 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Michelle Grover, Twillio's Chief Information Officer. We are lucky to have with us today, Audrey Tong, Taiwan's first ever digital minister. During this session, we'll talk about innovation and digital communications, free software, how Taiwan leverages these tools to facilitate collaboration and transparency between the government and its citizens. We will also highlight how Audrey used open data to hack the COVID-19 pandemic early on, and it allowed the Taiwanese citizens to have access to PPE. And with that, I'd like to welcome Audrey. Hi, Audrey. Hello. Good local time, everyone. Thank you. I want to ask you a few questions. So I wanted to start with one. Can you walk us through the story of how you became Taiwan's first digital minister? Certainly. Back in 2014, we occupied the parliament for three weeks. As you can see here at the time, I was helping the cable power and radio team to make sure that in the occupied Congress, not only we had live video feed, but also transcripts, translations and things like that. We even set up a kind of transparent wall outside of the occupied parliament. So half a million people on the street, many more online, can participate in what's happening in that occupied. So why would they would occupy the parliament? Because at the time, the students were protesting that we were being handed this cross-strait service and trade agreement with Beijing with no substantial deliberation. So the idea is that because the MPs were on strike, so we took their office to do their work for them, or so the legitimacy theory goes. And after three weeks of thoroughly nonviolent occupying the parliamentarian areas, we actually managed to converge instead of consensus for the months, not one less. And they got accepted by the head of the parliament. And so the politics in Taiwan really changed because these demonstrations don't protest anymore. It's a demo. A demo starts with sufficient ICT technology. People can listen at scale. And so at the end of that year, all the mayors that supported open government gets elected and all the mayor that didn't, well, didn't. I was then hired as a young reverse mentor. That is to say people under 35 years old advising the minister of the future direction of the country. And then I worked with minister Jacqueline Tsai at the moment with the, you know, maybe Uber case, the Airbnb case, Bitcoin, online liquor sales, things like that, making sure that the digital economy and regulations, the REC tech and the REC tech can evolve with the civic technologies. So I work as kind of like an understudy for a year and a half. And then when Dr. Tsai when became our president, I get promoted, I guess from an intern to a full minister. That is amazing. Another question. So in your 2020 has just been a life-altering year for many around the world in a number of different ways. How do you see your role as digital minister of Taiwan? How do you see the impact on communications between the Taiwan needs government and its people? Yeah, definitely. I think in Taiwan, we managed to fight off the pandemic with no lockdowns and also the infodemic with no takedowns. And these twin emics are really the pillars of the social innovation and where it shines. We have this interesting idea called humor over rumor that makes sure that this scientific knowledge, for example, this is the Spokes dog. Spokes dog of our ministry of health and welfare. In each ministry, we have communication offices. Usually we have offices that talk to the media, to the parliamentarians, but we also have participation offices that talk to essentially hashtags. And then these hashtag offices use everything from cute dog and cats and other internet memes to make sure that people feel engaged whenever there is an anxiety, a conspiracy theory, the shares and travels and outrage. We push out a meme after at most two hours that travels on cuteness and on humor and has a higher R value than the conspiracy theory. So physical distancing, if you're outdoor, you know, keep the two Shiba Inus away from each other. If you're indoor, keep three Shiba Inus. Remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing. Remember to wear your masks. But why do you wear your masks? Because it protects you from your own and washed hands, so on and so forth. So the idea of humor over rumor really builds a very quick iteration cycle. And those humor are actually crowdsourced. Everybody can call this toll free number one night to two and share whatever they think is a better meme to amplify to the whole society in the next day's live streamed conference from the Central Epidemic Mods Center. For example, back in April, there was a young boy that called saying, hey, I don't want to go to school anymore because you're rationing masks. And all I get is pink medical masks. And I don't get to pick the color. And I'm afraid that my classmates may laugh at me for wearing pink as a boy. And the very next day, everybody in the CCC's conference, including our Minister Chen Shizhong wore pink medical masks. And so suddenly the boy become the most hip boy because only he has the color that the heroes wear. And the minister even said that pink powder is my favorite childhood hero or something like that. And so this basically shows a trust from the government to the citizens when it comes to the three pillars of radical social innovation that is fast, that is fair and is fun. One is engaging too, right? You feel connected, you feel engaged, you feel cared about. I can only imagine how super happy that little boy was that day. He was very, very popular, I'm sure, for that day. What are some of the aspects of digital innovation that have helped transform Taiwan's communication strategy? Yeah, aside from the cute talk and the humor of a rumor, I think it's also important to have a legal definition of this information. Because this