 and she has been working and in charge of social innovation. She has also done a lot of community building work and today she's going to talk about her expertise as to how they have used and she has led Taiwan in social innovation around COVID-19. So Audrey, if you would be willing to share your screen, I will stop sharing mine and you can kick it off from here. Hello and good local time everyone. I'm really happy to be here virtually, regardless of your time zone and looking forward to a conversation. And as the moderator have introduced, please feel free to interrupt me anytime using the Q&A for asking questions or using the chat for asking clarifications and I'll just pause and take questions at any given point. So in Taiwan, we've had I think 10 COVID related deaths. We've been essentially COVID free since last April and we countered the pandemic this time with no lockdowns and just as we countered the related infodemic, the conspiracy theories, communication failures and so on with no takedowns, we were able to do so because of the digital social innovation infrastructure that I will describe in the first section of this webinar. So the digital social innovation has three pillars. It's very easy to remember and I call it fast, fair and fun. The fast part pertains to collective intelligence. The collective intelligence allowed us to start this very early response. So as you can see here, we started health inspections for flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan on the first day of 2020. We were able to do that because there was a Dr. Dr. Li Wenliang from Wuhan and who said, and I quote, there's seven new SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market. But of course it didn't quite save the people in Wuhan for well-known reasons of censorship but he did save the Taiwanese people because a young doctor with the name No More Pipe reposted Dr. Li Wenliang's message to the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, the PTT discussion board on December the 31st. Now the PTT is interesting because it's a public digital infrastructure. That is to say it's not funded by advertisers. It's not funded by surveillance capitalism. It has no shareholders because it's just pet project from National Taiwan University students for the past 25 years or so. That is to say it's co-governed open source and people triage such incoming messages on PTT in a fashion that is pro-social rather than more anti-social corners of social media. So when No More Pipe reposted the message, the professionals immediately started to upvote it and check its legitimacy and so on and people conclude it's legit and then our health officers started the flight passengers taking in this collective intelligence and this says to me two things. The first is that of course the citizens must trust each other enough and also the government enough to talk about such a SARS 2.0 resurgence in a public forum and also it also says that the government need to trust the people for surfacing such intelligence and responding in the here and now and that's thanks to according to the Civicus Monitor that was the only fully open jurisdiction in all of Asia in terms of freedom of assembly, of the press, of speech and so on. And so we immediately started around mid January, the Central Epidemic Command Center or the CECC. The CECC is a design that we institutionalized in 2004 following the somewhat chaotic and very traumatic experience in 2003 when SARS first hit Taiwan. And so the CECC is basically headed by the commander, the Minister of Health and Welfare is in the middle and supported by all the local governments as well as all the municipalities all the ministries and so on who sends the government to the CECC. And it's powered by another collective intelligence system the 1922. It's just a toll-free number but anyone can call at any time after the daily 2 p.m. press conference by the CECC and ask any questions. In 2020 there's been more than 2 million phone calls to 1922 and in a country with 23 million people it means that anyone who has anything to ask or anything to report gets a empathetic year. And so for example, last April there was a young boy who called and said and I quote, you're rationing out masks but all I get is pink medical masks. All the boys in my class in the primary school have navy blue medical masks so I don't want to wear pink to school for I'm a boy. Well the CECC immediately on the next 2 p.m. daily press conference all the medical offices were pink. The commander minister even said that pink panther was a childhood hero. So the boy become the hippest boy in the class because only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes wear and pink for a while become the most hip color. And so this shows that if you have participatory accountability in the here and now he can amplify the most controversial issues into not only gender mainstreaming but also popularizing mask wearing. In addition to the fast response I would like also to highlight the fairness of the mask rationing system and the fairness is guaranteed not just by the government but also by citizens in particular civic hackers or citizen technologists. In early February there was a mask shortage. We have 23 million people here and at the time it was just less than 2 million medical grade masks produced every day. And so because of that we thought about mask rationing but even when we're still planning mask rationing there's already a civic technologist the name is Howard Wu from Thailand City who just started this map that shows the nearby pharmacies and convenience stores and ask people to report whether it has run out of medical mask supply or is still have some so that people do not have to queue in vain and it lists both in the adult mask storage and also the availability of Chuzheng. And so this is great but it gets reported on national media and people started to use the service and after just a day Howard Wu owed Google 20K US dollars in API usage fees so he nearly went bankrupt and then he went on to the G0V or GovZero community. Now G0V or GovZero is a Taiwanese citizen technologist collective that is a very large cha-chano with almost tens of thousands of people I think 9,000 by the latest count on there and each and every one of them look at the government digital service which is always something that GOV.tw and think of better initiatives if they don't like how the digital service works they just make something that G0V.tw so just by changing O to a zero get into the shadow government which is always open source and always more fun. So Howard Wu went to GovZero asking so I owe Google 20K US dollars