cat or dog pictures and and their living experience wisdom It's just that they imbue each such new picture with a new public health announcement Message and so this is a mimetic delivery and it was of course not that easy to get everybody to accept that but after the loss of the local election by By many considered as a you know conspiracy theory taking Interference international referendum and elections for the past Year and a half we have been perfecting this art of what we call humor over rumor Which at the first first line response Vaccinate and then we cure using even stronger you know association materials that relies on cute dogs and You know pink medical mask things that breaks out of people's original us versus them habits But rather include all the different sides Yes, and and Like rumor humor is so context specific, right? What what Taiwanese people find funny or cute might not be true for Americans We couldn't just copy the dog, right? But I think but But there's there's something very powerful at the macro level of humor over rumor. I guess What other pieces of this? Participatory process that you're speaking of how would you distill that down into something that? other other Other communities can can copy, right? So the the three keywords are fast fair fun, right? So fast means that you iterate you cannot start perfect so the the basic thing is that you Have a hotline where people can tell you what you got wrong And everybody can just call as I said when I to do and tell the CCC what to do essentially And so it remains a bi-directional communication where everybody can very easily even for the people who are not digitally So savvy to type their ideas. They can just pick out their phone and share their ideas And we have a large core center that just distilled such crowd in innovation into the daily press conference It's almost like a ritual where everybody Views if they have the time or at least look at the sign language Interpreter if they don't have the audio bandwidth and they have night about was of course the way for the dog Picture after it. So that's the fast part. So just keep iterating until you get it Perfect and then the fair part which it means that everybody can look at the hard data So the mimetic picture doesn't work unless you have the data to back down those tables up, right? So and the data is Participatory meaning that when we say there's no shortage of must we don't say in a top-down manner We say we publish this real-time stock level of all pharmacies every 30 seconds at a time now every three minutes So everybody can walk to a nearby pharmacy use the international health card to get nine Medical masks if you're a adult or 10 if you're a child every two weeks and see the stock level of that pharmacy Deplete by nine or 10 after a couple of minutes on your phone using more than 100 tools including chatbots And these are all created by the social sector So the whole point of trusting citizens with real-time open data is that people can hold each other Accountable and then people can do analysis that tells us where do we get wrong like a oversupply or under supply and tell us to work with People who work long hours who cannot collect the mass farm pharmacy because they would close for business During that later night. We work with convenient stores and on those pre-ordering system So the fair part ensures that we are inclusive and people who are left off have a way to work with civic Technologists to inform each other and also tell the government what to do. And of course, we already Do the fun part so fast and fair I think is the building blocks that enable the fun The fun by itself doesn't let's you have a fast iteration and you have a fair allocation I entrust in citizens open data. Yes you mentioned this participatory Role of citizens, right and I'm curious how you make sure that it's not just the most extreme Voices like on an Amazon review, right? To to to be the ones who participate Well, first of all a call to 192 to doesn't preclude anybody else from calling we just keep expanding the call center And so it's not a limited attention resource as you would on a online platform with a reply button Which would be people, you know attacking each other's face not each other's book, right? And so that makes more sense I guess to build a online space powered by reply free Technologies such as Polis and Slido and the joint platform of e-petition where you can have your pro and con arguments But you cannot reply to each other and that's kind of automatically build a pro-social environment rather than an anti-social Environment and of course the good old telephone is still the best because there is no way to upvote or downvote Or reply to each other if you're making calls to 192 to so we use plenty of spaces for that There are of course also more creative Aspects of it's for example to co-hack the coronavirus hackathon where and it's in co-hack that TW and everybody can look at what other people have in mind I'll switch the English mark have in mind for example for These countries and these people who responded to the call for Open-source solutions they get the the winning prize is the electric Res cooker that you can use to disinfect your mask I made a video on that and so on those themes managed community resource make smooth Transition to a new or protecting vulnerable groups protecting future pandemic supporting frontline staff and established data-driven Risk communication we use the police technology where anyone can submit their ideas and upload and download, but they cannot Reply to each other and so then we look at those different extreme voices and you will see that for this particular topic Group B is 22 people and group A is 63 people, but