information and speech freedom, of course, in Taiwan are a hotly debated topic. And according to the Human Rights Watch Group Civicus Monitor, Taiwan is the only country in Asia that has a completely open in terms of the freedom of the press, of speech and so on of assembly, compared to any other Asian country, along with New Zealand if you count the Pacific. And so in this environment, we cannot do an administrative takedown. It's not imaginable, but yet there are, of course, deliberate attempts to influence, for example, elections, public health and things like that. So we have a legal definition of this information that says this information is defined as intentional untruth that harms the public welfare. That is to say it doesn't need to be disinformation if it just harms the image of the ministry because there's just good journalism. But if it harms the public, then it falls outside the freedom of speech and therefore could be prosecuted. I will use one example. There was a time back in April where people rushed to buy tissue papers. And why do they do that? Because we're ramping up the mass production from 2 million a day to 20 million a day. And people can see very clearly from the Civic Technologies dashboards. And there are rumors that, and I quote, all the materials that's going to be made into medical masks originally came from the tissue paper factories. So we'll run out of tissue paper soon, rush out and buy, unquote. And that, of course, travels down outrage, maybe have the R-value of three and people share it. But after only a couple hours, our premier, Su Zhencheng, as you can see here, pushes out this fantastic meme. So this is a wordplay and this is packaged literally as a tissue paper box where you see a tissue paper here. You see the backside of our premier, his bottom wiggling it a little bit. And a large font that says each of us only have one pair of buttocks. It's a wordplay because button twine in Bandarine sounds the same as to stockpile twine. And so it's saying, you know, it doesn't pay to stockpile because you're not going to use that much. And then a table that says tissue paper came from South American materials while medical paper came from domestic materials. So everybody who laughed at that was, it's literally impossible to feel outrage about the conspiracy theory because these are mutually exclusive pathways in their mind. And this maybe has a R-value of seven, like on average, each person share to seven other people every hour. And so after just a couple of days, the conspiracy theory died down. And of course, the prosecution of the people who intentionally share it at the beginning, not the people who share, but the people who fabricate this. It's done because they were tissue paper resellers go figure. And so that is one counter disinformation strategy deployed in place. That is absolutely great. We need to borrow some of these here. I'm just going to put that out there. Can you tell us a bit about how you utilize software to to communicate the availability of PPE during the ongoing COVID outbreak and how you think that other countries and companies can leverage similar technologies as well? Definitely. In Taiwan, when we're distributing the PPEs in the pharmacies, of course the pharmacists are professional, they're trusted by the community and so on. But a big problem is that people maybe have to go to four different pharmacies before they encounter one. They still have the PPEs in stock because they're rationing. There's a limited quota every day. And so there is a very interesting innovation, not done by the government, but by the civic technologies. The name is Howard Wu from Kainan City. He drew a map where people can voluntarily report how many masks are there in each store. And then we see this. This is excellent. The media loves it. The only problem is that he owed Google 20k US dollars in map API usage fees after just a couple of days. So he had to take it down. But to his rescue is the civic tech community called GovZero or GZeroV. This community, which I'm a part of, systemically take all the government website like join the GOV. The TW, which is a participation portal and make better alternative versions. The call to action is called fork the government. Important pronunciation, fork the government. And so the idea is that you change your O to a zero. And if you replace the O to a zero, then you get into the shadow government that is always open source, always more engaging and have a amplified collective intelligence of the civic technologies. And so Howard Wu asks on GovZero, can anyone help us to get the real time PPE availability and also reduce the Google API costs. And of course people from open street map community and so on contributed to his work. But also I take a look at his work and talk to our premier. And the premier solution said, of course, we need to trust citizens with open data. And so we published every 30 seconds that becomes open API, not just open data of each and every pharmacy's availability. So for example, nowadays, you can take your national health insurance card, the NHI card to any pharmacy and collect nine medical months per two weeks if you're an adult or 10 if you are a child. And the person queuing after you will be able actually to just refresh their phone. And see that this actually comes from 58 to 49 right after your purchase. And so that's a participatory accountability that builds trust from citizen to citizens instead of asking citizens to blindly trust the state. This makes the state transparent to the citizen, not the other way around. And we have more than 100 different tools that even people with seeing difficulty or colorblindness and so on can talk to chatbots and voice assistant because it's all open data. And this gets adapted by the Korean civic technologist. I just met a few of them a week ago. Some of them were just 14 years old and so on. They