what do I do and people start brainstorming free software solutions but also because I'm part of the GovZero movement I just took his idea and send it to the head of the cabinet so I met with the premier saying we need to trust the citizens with open data and we need to use our universal health care national health insurance and the IC card associated with it in order to implement the rationing system and we need to update every 30 second in an open API so this is not just open data this is data that's published upon collection so people who queue in the line in this pharmacy if they queue here and they see people swiping a national health card before them they will see immediately that 58 becomes 56 become 54 and so on so if they notice anything wrong they will call 1922 with their mobile phone right there so assure everyone that this distribution is fair as we reimbup the mass production from 2 million a day to more than 20 million a day in the end there's more than 100 tools maps, chatbots, voice assistants and so on that's created to help people to locate the PPEs and there's also independent analysis such as this one that showed whether there's a rural, urban distribution problem or things like that so one case in point is that around March when we're rolling this out for a month or so I look at the map seeing the pharmacy centers and the population centers almost perfectly overlap so I thought it's a really good fit but then there was a parliamentarian MP Gao Hong'an she before joining the parliament was the VP of data analytics at Foxconn so she knows something about data so in her interpolation she asked the minister Chen saying even though it looks fair on the Google map if you use the open street map and zoom out it's actually unfair because for rural people in order to reach the pharmacies even though it's the same distance it's not the same time opportunity cost if they take public transportation and that's true and minister Chen instead of defending the policy simply said and I quote legislator teach us because there's evidence-based policymaking so open street map community and MP Gao did suggest and we did implement just 24 hours after her interpolation a new pre-ordering system that works with convenient stores that opens 24 hours a day and also we changed the distribution algorithm with the pharmacies taking the rural transportation cost time cost into account so MP Gao was very happy and said that yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's co-creation again this ensures fairness in a way that everyone can participate so with the help of the convenient stores we eventually implemented pre-ordering IC card swiping at the convenience store also so we get three quarters of people getting the medical mask and wearing them by I think early April and around that time our value start to drop below one and that's when we start to put this COVID-19 in control and finally at the end of this section I would like to highlight the human part of our communication because it is a stressful time and people do fill in conspiracy theories wherever and whenever they don't get reliable information so it's like a fact that is not there, that is missing, that is a void so people just fill in with conspiracy theories it's seen around the world and we're no exception around April there was a popular rumor in Taiwan that said and I quote the government is nationalizing mass production this part is true and the government will confiscate all the tissue paper materials to make masks so we'll run out of tissue paper soon unquote turned out this was started by tissue paper resellers but we didn't know that by then so anyway we see that people going out panic buying tissue papers not knowing that tissue papers and medical masks do not actually share the same material so within just a couple hours using the triple two principle which says for each trending rumor within two hours we have to roll out two different pictures of different modalities each 200 characters or less and that clarifies this issue in a way that's even more viral than the conspiracy theory so our cabinet just wrote this out from the premier's office you saw his front side premier Su Zhenchang and this is his backside and he I think wiggles his bottoms a little bit and says in very large font each of us only have one pair of bottoms this is a word play because in mandarin to stockpile twin sounds the same as bottoms twin and so this is essentially saying it doesn't pay to stockpile can't use this much anyway but this is the serious part that says tissue papers are made up South American materials and medical grade masks are made out of domestic materials they're completely different materials but because this is like hilarious absolutely viral so this reached far more people than the original conspiracy theory and people who look at it and laugh about it tend not to share the original conspiracy theory anymore because their anger or outrage has been channeled into good humor, good fun and by making himself literally the butt of the joke we inoculated vaccinated the idea market against such conspiracy theories and this is what we do all the time because you see in each ministry we have a team of participation officers and who engages training hashtags and so on and professional comedians too and so this is a spokes dog a very cute Shiba Inu of the Minister of Health and Welfare and the dog literally lives is a companion animal with the participation officer of the Ministry of Health and Welfare so what they do is that after each 2 p.m. press conference they walk home which is just a couple blocks away and take new fresh photos of the dog and say for physical distancing when you're outdoor please keep two Shibas away if you're indoor please keep three Shibas away otherwise wear a mask and remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing and wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand this is very carefully crafted because it appeals to rational self-interest especially because this was rolled out in very early like February where the airborne transmission or encyclptomantic transfer these are not that well understood but everyone understand intuitively if you wear a mask it's far less likely that you will touch your face with unwashed hands so it links hand sanitation to mask use in a way that people will willingly share voluntarily share without appealing to collectivist ideas like protecting each others respecting each other and so on and so after this meme gets rolled out people who queue in a line to get medical grade mask do wear it all the time and it's much easier for them to remind one