 Hello, I'm Au Chi-Tung, Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation. And indeed, the way that Taiwan countered the pandemic with no lockdown and the infodemic with no takedowns is rooted in our experience of democratizing around the late 80s and then the first presidential election in the 96s, which is intertwined with the introduction of internet and the worldwide lab in Taiwan. So it's not just my personal background of, you know, being a high school dropout when I was 15 in 1996 to pursue research on the open world lab, but really an entire generation of people in Taiwan who experienced internet and democracy, not as two separate things, but as one thing literally at the same year. Yes, gladly. Taiwan was notified of the pandemic thanks to a young doctor, Li Wen-Liang from Wuhan, who posted on their social media that there were seven new SARS cases in the Huanan Seafood Market at the December of 2019. Now, in December 31st, 2019, the PTT, Taiwan's digital civic infrastructure, gets this notification by another young doctor, No More Pipe, and PTT immediately start to apply their collective and connective intelligence to triage this news. And just in 24 hours, we started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. So Dr. Li Wen-Liang literally saved the Taiwanese people while his message, of course, could not be transmitted to the people in Wuhan because of the very different infrastructure when it comes to internet-enabled listening. And PTT, because it has no shareholders nor advertisers for more than 25 years, is swelling in the social sector, operating within the Taiwan academic network with a norm of what I call pro-social media rather than the more anti-social corners of social media. So that was the first, I guess, digital innovation that saved the people in Taiwan when it comes to the pandemic. Of course, masquerading, contact tracing, and so on were co-created with G0V, or GovZero community, around 10,000 people on the same Slack chat channel or Telegram or IRC, or the sign contributed to the internationally recognized early response. And this may, of course, also on the SMS-based contact tracing system where people can check in the public venues without having to download any app and sending a SMS to a well-trusted number 192 to representing the counter-epidemic command center without having to pay SMS charge and no worries about the privacy implications as well because it's just stored in the five telecom carriers. And if there's no contact tracing request from a local contact tracing office, it's just deleted after 28 days. So far, there's a quarter billion SMS sent this way and around 11 million that has been used to shorten the contact tracing from more than 24 hours per confirmed case to less than 24 minutes. And that's why, of course, for the past couple of months, there's essentially zero local cases in Taiwan and we're back to safe day. My favorite quote from the Daoduo thing was to give no trust is to get no trust. So by trusting the citizens, that is the entire difference world as opposed to if the government has developed one single application. It's not the case in Taiwan. The SMS contact tracing system is not government-invention or government technology. As I mentioned, it's part of the GovZero community's co-creation and the people who participated in the co-creation are the people, for example, who operate the PTC, the people who are in charge of some previous contact tracing systems in other parts of the world, the people who are in charge of one of the most popular messaging tools in Taiwan and so on. So a broad collective, you can call it a collective intelligence that connects through the network of contact tracing developers around the world, mapped out the possible solution space and converged on SMS that's not transmitted to government really but rather stayed in the telecom operators, emerged as the specification. And my role is simply, I call it reverse procurement to deliver on the civil society expectations of a safe and privacy-preserving contact tracing system. So by trusting the citizens and not delegate but rather working with the people and have the social sector set the norm, the public sector simply amplifies these norms and we implement it in a way that's entirely voluntary if you want to use pen and paper or any other method. In addition to replacing the SMS-based contact tracing system you're still free to do that. There is no penalty for not using this newly invented system which is why it doesn't foreclose future possibilities of iteration and it amplifies the norm such that the private sectors adhere to the norm not because it's a government mandate but because the citizens already prototype and ask for it. So I call this forking the government, taking government digital services, developing a different direction by the people closest to the pain and suffering and our job again is just to amplify them. Yes, that's a really great question. So we use a principle and by we, I mean the GovZero community who designed this thing, use an idea called secure multi-party computation. It is one of the privacy enhancing technologies that ensures for example the telecoms which has your check-in SMS records, nevertheless has no access to the mapping table between the digits that represents the venue and the actual venue themselves to individual telecom operators is just random code that means nothing. And for the QR code maker, anyone can be a QR code maker by the way, but for the primary QR code maker at Tradevan, they do not have any access to your SMS records or indeed of any person entering the venue. They just interact with their venue owners to make some unique 15 digits code. So unless you are a contact tracer that has the lawful authorization to get the puzzle pieces from the type A pass system, from the five telecoms, from Tradevan and so on, individually those data do not compromise anyone's privacy because it's just like puzzle piece without piecing together it does not complete a contact tracing. So what I'm trying to get at is that if we design with privacy and accountability in mind in the very beginning, then it leads naturally, for example, to people who want to see which contact tracer in which municipality have accessed their records in the past 28 days and they can simply visit SMS.1922, the GOV, the TW entering their phone number, respond to SMS and then just see the entire reverse accountability audit record. And so all of these are earning trustworthiness, as Joe mentioned, by essentially giving an account whenever there is a doubt instead of blanketly saying, oh, the state knows the best. Actually, the state just designed the process and mechanism but do not hoard