 Thank you so much, Audrey, for joining us. Hi, good luck at time everyone, really happy to be here virtually. Now Audrey, you're famous for creating a brand of fast, fair and fun digital democracy in Taiwan. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Definitely. The fast part pertains to the collective intelligence. The way Taiwan fought off the pandemic, with no lockdown whatsoever this time, is thanks to the collective intelligence that warned us the first day of 2020. Actually, the day before that, on the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, the PTT, we've already seen people reposting Dr. Lee when he announced a message from Wuhan. Now, this message, which, and I quote, there's seven new SARS cases in the Huanan people market, I quote, did not make the rounds in the social media in Wuhan for obvious reasons, but also it did not alert many other jurisdictions as well, even though it was reposted on many other social media. So what's special about our social media is that it's part of the digital public infrastructure. It has no advertisers, no shareholders. The PTT is subsidized for 25 years now by the National Taiwan University as part of the Taiwan academic network. So the pro-social signals get people's attention. People do not want to sign, like in a digital equivalent of a nightclub shouting each other down, or with toxic drinks, private bouncers, smokes, and things like that. We do have a healthy pro-social culture that helps to triage, and indeed it looks like the SARS has indeed came again. So within just 24 hours, our Central Academic Command Center staff started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. And this shows two things. It shows that the government trusts the citizens utterly to talk about these things according to the Civicus Monitor, where the early jurisdiction in Asia is completely open in terms of freedom of speech and the press, and also the citizens trust each other sufficiently to take this seriously and attempt to report whatever they think of a new emerging phenomenon through this toll-free number 1922 to the Central Academic Command Center, which is set up even before we have the first local case in mid-January. So for example, last April, there was a young boy that called saying, you're rationing out masks, but all I got was pink medical masks, but all the boys in my class has navy blue masks, and I don't want to wear pink to school, people will laugh at me. Well, the very next day on the daily 2 p.m. press conference, all the medical officers that you can see here wore pink, and the health minister even said that Pink Panther was his childhood hero. So suddenly the boy became the most hip boy in the class for only he has the color that the hero and the hero's hero wear. So the fast part pertains not just about emerging situations, but also about a rapid fast iteration where the best ideas and the best feedback are amplified in the here and now within just 24 hours or at most one week. And this is the agile development methodology applied to public service. And tell us a little bit more about the fair and fun side. I know you've got some wonderful case studies from your work. Certainly. The fairness pertains to the public health measures that we took since the beginning of February. On 31st of January 2020, the public health experts, Chen Yixuan and Feng Xitan, gave a presentation in the cabinet office here. According to their model, even if we have very good contact tracing test and isolation, we cannot stop the COVID. They said if any corner in Taiwan doesn't have sufficient PPEs available. On the other hand, if we can make sure that in every precinct in every district, there's more than three quarters of people wearing masks and washing their hands, then the R value will drop below one and we can avoid a lockdown according to their model. Well, within just three days, our National Health Service wrote out based on the existing mechanism of getting refillable prescription at the pharmacies, the way to use your National Health Card, which is the IC card that covers pretty much all the residents and citizens alike, and everyone can get the ration mask in real time. Now, how to locate those pharmacies that have masks available? Well, there's this movement called ZERO, which look at all the government websites that ends in something that GOV.tw in Taiwan, it's probably the same in the UK, but they make FORX, that is to say alternate implementations by changing O to a ZERO, you get into the shadow government that's always more interactive, more fun, and also open source. So the GOV.ZERO people made this kind of month that when people queue in line, they can see people queuing before them, after they swipe their National Health Card, the real availability of masks on their phones and so on just go down by two and two and two, because it's initially two per week, and nowadays it's 10 by two weeks, but people queuing line will be able to participate in the audit, the accountability of such, and because it's based on the open API, we trust the citizens by updating every 30 seconds their real-time inventory, so it promoted more than 100 different tools, not just masks, but also chatbots, also apps, voice assistants, long-term analysis on the distribution mechanism, and things like that, all thanks to the civic technologist. And so this ensure that this fairness is both taken care of on the rural and urban level alike, but also it's fair across all corners of society. That's just amazing, Audrey, and I just want to pick up on one thing there that you kind of touched on, the civic participation side of things, the fact that you have technologists across Taiwan and perhaps across the world building societal innovations that get used by citizens. How do you grow a movement like that and motivate people to contribute to it? I think the most important thing here is that the feedback gets amplified