another so this is what we call the Taiwan motto and this concludes the first section of this webinar and you can look at Taiwan can help that us for more material to support this part the digital social innovation part of counter pandemic now before we move on to counter infodemic I would like to switch back and take maybe some questions Sure, Audrey that was excellent and for those of us including myself who don't have the good fortune of being in Taiwan I have to ask this culture the culture of Taiwan must have lent itself to the ability to create this fast, fair and fun approach because it seems extremely human to address the humor side of individuals at such a serious time so can you talk a little bit about the culture in Taiwan and how the government as well as the people are willing to be fast, fair and fun at a very critical time? Certainly, I think there are two main reasons the first is that we remember 30 years old and older remember SARS in 2003 and when SARS first hit Taiwan there was I think 73 SARS related deaths we had to barricade an entire hospital unannounced the municipalities were saying completely different things than the central government there was a panic buying of masks and so on so because of that we institutionalized the CECC, the communication plan and things like that in law in 2004 in the communicable disease control act, the CDCA while the memory of SARS was still fresh so that means that when people invoke ideas like for example, where medical grade must protect oneself against our wash hands there is already a well we call societal inoculation understanding at least by people who are above 30 years old that this is actually necessary and this actually works so that's what other countries are now going through everyone now understand that mask is useful and it protects oneself against one's unwashed hands so I think it's really important that people around the world institutionalize as we did in 2004 whatever measures that people take in a time of crisis into the institution so by the time SARS 3.0 comes whether it's next year or a decade from now judge people still feel this calmness because we never declare a state of emergency this is the second cultural reason people who are above 40 years old myself not included yet above 40 years old remembered the martial law and in the martial law basically administration do whatever and the legislature doesn't really have interpolation or oversight power because it's essentially a soft authoritarianism so in any case what I'm trying to get to is that in Taiwan we do not declare a state of emergency if we can help it we don't do lockdown if we can help it if we don't do censorship we can help it because people collectively remember how bad it was under the martial law and so we have to make humor work because that's literally the only more viral emotion than outrage on the public social media if you do not have the power to censorship so because of that we have to develop digital public infrastructure and we do not rely on say Facebook the more anti-social corner of social media instead we cultivate the pro-social social media such as PTT so that we can have a conversation in a like a public park or the town hall the digital equivalent of such instead of the digital equivalent of I don't know nightclubs selling addictive drinks with private bouncers and things like that so a emphasis on digital public infrastructure is also important. Excellent. I have a follow-up question to that so it's obvious that there have been milestones throughout the culture that have caused a recognition, a moment of recognition and then there has been change that has happened and been executed it's the sustainability of those changes that feel so impressive so like you had mentioned people who are 30, people who are 40 but yet it seems like it's permeated throughout the entire culture regardless of age can you talk a little bit about how those changes have sustained themselves until now so that you never have to call state of emergency it's always this is we're ready for it we're prepared for it. Yes, that's an excellent question. Of course the cute Shiba Inu transcends age boundaries it's very popular with very young people too so that's definitely one thing we have a communication strategy that is predicted on getting the people the power to remix such messages that is to say we make the memes that the things that are funny but we do not restrict indeed we encourage people to do better alternatives such as the mask rationing map that is a culture of what we call the social sector of people caring and seeing maybe a PDF file of daily mask rationing status and that's neither accessible nor fun so people will dedicate their time to make it more fun I think the trick here is that we need to amplify the voices and the contribution of such social sector technologists in real time if we have to wait for a year which is actually short by procurement cycle times in order to take their ideas into public infrastructure then people lose interest but if we use what we call Agile strategy so that people who suggest better ideas like MP Goh Hongan who suggests a better distribution method gets their idea incorporated next Thursday because we deploy every Thursday so anytime anyone have a good idea we just say okay we'll implement that next Thursday so this fast rapid response I think is also important to make this culture sustainable and we're committed to it not only in the participation offices but also in the national regulations for national open government plan and things like that and we're quite fortunate that this is supported by all the four major parties Intel is one of very few things that they all agree on Excellent and my last question do you feel there's an underlying trust among the community, each other with government that allows for these types of activities to flourish? Definitely and I think the government should trust the people the people may or may not trust the government that's entirely fine but if the government does not trust the people if we say we only do the auditing ourself we only do the visualization ourself we only do the PPE rationing ourself just blindly trust us then it's actually showing a distrust to the people and to give no trust is to get no trust so I think the main thing about trust is that it's earned it's a trustworthiness relationship that is earned every time anyone checks on their phone a mask distribution experience by swiping the national health card and actually seeing it's decreased by two or three or nowadays 10 it's increased and anytime that anyone calls 1922 more than 97% gets picked up immediately