the data in any centralized way. Definitely. Distributed ledger technologies form an important inspiration to the Taiwanese civic technologies community. Indeed, many of the developers in, for example, Ethereum ecosystem and Tezos and many other ecosystems are either primarily or importantly based in Taiwan. So when we introduced, for example, the mass curation system last February, people immediately thought, yeah, this is something a ledger technology could help. And with the help again from GovZero last February, all the pharmacies in Taiwan, more than 6,000 of them, published their real-time inventory of Medical Grade Mosque. Every 30 seconds there is a global update to more than 100 different applications. Some are interactive maps, some are chatbots, voice assistants, things like that to ensure that whenever anyone purchase two or three mosques at a local pharmacy using their national health insurance I see called more than 100 different developers gets this renewed number immediately so that people queuing after them actually can check their phone and see in real-time whether this pharmacy is going to run out of mosques, whether they should queue elsewhere. They can make that decision even before deciding what pharmacy they want to use. So again, this is a kind of coordinated solution but it's not implemented in a centralized way. Rather, all the different interactive visualizations points out, for example, to the data bias that privileges the urban areas because initially we're distributing based on physical distance but not everyone own a helicopter as the OpenStreetMap community pointed out to us rather quickly. And then they forked the government essentially by interpolating through an MP to our Ministry of Health and Welfare. They said, I think we have this better distribution method based on the real-time number that you publish. So demonstration is not a protest here. Demonstration is literally a demo. And Minister Chen said, yeah, a legislator teach us and the very next day we started implementing a better distribution mechanism. So this is not an accountability in the traditional sense of the government does everything. Rather, this is truly co-creation where the citizens can also contribute better algorithm to address data bias. So for the past 10 years or so, GovSeries has been systematically looking at the digital services in Taiwan which is usually something that GOV, the TW and forking those services into something that G0V, the TW So for example, in our National Participation Platform join the GOV, the TW if you change it all to a zero join the G0V, the TW then you get into the GovZero Slack channel. So basically what GovZero is doing is showing alternate imaginations of what's possible in government digital services always in open source and creative common licenses so that it's a soft fork as we say in the DOT space. If the state wins in popularity and the GOVZero alternatives gain in popularity then the state can at any given time and with this so for many different occasions simply say, oh, we can't beat them so we join them and simply adapt the GOVZero designs to reverse procurement instead of traditional procurements and integrate it into the government services. Indeed, when I was a child in the late 80s Taiwan already had a very strong social sector the cooperatives movement, the social entrepreneurs the local charities and so on indeed delivered many essential services and campaign for democratization even before the martial law was lifted and I think one large event around the turn of century was the September 21st earthquake and earthquake really caught people of different parts of the social sector of different faiths, of different practitioners to essentially work together out of necessity and build social solidarity because the disaster is such a massive scale that people simply cannot rely on the local and central government to provide the necessary response in time and afterwards for pretty much all the large disasters and I include the occupying of the parliament the sunflower movement in that the social sector that already had a prior experience trusting each other simply bonded together so the occupied movement was really orchestrated in 2014 by more than 20 NGOs which has the corners on the occupied parliament on the street and actually half a million people on the street worked toward getting the messages of the 20 NGOs across each other so that the cross-strait service agreement is debated not from a purely economic perspective but also from the system of risk associated with cybersecurity, to labour conditions, to LGBTIQ rights and many other things giving a more full-fledged deliberation on the quality of the occupied parliament and its constituents, people who participate in the movement so I do agree that this is continuous. Certainly in Taiwan indeed we have a constitution that mandates the fostering from the state of the cooperative movements, it's part of the constitution and when I was a child each and every primary school and middle school has to have a consumer co-op within their school, democratically elected to make sure that we eat healthy food during lunch breaks and things like that. So these are small things but I do think that it gives rise to a culture where people instinctively think of cooperative solutions to structural social issues instead of relying on the capitalistic solutions that relied mostly on the control of a few shareholders that people have no democratic governance over. So the early experiences are important and in this century of course we focus on the education reform that's replaced the literacy to competence. So literacy again is when you're just a receiver of media, of radio and television for example but competence is when we're makers and remixers and producers of our own narratives. One case in point is that in a lot of the schools I think it's most schools now the climate science and data science are taught via air boxes which is this device that measures PM 2.5 and other climate indicators and contributes to a distributed ledger maintained by our national academy and supported by our national centre for high speed computation but decidedly distributed so that the students learn if they maintain the air box well actually their friends their neighbours, their family before deciding whether they want to go out for a jog or something will rely on the data that they could curate and produce and if they want more precision around their community they can very easily get one, it's open hardware and place it on their balcony or things like that and again this is beautiful data collaborative that the students without being indoctrinated with any top-down ideas about how data