the area measures diversity It does not measure the number of people So so this area is not three times larger than the group B So even if you mobilize like 5,000 extreme people vote exactly the same way It will not increase the area here by by any bit, right? And so basically group in and be deeper A very fine grained travel history for confirmed cases. This is a privacy thing So because they don't manage to convince each other this doesn't become the co-hack topic But they do agree on for example the logistics map like the mask map the availability of not just mask Alcohol samples and sprays and things like that and these are like digital transformation for miss me's And things like that are very interesting and they all agree on that So we only choose the topic that has brought agreement across all the diverse groups as the binding agenda for the co-hack Hexagon and this is important because we then make sure that the extreme voice to do not dominate they have to do more nuanced Conversations and repost their statements in a way that can appeal to the other sides of the aisles You know I I I get asked and I think a lot of people wonder why Taiwan has done so well in in handling COVID and fun fast fast fun fair fun is It seems to be in humor of a rumor seems to be a part of the strategy. What are their reasons? Would you in explanations would you give? Also, I think this mask culture Where we build the mask is not something that protects others There's something that protects yourself and it protects yourself by reminding you to not touch your face With our wash hands is a self reminder to wash your hands properly and not touch your face And that that's it. And so this is a Interesting strategy instead of a being collectivist, which would be you know, we order everybody wear a mask Otherwise you put a fine or keep social distance physical distance Otherwise you we put a fine we never impose any fine for physical distancing or mask wearing This is just a normed building and they appeal to people's self protect protection nature And if you're in a large crowd gathering of 50 people and you cannot keep the physical distance The few people who wear the mask can remind other people to take care of themselves Which is a very natural thing to do rather than asking them to protect You to respect you which is a very difficult thing to do if you're in the minority And so we also make this mimetic in a sense of that it's easily to share this idea of protecting You're from your own hands and remind yourself to wash your hands Which is what's required to make medical mask work anyway And so this is again one of the reasons why we have a mask wearing culture so quick after the epidemic has Happens and that's we do not actually have to teach people how to properly wear the mask We have to remind each other very easily and also the nursery rhymes and things like that In this norm building right is What you know one critique is that it's only possible in relatively homogenous Societies to do so quickly as you've been working with other communities around the world and Have you seen that? Cultures that are or societies that are more diverse Are able to do what what you advise in Not sure about this homogenous thing because we have 20 or more national languages Including sign languages. And so I wouldn't say Taiwan needs people are a homogeneous bunch That I think you can say that we're very populist right 23 million people but from Taipei to Kaohsiung So high speed rails only 95 second sorry minutes So the population density which is much higher in Taiwan I guess it's both good for norm building because there's more social examples to to look at but also harder I found epidemiology standpoint because it's much easier for virus to spread just like it's easier for idea to spread So the high density is Is double-edged I guess but I wouldn't say that this is homogenous at all I would say that we work on a norm that appeals to the common human nature of of enjoy humorous messages of liking cute dogs and cute cats and of Self-protection and taking care of your family and things like that So we are working on more universal message when we don't have the top-down lock down or other top-down Emergency order or whatever constitutional powers. We never declare a emergency situation. So we have to you know Realize this kind of coronavirus strategy by essentially a co-learning culture by making everybody a fellow epidemiologist Amateurly and so our vice president at that time. I recorded this whole online course that teaches Epidemiology 101 to lay audience and And you can see here at time can help that us who can help Taiwan And if you scroll down a little bit, you will see the crash course And recorded by VP Chen Jieren and actually the epidemiologist Not only a vice president in science, but he literally wrote the textbook on epidemiology academician and so he is both a political and health authority and he explains the are not value Wearing mask washing your hands how the dynamic work or quarantining works Policy for testing and so on in a very easy to understand Mena and treating essentially everybody as adults as fellow Practitioners of epidemiology and this is as opposed to this idea of you know People need to be kept in the dark our obedient Confucian collectivist or things like that This is treating everybody as adults and making sure that people understand the why of each policy measures Yes with content like this What one challenge is getting people to actually Watch the whole thing. Yeah, I mean pay attention. How do you think that piece through professional youtubers? YouTubers they participated they literally crawl funded this website. This is not a government website This is just