in real-time. So for example, back in 2017, May, there's a young service designer named Shuo Chi-yuan, as pictured here, who raised a petition on our national participation website, and joined the GOV, the TW, where anyone with 5,000 signatures collected can demand a point-by-point ministerial level response. And he simply said that the tax filing system is explosively hostile to Mac users. And that was because we were using Java Applet, and that year was the year that Oracle deprecated Java Applet technology. So it was indeed very difficult to use, almost impossible. But instead of defending the policy, we simply worked with the participation officer network, a network of around 100 public servants. Each ministry have a team of such people who engage in emergent hashtags. So much like how media officers engage journalists, and how the parliamentary officer engage the MPs, the participation officers engage such trending memes and respond saying, oh, anyone who criticizes our minister of finance or tax filing system is cordially welcomed to join our co-creation workshop in the tax filing system redesign process. And after three such collaboration workshops, we actually co-delivered the 2018 tax filing experience for Mac and Linux users with 96% approval rate. And by the time 2019, with the Windows users also joining the new system, the approval rate was 98%. It was unheard of. And because everyone who participated like 5,000 people feel they have contributed at least one post-it note via Slido, via the YouTube live stream commentary, and so on that got collected in those post-its notes. And then they feel that this news is made co-designed by them. And indeed, some of the co-designers, the contributors, the people who joined the petition, are public servants themselves. And because they understand we took the API-first design approach, when the time comes that we need to introduce a pre-ordering system based on an app to pre-order the mask to convenient stores. The minister of health, public servant, remembered this co-creation. And so we just changed some parameters and literally within just three days, repurposed the tax filing system for income tax into the pre-ordering system for the mask dispense. And then after with the minister of economy, public servant, also repurposed the same system into the pre-ordering system for the stimulus vouchers and so on. So just like Lego blocks, truly the government has a platform. I love it. And tell us a bit about your work on policymaking as well. I know one of your guiding principles is civic participation. Another one is rough consensus. Tell us a bit about the innovations you've created on creating rough consensus around innovative policies. Sean, what we're looking at really is a culture of co-creation that involves all sectors. So for example, this is MP Da Hong-an, a legislator. But before she joined the parliament, she was the VP of data analytics of Foxconn Group. So she knows a lot about data. And she was making an interpolation last April, March, last March in 2020, saying, if you look at the open street map that she was projecting behind her, she said, you can see that there is a bias in the data, even though that we see on the map that the pharmacy distribution is almost exactly aligned with population centers. So we thought it's pretty fair. She analyzes and found out if people have to take public transportation, it's actually not fair in terms of the time cost it takes to reach nearby pharmacies. So there is a bias. There's a capital city bias in this sort of analysis. And Minister Chen did not defend the policy at all. He simply said, legislator, teach us. And then because we share the same API-based evidence policy making, anyone can suggest better distribution mechanisms and we fix that the next iteration, literally 24 hours afterwards. And so MP got said, oh, yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's co-creation. And this is not the first time we crowdsourced policy solutions like this by sharing open data. We always take the idea that if we share the facts with the people and make a space for pro-social resonance about people's feelings about whether it's fair or not, more likely than not within just a few weeks we'll get better ideas. And the minister can simply say, legislator, teach us. Only this time it's not just MPs, but citizen legislators that could share what's the best practice or better practice when it comes to emerging issues. The first time we deployed something like this using the Polis system, that is part of our civic infrastructure at polis.gov.tw for the public service and polis.tw for the social sector. We run this in 2015 in response to the UberX situation. So you're looking at the real map where people's broad feelings about UberX, my friends and families, social media friends are automatically clustered according to whether they resonate with each other's point or not. So here you can see, for example, one of the issues here is about passenger liability insurance. I said that this is very important. You may or may not agree with me. But if you do agree with me then, you will move toward me as soon as you click agree. If you click disagree, you will move farther away from me. And then you see another prompt from another fellow citizen. But there is no reply button, so there is no room for troll to grow. Rather, after three weeks, everybody can see whatever divisive statements that the television or the antisocial corner of social media highlights, even though people don't seem to agree on the definition of sharing economy, people do agree with one another on the need for registration or not undercutting existing meters or making short insurances there and things like that. So actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the things, most of the time. It's just, it's not reflected accurately in many democratic institutions on the more antisocial