should work they see for their first-hand educational classes that capstone projects how to tune how to work with the other data that's contributed by other data altruists and if there's as I said data bias, data stewardship problems and so on it's within their rights and within their duty to fix that in their school and I think it's very powerful when we concentrate on the competence rather than literacy well as I said the social sector we're fully empowered is in charge of creating the norms and habits and that again has higher legitimacy because of our history as compared to the rules and regulations produced by the state, by the public sector so instead of a relatively disempowering stance where each person only contributes three bits of information every four years to governance called voting by the way, this is a higher bandwidth direct participation and direct action that can result in better changes faster so almost like instant gratification and that of course is a very strong intrinsic of course incentive but also extrinsic because by you know tackling the pandemic with no lockdowns it allow our economy to thrive so obvious leaders also economic incentive at play here yes definitely so for example in Taiwan we use still paper based ballot when we vote for people electronic sometimes when we vote for things priorities and budgets but for people ballots the counting mechanism is very well live streams and recorded from the very beginning to ensure the integrity of the voting process the role of the observer of course is highlighted but because as I mentioned the right web is already around when we vote the president for the first time directly the counting booth became kind of small youtuber recording booth nowadays each major party has their own telling app and you see people just with their smart phones and so on well used to be larger cameras but the same idea to film the counting process and it has the benefit of people participating not as party representatives but just a lay person but they can contribute to resolve any election issues and when the counting app of one major party agrees with the opposition major potting there's simply no dispute and no room for the trolls to grow when it comes to the disagreeing counts on any election counting station and when you scale it to a nationwide level it leads to a faster resolution in post-election disputes which of course doesn't happen in advanced democracies like the US but in Taiwan it used to be a problem and people developed digital democratic tools not to replace the paper-based voting but actually augment that voting with even more trustworthy counting or live streaming process and leading before the presidential election there is the presidential debate and forums by the three candidates and again the middle schoolers as well as really anyone can contribute to the meta competence by typing in what they heard and cross-check it with a wealth of databases that is already collected by the professional journalists and help in the fact checking work but this is not just a sign homework if they revealed that the presidential candidate says something that's factually inaccurate their fact check appear on national public TV in real time so they contribute to the democratic process both right before and right after the national election well one impact of course is that I pay also a small amount of land tax each year and if I think that I shouldn't pay this amount which is calculated roughly by the real prices that is forcibly declared all transactions around my neighborhood if I think that for some reason that's the land tax that I should pay is much smaller than the amount that's calculated by the peer-to-peer information well I can say my land was nothing so I shouldn't pay the tax but the result of me saying that is the municipal government can then just acquire that piece of land at the cost of nothing because after all I publicly said that right so this is the idea of the Herberger's tax that gets more accurate bits of information of the self-gogged land price even without the calibration of the real price that's the result of real estate transactions around the presidency in my neighborhood still it incentivizes me to actually pay the land tax but also report a more accurate number if those calculations are somehow biased and so that is one direct result actually is a georgism it's one of the ideas that Harry George that held an influence on San Yat-sen which became part of Taiwan's land tax system definitely yeah to continue the metaphor of eastern and western influences I think Taiwan as an island is defined of course by the clash between the Philippine sea plate on the east side and the Eurasian plate on the west side and when the two tectonic plates bump to each other we have really large earthquakes that of course cause for social solidarity and resilience in our buildings but also the resilience in our minds so the people who built such resilience as I call it transcultural frameworks can't absorb the energy that's released by the earthquake and just like the top of Taiwan the Saviya Pendokunong-de-Yushan mountain that grows two or three centimeters each year as a direct result of that clash so for example when we legalize marriage equality we take the definitely pretty western idea of marriage by registration and rights and liberties that should be enjoyed regardless of one's gender and sexual orientation so we also respected and honored the tradition of the kinships that is formed by the familial bounds and so on so we legalized it using a nickname hyperlink act that says only the bylaws are wed when two same-sex persons wed but their families, their kinships their last name and so on do not wed and this social innovation is a direct result of a constitutional court ruling as well as two direct democracy referendum that passed and it defined such a solution space that I call it a good enough consensus or rough consensus where everyone can live with and then this model quite innovative is then being considered seriously by other still kinship oriented societies around us in the Indo-Pacific as a kind of model that will enable the civil liberties and equalities without writing off the cultures and this is just one of the more recent examples of a trans-cultural republic of citizens definitely, so as I say quite publicly that I work with the people not for the people work with the government not for the government these connective spaces are designed to make sure that each person participates not as a representative but just representing their authentic experience and innovations and this applies also to the public service itself the engagement offices that Joan briefly mentioned