a crawl funding campaign and and bond down by you know The leading youtubers and they all took quizzes and test each other's knowledge about epidemiology and found out there's Sense of you know, we don't know the essential science Behind what we're doing and then they promoted this film and on a the leading massive online course platform that how so within a few days more than 20,000 people enrolled and then they talked their friends and family I'm one of the people who enrolled That's amazing. I'm also curious how you make sense of Communities outside of your direct Authority, right? I excuse me. Let me rephrase that. I guess I mean, you know, Taiwan is able to Keep the numbers for the for COVID down but it's It's one place in a broader world where Others are not following the same norms or Right Prime Minister Ardern said you're pretty much doing whatever time is doing And they're also doing quite well And so so yeah, the town can help that website is Distilled version of the talent model that we're happy to share to other jurisdictions And if people do not want to listen to the crash course over by our president We sorry vice president. We we also share this What happens next is a really good interactive game that you can just Just like watching a comic learn epidemiology and learn the SIR model You can even experience with the lockdown scenario How contact tracing works and things like that and see how those hurt immunity ICU capacity and things like that and how that Can successfully counter the coronavirus just by proper use of masks and things like that And so there's of course also a local chest translation of that I think it's been translated to many many languages and if you're interested in helping It's to translate to other languages that that's great. There's also a German language on that So I think that's the content that we can not only contribute. Well, it does say Taiwan here Wacht mal haben Taiwan in Südtropia nicht bereits in der Krifte kommen Right, so and and that is I think the importance to provide the raw material the open data So that the people who specialize in digital storytelling can then make such interactive storytelling pieces based on the data that we provide And what about the collection of data? How do you ensure privacy or? We don't know extra data Okay So there's no bluetooth app or anything like that Why do you think everyone else is so obsessed with data collection as the main focal point of of the response? Well, I think that's because in Taiwan we had to work with the constitutional limit We don't have an emergency situation. So everything we do need to be pre approved by the legislation So we're bound by the person data Protection act so our solution space is already very constrained to begin with This is much like our counter disinformation strategy We have to innovate on humor over rumor because there is no constitutional Authorization for us to take down any content on the social media So we have to to innovate in a way that doesn't over extend the administrative powers But I think this is a great opportunity For the social sector to jointly control its data collection to care about their own health records to each other Indeed the co-hack winners are all about You know Making a record of your personal visits and things like that your temperature But not sharing it to the public or to the state or any company But just among the people who care about you like your immediate family and things like that And when a contact tracer do come to you There is a one-time URL that you can share with them that only talks in professional contact tracing terms So that you will not accidentally reveal that privates Information of your other friends and families that you have contact with still getting contact tracers the information They need without compromising privacy. This is called privacy enhancing technology or PET and this is very hip in Taiwan So I think the other jurisdictions they may focus on data collection because they do want to extend their power even for state surveillance like Sharing the data all to a trusted party Sorry, the ruling party that is one that's one part Of course people also sometimes trust private sector or multinational companies and so on So this is essentially a norm shaping moment Whether the data is to be collected by the civil society and only by people who care about each other and know each other or By a one kind of state apparatus surveillance or by a multinational capitalist Entities. This is what we are deciding now will shape the culture After the coronavirus and so I think that's why everybody is so obsessed with this because this is a non-defining moment And I guess what I Are you saying that then the data collection if you shape the social norms properly Right that the data itself is not as integral or are you saying that the data collection from as a grassroots effort where Yeah, this is basically instead of data literacy or media literacy, which is people as consumers of media and passive You know objects of data collection Where instead of saying that we need to have digital competence, which means people are producers of media amateur journalists and also curators of data data contributors and when people voluntarily curate their data, of course They only want to share it in a way that are pro-social and that makes sense to their friends and families And this is what I call it social sector norm building And I think this is a superior model to both the state surveillance model and the capitalist model What is a challenge that you're currently Working on This travel bubble Thing how to make sure that we trust each other's numbers for example between Taiwan and New Zealand in both testing before