 And welcome again, everyone, to this third day of the FT's global boardroom event. We are delighted to welcome to this Tech Asia keynote interview Audrey Tang, Taiwan's minister in charge of social innovation. Audrey is well known as a luminary in their field for famous for spearheading a vision of open government in Taiwan, which we will hear about more in a couple of minutes. In the public sector, Minister Tang served on Taiwan's National Development Council's open data committee and the 12 year basic education curriculum committee and led the country's first rulemaking project. In the private sector, Minister Tang worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics with Oxford University Press on cloud lexicography and with social text on social interaction design. And in the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to Gov Zero, a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for civil society with the call to fork the government. So, Minister Tang, a warm welcome. And just to start with, I wonder if you could recount a little bit of the saga of the mask maps in Taiwan. I think some people will be familiar with this. But in essence, I think this initiative in which you were a prime mover is seen as an example of open government and open data. And it helped get Taiwan ahead of the pandemic in the very early days when the virus was spreading and me based in Taiwan was, you know, wondering what our fate would be. Could you just explain what happened at that time, please? Certainly. So, last February, early February, when we discovered that the R value of the new variant of SARS is quite high and without more than three quarters of people wearing masks properly, we wouldn't be able to solve it using contact tracing alone. So we decided to start rationing out masks because at the time in a country of 23 million, our mass production at the time was less than 2 million per day. So it means that if we do not ration out the mask, then people would hold the mask and it will not protect anyone. But even before we roll out this rationing method, the civic tech community of zero, as you just mentioned, the G zero V community came up with their own idea of visualizing the mask availability in the nearby pharmacies and stores and so on. So that people queuing in line do not have to queue in vain and can distribute among themselves to the place that still have some mask available. So the mask rationing map is a what I call people public-private partnership where the people who came up with this idea of a visualizing map and we do a kind of reverse procurement. So early February in a time span of three days, we started providing the kind of real-time open API, updated every 30 seconds so that when you queue in line, you don't have to wait for the person queuing before you to update. There are numbers on the map, which is what the civic tech originally did, but actually a pharmacy which more than 90% of the fiber optic line back to the National Health Insurance Administration. So you can buy some mask and immediately after 30 seconds is like a distributed ledger, more than 100 different tools, including chatbots, mobs, voice assistants for the seeing difficult people and so when all gets updated in real time. So first people trust this system as a distributed ledger so people can see as being rationed out rather effectively and second of course one does not have to queue in vain and the OpenStreetMap community for example can also co-create better distribution and pre-registration algorithms because everybody can analyze the data including the bias independently. So indeed it is a kind of shiny case of how real-time open data helped to counter the pandemic and by April by May last year we're largely gone to zero COVID and state that way for a very long time. But this may of course when the alpha and later on delta variant hits high one we face our real first and only wave. And so it's the same bunch of people who co-create a mask rationing map also created a SMS based contact tracing tool. And it's not like in other countries where the data is aggregated to the state like making a server and state, but neither are we kind of trusting solely the Google and Apple of the world, the multinational companies from coming up with their exposure to the notification app. The third way is having the civic society, civil society creating the tool based on open standards in this case SMS and QR code. So you don't have to download any app just you're built in phone you're building camera point QA venues QR code and pops up automatically SMS pre-composed with the 15 random codes representing the data you just hit send. So everyone can check in in just a couple of seconds and within a week basically adopted this design from the graph zero community and more than 2 million venues began printing those QR codes and to date there's more than one quarter billion SMS sent this way that reduce the contact tracing time it takes for each infected case from 24 hours to less than 24 minutes automatically and that's why for more than one month now we're back to zero COVID. Wow fascinating just just a point on that to clarify so so does that rely on the individual that has got COVID to report that the fact that they have been affected infected does it rely on that. So basically the way it works is that the SMS that representing the check in is stored in the telecom operator of your choice right so whomever hands you the SIM card stores that check in for 28 days. And if in the same venue there's anyone confirmed as being infected then it is the contact tracers that's then use this platform to notify automatically all the people who have checked into the same venue it doesn't need to be a static venue could be a same taxi or things like that so they can get exposure notifications and if the contact tracer finds out who exactly is in the same venue and so what then of course the contact tracer can proactively notice the persons and put them in quarantine so on. And so this is both proactive but also has a passive mode as well but if there's no case in the 28 days in any given venue then the telecom companies just rotates deletes the checking records and the contact tracer never access that deleted records. So to date there's only been I think around 10 million or so 12 million or so accesses to the checking records so the vast majority of the quarter billion were just deleted with no privacy compromises. Fascinating it's really a world leading example I think but but more broadly in Taiwan I mean we know that Taiwan's government has been a leader globally in open government and you have a national action plan in this regard could you just explain you know what are the main aims of the plan and what are the main steps so far. Definitely. So the open data part is the transparency pillar of the open government national action plan which runs the same length as Dr. Tsai Ing-wen's second presidential term so we still have a couple years more to implement more open data when it comes especially on environmental data climate sensing air pollution sensing and so on and the other pillar is the participation pillar