don't speak Mandarin and Fijian County from Thailand. And Haru doesn't speak Korean, but they both speak JavaScript. So that's not a big problem. And so they asked their government to publish under our own API, the open API standard. And then the first map that worked in Korea was actually from Thailand City. And so this is a great international collaboration based on the idea of radically trusting the citizens. That's amazing. In the next 10 years, how do you predict that software and digital innovation will impact global communications and society as a whole actually? Yeah. This is a great question. So I'd like to show you my office. This is literally my office. So this is the social innovation lab in Taipei. At heart of Taipei City, we tore down all the walls. It's literally a park. Anybody and their dog and their self-driving vehicles can travel to the place and talk about the digitization, the innovation, the governance and the inclusion of those emerging technologies. And the great thing about this place is that in Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right. So anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of Taiwan, the Yusha Mount and almost 4,000 meters high, you have 10 megabits per second. In just 15 US dollars per month, unlimited data connection. And if you don't, it's my fault personally. And so anywhere in Taiwan, you can connect to the social innovation lab and participate in my office hours. And everything is radically transparent on the record. And I actually seek out the places least connected to Taipei, our capital city, like the rural, indigenous, with cultural translators and so on, and participate in their town halls. But I'm the only one that travels, that facilitates. But I connect back to the lab with 12 different ministries, section chiefs or a hire, so that they see before their own eyes the stories of people, their struggles, their innovations and so on. And this is called our social innovation tours. Now, with the pandemic, it seems that we, this is not limited to Taiwan anymore. Everywhere, even very senior officials, previously, you know, not very believing or trusting the video conferencing, suddenly discovered that it's as easy as opening up your browser. And you can actually look at each other and have a better communication as opposed to face to face because you have to wear a mask when you meet face to face. And so because of this, we managed to help this kind of video conference, for example, a few days before the World Health Assembly was 14 different economies and to talk about, for example, the humor over rumor playbook, the Taiwan model and things like that. And we get to meet with quite senior officials, medical officers and things like that, totally transcending the boundaries of nations. And because of that, I think this will help us a lot because then we can talk about climate change, about the disinformation crisis, quantum cryptography and things like that. All the worldwide issues using this feeling of international solidarity that we have built during the coronavirus. So I'm very optimistic. That's great. It's interesting that even as difficult as communication is, in some ways it's even better and a little more open. I think that's an interesting kind of side effect of how things got into it for us. Definitely. Definitely. And last I want to ask, so with all the things going on in the world these days, what are you hopeful for? Sure. So for me, I think the pandemic serves as a great wake-up call so that for people, the linear growth of GDP and so on kind of takes back us a little bit. But we can further develop the measurements of progress. The progress doesn't have to be linear. It could be actually the business and the society innovating together to achieve the global sustainable goals. And global sustainability seems to be something like a kind of linear development things where you take care of the basics and the developing world and on the developed world. Maybe you worry about open government and things like that, but rather we see digital now instead of just as information and communication innovation in the industry, we see it as partnership for the common goals that can unite the forces of the economic, the societal as well as the environmental forces together. Because this is what was required to counter the pandemic and we have this idea of cross-sector collaboration for a long time. But this is the first time that all over the world people see it on the same urgency scale. In climate change on smaller islands is more urgent. On larger continent is less urgent. Of course, that's the nature of things. But for a pandemic, every epicenter is just two months away from every other epicenter. So this shared urgency timetable enables us to build new infrastructures, sharing access, sharing research, sharing the communication infrastructure that enhance availability of reliable data across sectors that encourage effective partnership across jurisdictions, as well as sharing open innovation, making sure that people when we innovate something locally, we do not keep it to ourselves, but spread it with what we call the Taiwan model and in websites like Taiwan can help that us. That was great. Thank you so much, Audrey, for talking to us today. And I just want to close out with how great it was to talk to you because it also is a reminder that even in times that are difficult, we can learn things. So what I'm also hopeful for is the fact that people are able to communicate better. And just you're right, the idea that everything doesn't have to be business related. It can be for the greater good of each other and that we can share those things with each other. And guess what? We could have done this all along, but sometimes we need a little push out call. So thank you again for taking the time to talk to us. I really appreciate it. Thank you and live long and prosper. Thank you.