and after landing a flight and that we can relax the Physical distancing or large crowd gathering rules domestically while still allowing for limited international travel This is how to balance. I mean if we only allow for returning Citizens in Taiwan then of course with the current border control and the quarantine We're reasonably sure we've been like 40 days with no local confirmed cases now. It's very safe. Taiwan's very safe now So we can remain that safe. However, we also want to resume international travel with other economies That have also counter the coronavirus and that create additional risk both sides So we have to do risk communication and also norm building like if I wear a mask In New Zealand, I want to land in New Zealand still wearing this mask Right and and so making sure that this is probably communicated is a challenge because then it entails a Kind of mini lateral agreement on many things May I ask what you're reading these days Well, I am cautiously optimistic that we have a sufficient Interest as I said the 14 Economies pre-wh a mini lateral. I think people are very enthusiastic are resuming some business travel and I have to ask what your take is on global politics with WHO and You know the this the role of Taiwan in in in the WHO's work broadly Sure, so I think this is absolutely to other WTO members detriment that's the Taiwan contributions, especially very early on is not Being spread to the Ministerial level, I mean we had limited scientific community access in the WHO system But unless the other Countries vice-president happen to be their lead epidemiologist Otherwise having scientific access is not the same as having political access Obviously, you can have the best scientific access, but those scientists still doesn't necessarily translate those measures Into actionable political action and that's why the ministerial access is so important And so of course we're building our own mini lateral conversations through these forums and these global cooperation and training frameworks with the Japan and US and so one but we think this I'm personally feeling that the thought that we did not have the chance of getting the ministerial access very early on during January And when you're choosing staff in particular, I'm curious what traits you look for in people that you find most attractive In this work. Sure. So we basically recruit people who can add a perspective To a cross interdisciplinary work and so from each ministry if they're career public servant We only have one person at a time. So meaning that for example the foreign service They have easily more than a dozen people want to join in my office But if they all join we become a section of the foreign service, right? So it has to offer a unique perspective as first and also although they still report to their Like foreign service minister They need to give to share as much as they take at least as to say they must be willing to work out loud Not only to work with other people's best practices, but also contribute their own best practices for other People who are deployed from their ministries. So for example when a minister of culture discover that if you award People afterward instead of doing re reimbursements like KPI Matching things at it massively simplify the incentive structure and they share that and the minister of education Did this design? Designated employee here staff here then learns about this and then can influence the minister of Education to choose this new method as alternative to procurement And so all these innovations just spread very easily if you want to Share as much as you want to take from other people's sharing. So these two are the HR criteria And how can others we've been talking about how Taiwan can help other communities? How? How can others help Taiwan? Well spread the message of the Taiwan model. I can help that us And spread a hashtag Taiwan can help and Taiwan is helping And so then builds epicenter to epicenter relationships We're all very happy to work on for example privacy enhancing technologies Through the co-hack and many other end of us. And so yeah, just just you know follow us on Twitter And you know on that point when you talk about this work You mostly are mentioning technologies that already exist, right? And I'm wondering how much of the work requires new technological innovation and how much of it is really just Utilizing technologies that exist in new ways Yeah, well because we are very HR meaning that we have to come up with Responses to the societal expectations literally every day or at least every week. We do not have time for You know very long incubation periods when it comes to research and science Of course the medical research is going on with rapid tests vaccines and drugs. These are new technologies, obviously but on the digital side we mostly just reappropriate appropriate technologies as we see fit instead of doing any new novel Applications, but we do shorten the iteration cycle a lot So like on the traditional open data platform, which data is published usually every day at maximum We change it to publish every 30 seconds to enable distributed ledger like Accountability framework and that's new, but this is just a new interval of a existing technology. It's a new application Frame rate I guess but otherwise that there's nothing new here Thank you so much. If you have any closing words that I could share also in this Yeah, sure. I think the government should trust its citizens the more you trust your citizens The more the citizens will be able to innovate and let you know what's really going on and what you do and to give No trust is to get no trust Thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Good luck. Thank you. Bye