which costs for not just increasing the bandwidth of democracy as in as I said open data also reduce the latency meaning that people do not have to wait for four years to vote but rather continuously every day there's a petition platform going called join and people can say their own agenda after collecting 5000 signatures the ministries and including interagency issues twice every month we meet face to face with those petitioners and multi-stake holders to figure out how we can work together and the same electronic signature infrastructure also extends next year will start to do joint e signatures for our national level referendum so not just the administration level but also binding to the legislation level as well as part of our referendum work and also we're committed to be inclusive so including people who are not even 18 years old can still set the agenda through the use advisory council what we call the reverse mentor to the cabinet as well as starting their own petitions on for example banning the plastic straws of our bubble to take out and things like that so it's not just to make the entire administration more transparent and accountable but also make a decision making process more participatory and inclusive. Right. It's so I understand so basically if 5000 people get together and they have a proposal for the government. Then the government is duty bound to consider that proposal is is that the way. That's correct and we have a dedicated system called participation offices or POS embedded in all 32 ministries in charge of engaging the public. For example in 2017, when a service designer named sort of petitioned that the tax filing experience is horrible and I quote explosively hostile to taxpayers and of course, then it's not just this negative energy of demonstrating against but rather the participation office engaged him immediately and say let's co create next year's tax filing experience together with the people who feel the most anger about this particular issue. There's a real sense of urgency there but I think a very creative thing of the PO network when it comes to the joint platform petitions is that the breakout groups were not facilitated by the tax agency. But instead by the coastal God, for example, but when we deliberate about the facing the ocean kind of ideas of surfing amateur fishing and things like that. Then maybe it's the tax agency or the financial ministries participation office facility that break out groups and the theory is that once they're outside of the silo the tax collector also serves in spare time and coastal God probably files the tax to. So they take automatically the position of the citizens and can work on true kind of mutual partnership because they feel the need of citizens themselves. It's, it's really an interesting initiative I imagine there are plenty of countries around the world where people feel anger when they have to file their taxes and, and they, you know, cooperation with an authority to make that process easier is surely something that I well I personally feel the UK could could learn from just on a different topic though. I know that you have been involved with the issue of misinformation and toxic commentaries in social media and in other places could you explain what you're doing in that regard. Finally, so Taiwan's way to counter that this information is not via takedowns we don't take down anything from the administration but rather investing in public infrastructures pro social social media in the digital realm. For example, the PTT, which is the forum like Reddit for free of advertisers or shareholders is squarely in the social sector for the past almost three decades now funded by the Taiwan academia network and that's the place when really when last message spread to Taiwan, 2019 December that there are and I quote seven starts cases in the Huanan Sea from market and of course, got triaged overnight in 24 hours it resulted in us getting the health inspection for all five passengers coming in from Taiwan to Taiwan and that shows a pro social social media a digital equivalent of a town hall can really contribute to early discovery and response when it comes to pandemic and other urgent issues and then the joint platform again is a investment by the public administration in the national development council so starting 2016 basically we classify such investment in the public infrastructure in the digital realm. Infrastructure money this is a previously things made out of concrete like concrete buildings are can now be made in bits and then we have the digital equivalent for the citizens to have a pro social conversation but of course the digital equivalent of nightclubs does to say Facebook's and so I was loud music and smoke the room in private bounces. Of course these are still around there's a lot of conversation going on there, but they are by and large we use the idea of human over rumor, making sure that people are understanding this information as discovered by the journalists the fact checkers the zero people the covax project meets in just a couple hours a very comedic response from the participation officer from each ministry so that people can just laugh about it laugh the tension off and then focus on the policy not the outrage. How do you deal with the issue of opinion. I mean, if somebody has an opinion that you believe is based on faulty information. How do you deal with that because I think in many societies people would say well that's my right, you know I, I feel that way, and my interpretation of the reality is this yours may be different so how do you deal with that. So I use a method called notice and public notice. Indeed, as you said, if they read something that has been manipulated but think that's the fact that's the truth. If you take it down if you impose some top down finds or something that actually it feels the outrage or it feels the conspiracy theories actually make the more polarized, but especially leading up to election that's when those conspiracy theory are in their kind of full height. But in Taiwan, what we did is basically the contact tracing idea applied to the disinformation kind of like a virus of the mind. So we invite, for example, the middle schoolers to fact checked the three presidential candidates during their debate and forums and so on. And it's not just a classroom assignment or exercise, they, along with anyone who want to contribute, once they discovered something that doesn't match can actually contribute to the live stream when the debate was still happening. So making a positive impact to the entire conversation and during the tallying, for example, the election process, we use paper based ballots for presidential elections and mayor elections. When people start discounting process, they show the paper to the YouTubers in the audience, and there's dedicated apps in each major country that does the tallying concurrently from multiple angles. So basically this is a way to make sure that anything that is disinformation is met with participatory audit that that particular person can trust a YouTuber that's more aligned to their political affiliation to actually dispel