corners of social media. But with this shape, we can then hold every stakeholder to account and invite people to deliberate early on the rough consensus on the part of the agenda that's crowdsourced and that's indeed how we resolve the Uber ex-situation. Uber is now a local taxi company, the Q-taxi in Taiwan, and they operate just like anyone else using the revised multi-purpose taxi laws that permits, say, search pricing and app-based dispatching, but without undercutting existing meters or treating their drivers in a way that's unlike other full-time drivers. And let's come to the final of your three principles, radical transparency. Now, of course, we're recording this talk and part of the conditions for doing so is open sourcing it afterwards. I know you open source every single one of your conversations. I think that's fascinating. Tell us a little bit about that. Does that change your interactions with perhaps the private sector lobbyists? Definitely. So this is my office, literally my office, the social innovation lab at a heart of Taipei. Any social innovator is welcome to talk to me for 40 minutes at a time or they may show up unannounced, but the early condition is that whatever we talked about must be made into creative commons. They may choose to co-edit a transcript or just publish the video recording on the internet. Now, it really does change the nature of conversation because people understand our descendants, right? We'll look into this archives and records. So people don't tend to make short-term suggestions that will solve the problem for now but create more externality, more problems for the future generations, simply because it will look really bad when the future generations look at those transcripts and videos. So in a sense, the recorder stands for the stakeholders that's not yet born or the stakeholder that's not yet here, but people always speak with these people in mind and because of this, people tend to only make the cases based on the sustainable development goals, only making the case based on the partnership toward those global recognized goals. And so the economic sector, the social sector, the environmental people, they all visit me but they don't tend to make suggestions that are at expense of the other sectors or the other generations. So it also fosters cross-sectoral dialogue. I wanted to come back as well, Audrey, to one point you made a couple of questions back about social media and information on there. Now with COVID, we've seen the real dangers of misinformation but Taiwan has come up with one very innovative solution that I know you've spoken widely about but perhaps you could tell this audience a little bit about how Taiwan tackled misinformation during COVID. Definitely. So around the time that we introduced convenience store-based mask ordering, you can see the head of our cabinet, Premier Su, smiling very happily here. There's a trending conspiracy theory, though. And the conspiracy theory said and I quote, the state is nationalizing mass production and all the tissue paper you see in convenience store, the material will be confiscated to make masks. So go out and buy because we will not have tissue papers next week anymore. And so people did panic buy and it causes quite chaotic interactions with the convenience store and supermarkets. Now our counter disinformation principle is based on countering the infodemic with no takedown. So we don't take down things. Rather, we roll out funny memes in what we call a humor over rumor approach. So the Premier, which you just saw his front side, now this is his back side, wiggling his bottoms a little bit, saying in very large fonts, each of us only have one pair of bottom. Now this is a word play because the word in Mandarin, tuan, which stands for bottom, sounds the same as tuan, stockpile, to stockpile. So basically it's a homonym that is saying, it doesn't pay to stockpile. And then it says in very clear wording that's the tissue paper made out from South American materials, but medical grade masks are actually plastic products that's made from domestic materials. There's no way that nationalizing the mask production could actually hurt or interfere with the tissue paper production in any way. Now if we only publish this particular table, maybe people will not share it, but because the Premier literally made himself butt of the joke, people found it hilarious and they reached like a record number of people much more than the conspiracy theory. And people who laughed about this actually calmed down and thought about it and could not buy into the conspiracy theory anymore. Like literally there's no capacity to feel outrage about this information anymore because they've already laughed about it. And so within just two short days over the weekends, the panic buying stopped and with the tissue paper production and distribution returned to normal. You've been digital minister now for nearly five years and I know that journey started when you were actually helping protesters against the Taiwanese government in the 2014 Sunflower Movement demonstration and at that time trust in the Taiwanese government was low with approval ratings around 25%. So I guess I'd be fascinated to know where societal trust is now and what role have your design principles of radical transparency and societal innovation played in getting there? Yeah, for President Tsai Ing-wen, currently the trust level is around 60%, which is not that bad. And for Minister Chen Xu Zhong and the Central Epidemic Command Centre measures, it was as high as 94%. But now I think it's back to 80%, 90%. But still it's a very, very high approval rate and very high trust number. But I think this is because to give no trust is to get no trust. By trusting the citizens to co-create and tell us how to correct our mistakes quite publicly with just 24 hours or almost a week, this trustworthiness is really earned by the CEC.