is one case in example where we put professionals in the public service well outside of their silos as champions of citizen interest so for example when we redesigned the tax filing system in 2017 out of a popular petition that says the tax filing was and I quote explosively hostile end of quotes to non-windows users the breakout groups is chaired not by the people from the ministry of finance but rather they could be from the coast of God the ocean affairs council but when we talk about the ocean policy how to enable more support for amateur surfers amateur fishers and so on well then maybe that breakout groups is facilitated by the ministry of finance public service and the idea is very simple because the coast of God person also have to file their own tax and the tax collector is also of course a avid surfer in their spare time so when they facilitate such deliberative town halls and meetings they automatically take the side of the citizen because after all they are citizens themselves as opposed to representatives within their professional silos and these are just some of the designs of the participatory office and network that deliberately put the liberation at the core of the public servants work instead of being a top down mended way where they have to service the public so in a sense it's also incentive to serve their own self interest and their community be it surfer or fishers interest while of course offering their professional training as a public servant so that translation occurs more easily between the professional community the academic community and the lay persons definitely in Taiwan we have this annual event called the presidential hackathon that also takes place by TI in the social innovation lab where more than 200 projects from social innovators across Taiwan we use a new voting system called quadratic voting that invites people to reveal the synergy between those projects and with this new voting system we take the top 20, coach them across collaboration of different sectors until it culminates in the five champion teams each year which receive this trophy from our president Dr. Tsai Ing-wen the trophy is the shape of Taiwan like this with a micro projector underneath and if we turn on the micro projector it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen giving you the trophy so it's very main job it describes itself but the trophy represents whatever you did in the past three months on a smaller scale for one river for one neighborhood for one public policy in the next fiscal year as if it's a presidential promise so basically it's a way to offer national agenda setting power with all the personnel budget and regulatory changes required and invest that to five teams each year and we just got a result of the five championship teams actually very recently in the past couple weeks and this time four out of the five are working on climate change and climate action the other was on long-term healthcare reform so we now have the cases for example where the last community the original community that built those airboxes on the civic tech now shifting their attention to water pollution and measurements through water boxes and many other end of us we have another championship team evolving the previous championship case where people show a mask map like system of drinking fountains and refilling people's bottles and calculating the plastic and carbon reduction and apply that idea to cataloging the carbon sinks and make sure that people augment their realities by committing to support those carbon sinks from community action and so on and so on and so forth the Taiwan Electric Company also offered a way to use the residual heat from their plants to aid in fish farming and to reduce carbon because otherwise it will have to emit more heat than required so turning a side product into something that could be circularly used and so on and so I believe this is not a top down thing the central less registry will necessarily come from the various way to account for the carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases from the social sector and then the championship teams provide a way for us as part of the presidential hackathon committee to look at already existing ways for people around the globe that are making such accounts successfully on the local level to create the underlying principles to the presidential or country white level in the next fiscal year certainly so as I mentioned already many jurisdictions look at Taiwan the Taiwan model so to speak of a successful people, public, private partnership but I would like to focus the attention not just on the biological virus and its prevention of carbon dioxide and some physical emissions but rather also the virus of the mind the polarization the divisiveness the hate and discriminatory vengeful action that's taken by people in the more anti-social corners of social media which may initially be good to manufacture counter power but it's not good at all when we're talking about digital democracy so the idea of a pro-social social media of deliberative design on deliberative spaces of the nationwide investments for example in 2016 when we classified PTT or join platform instead of one as public infrastructure on the digital realm and can allocate special budget money that's previously only allocated to the bridges and roads that are concrete like made out of concrete those ideas I think are important around the world for us to reinvest in pro-social social media and the digital equivalence of the institution that we rely on the physical space the university campuses, the parks and national parks, the town halls and so on so that the citizens around the world would not be forced to deliberate about public issues in the digital equivalent of a night club with very loud music and noise and addictive drinks and private bouncers I have nothing to I have no grudge against the entertainment sector but the night club is simply not a place to hold a town hall I've spoken too much so I'd like to hear from you definitely and thank you for this awesome conversation I look forward to meet you in person but before then live long and prosper thank you that was great and we benefited in turn from the Occupy community our Occupy is a couple years later than the US wants so we learned ample lessons from there and my personal philosophy of dynamic facilitation and so on are coached both online and offline by the likes of Tom Lee and so on who are a part of this longer tradition of the cooperative and activist movement in the US so consider us to be in the same tribe just different tentacles I guess in different time zones alright so I have to sign off now and see you on the flip side bye