the rumor about the miscounting and things like that. And maybe next round they will participate in the fact checking work themselves. Right. Okay, very interesting. We've got some really good questions that have come in from the audience so perhaps I could take them one by one we've got about eight minutes left so have to be fairly brief but the first one is are you concerned about the dominance of big platforms like Google on the internet. Yeah, as I mentioned, the ideas of civic technology like based on SMS contact tracing QR codes and so one is based on the idea that the local norm, what's considered normal in the cyberspace is co created with the entire society. So for example, what's the right balance between the right to know that a contact tracer has access your data and your voluntary contribution because you can always go back to pen and paper we never said that's out of the question right is a voluntary choice. So the idea is to build such data collisions there's partnerships with the people, not just for the people. And once people understand that the norm around contact tracing or about masquerading of course we welcome Google who very graciously waived the Google map fees of the initial operation name of the mask prototype. And they also contribute a lot of the design into the contact tracing tools, including the line is the messenger in Taiwan. They actually adjusted their QR code scanner of adding friends is like what's up in Taiwan to support a contact tracing effort but what's important in people public private partnership is that the norm is not set by those large companies. They actually just implemented local norm as set by the civic tech community along with the people. Right. Excellent. The next question is is related I believe but I it's still very interesting. How does the web 3.0 initiative by which this question and means the decentralization of the Internet fit with your vision of open data and open governance. Yeah, I think web three with its call to bring code to data rather than aggregate data to code works very well and indeed I'm working with Vitalik buttering as a fellow board member in radical exchange to explore what kind of blockchain inspired governance where three inspired governments can be applied in Taiwan. So for example our presidential hackathon where every year five social innovation teams are blessed by the president to become a presidential promise for the next fiscal year with all the budget regulation and personnel requirement fulfilled by the state that got from the blockchain governance the idea of quadratic voting for the past three years we use this new voting method to unlock more signal around synergies and things like that and that's something that we learned directly from the decentralized governance community and SMS based contact tracing by storing the mapping between the venue code and the venue in one place and then the check in the SMS records in various different telecom companies. The end result is the telecom knows nothing about which venue you have been to and the venue owner knows nothing about your phone number or indeed anything about you. And so this what we call multi party design again is a key part of the federated architecture of the modern web three imaginations. I think it continues to be an inspiration and we will continue to work on the zero knowledge on the homomorphic encryption differential privacy federated learning all those great privacy enhancing technology that affirms the democracy ideas that share with the way three can be missing. Interesting. The there's a couple of questions come in you just mentioned blockchain. I would also be fascinated to know your views on blockchain and crypto with the background of course that quite a few countries are restricting crypto in some of its iterations. What's the view. What's your view personally what's the view of Taiwan. As I mentioned, I think it's like a research are which provides the inspiration of the central as governance for us to work with but not for the people. So I think this is we have great partnerships with the blockchain communities. Now, mostly we use the distributed ledger ideas for example for masquerading the 100 different application developers maintaining their own ledger along with crowd audited input. That is directly from the ledger like technology auto is not technically speaking a blockchain or, for example, last year when people decide they don't want to collect the rationed mass for a couple weeks because maybe they have some spare. They can actually use a kind of data sovereignty to the national health insurance app and as I express to say that's the ration that I did not collect. I would like to dedicate it to international humanitarian aid and provide a signal to foreign service either anonymously or mint a NFT right now fungibly I would like to say that this particular person has dedicated this number of masks. So a lot of people contributed charitably, I think more than 7 million mosque initially were distributed this way to around the world and again this is similar to an NFT although it's not technically run on blockchain technology. Very quickly, in the last two minutes, would you be able to answer this one. What is the state of digitalization at the smaller medium enterprise level in Taiwan, and what support is the government providing for digitalization. I know this is also an issue in Hong Kong where I'm where I'm based. So what's happening in Taiwan. Well, this year, for example, we have the T cloud, the Taiwan cloud project at keep T cloud, the GOV, the TW says, if you want to try out any of the digital transformation tools that are cloud based as a small or medium enterprise, then the state subsidize 80% of that money. So you can actually try like five times more than your originally planned to invest right so maybe different payment methods, different way of organizing your supply chain and things like that. And without incurring a lot of initial capital investment on it so that's the T cloud project and we also have a P for talent the three T talent transformation training project that match makes the young students who were freshly graduated from undergrad level study, and then assign five of them at a time as digital ambassadors to a local SME or a night market community, and then work on the theory of change to digitally transform them so they're not really interns they're more like reverse mentors that are willing to share their first and experience of getting those digital tools, and again stay subsidized so without incurring much cost to the SMEs and we've seen a lot of uptakes, especially during our, what we call 5,000 quintuple stimulus voucher where more than 4 million people choose to redeem the voucher in an electronic way through mobile payments. Well, Minister Tang I'm afraid that's all we have time for but thank you so much for such a tour de force it's really been fascinating listening to all the developments underway in Taiwan and I'm sure many of the audience will will will take away a lot of this it'll be new to a lot of people who are listening thank you so much. Thank you live long and prosper.