I think we maintain 95 even on the height of the cost and again by getting their concerns explained in a way that they could remember and share to other people that also increase trustworthiness and I think it's not by a blind trust but by a relational like literally every minute every 30 seconds increase of trust that's piecemeal but increase over time Excellent, thank you so much for entertaining those questions All right, there's a couple of questions in the Q&A I've asked, yeah, I've been corporate I just see the question count So if there's no other questions I will move on to the next section Okay, excellent All right, so the next section pertains to counter infodemic The infodemic is not limited to pandemic or health related things Indeed, we face a lot of disinformation in the specifically 2018 mirror election and after 2018, we started this triple two principle and nowadays on average, we get a clarification a funny clarification from the competent authority from the ministry, 16 minutes on average after each training disinformation or misinformation that's detected online So this is one example When Premier Soudengcheng first implemented this triple two principle there was a popular rumor that says perming your hair will be subject to $1 million fine if you do it multiple times a week starting next week This is of course not true But then Premier Soud wrote out this meme that says it's not true I may be bald now, he said but I will not punish people with hair because I used to have hair Okay, that's funny And a small print that says what we introduced is a labeling requirement for hair products that takes effect on July 2021 So it's not punishing customers And then the Premier as he looks now says however, if you keep perming your hair many times a week while it's not going to damage your bank account it's going to damage your hair Just look at me for what would happen to you So again, by making himself literally but of the joke well, not literally this time This is very viral If you type in like perming hair, fine, whatever you will see this meme instead of the conspiracy theory So the conspiracy theory was stopped I think just two hours after its original introduction So this is what we call humor over rumor But how do we get a dashboard of what's going to trend as disinformation at any given time? Well, certainly not by surveillance or censorship So we rely on the community Specifically, we rely on another Gov0 or G0V project called Covax Covax for collaborative fact-checking introduce a function in the popular line which is like WhatsApp end-to-end encrypted chat channel so that people can learn, press and forward it like it as a spam It's just like flagging your incoming email as spam which is then sent to a spam house so that incoming unsolicited email from that source will send to your junk mailbox and people's junk mailbox instead of inbox this does the same to the end-to-end chat messages because when the R value is high it first permeates all the end-to-end encrypted channels before it gets into the more public corner of social media, such as Facebook And so because of this, if we can't attack it when it's still in kind of incubating phase before it mutates into something even more deathly or more viral then we can't develop vaccines quick enough So by people flagging things all the time, voluntarily they get sent the most trending ones because at any given time there's only like three or four trending conspiracy theories because the mental bandwidth is limited in social media the Taiwan Fact Check Center, Michael Penn and there's many international Fact Check Center professional journalists, members, along with volunteers they start fact-checking it and then roll out this notice and public notice reports to clarify the issue So that's how we get the first-hand responses the immediate responses And also for advertisements which are not quite the viral disinformation it's basically manipulated by money then we treat it as campaign donations especially around election time So our National Audit Office in 2018 started after a long time demonstration of zero people The National Audit Office did publish in open data the political contributions dataset so that anyone could actually see for themselves how likely that their preferred candidate has spent campaign expenditure and so on to the social media campaigns and especially one that used targeted advertisement And because this is a norm that's set by the social sector we turned and talked to Facebook saying that you need to do the same for the political and social advertisement during election because if you don't it's essentially bypassing the campaign donation laws that restrict foreign sponsor propaganda during election time and because they face I guess social sanction if they don't implement it they did implement it by 2019 which is just in time for not only the COVID but also our presidential election in 2020 So there was almost no dark patterns compared to the 2018 election in 2020 and we were able then to share the clarifications the real-time clarifications for all the political charged disinformation campaigns and reach people in real time So I will use one particular example that said and I quote Hong Kong sucks compensation exposed killing a police earns you up to 20 million that's an actual viral disinformation in 2019 November Now the fact checkers look at the photo and see actually is a real photo by Reuters but the Reuters photo on the left said nothing about being paid it just said there's teenage protesters in Hong Kong which is shaping of course to be the deciding issue in our presidential election January 2020 but this alternate caption though is something else entirely and the fact checkers trace it very quickly back to the Weibo account of the Chang'an Sword which is the communist party's central political and law unit in the PRC and so because of that we immediately will not take down because we don't take down things put a public notice out so anyone sharing this on say Facebook see immediately that this message is stay sponsored propaganda it's not what original Reuters photo click here to learn more so instead of shutting down its distribution we encourage the distribution of the virus but we remove the toxicity of it by public notice which is exactly how vexing works and so it serves as a vexing of the mind so people understand there is information manipulation going on there's many cases such as during the election there was this disinformation that says the CIA is always the CIA made invisible inks to make Dr. Tsai Ing-wen win regardless of who you vote again this is countered with more transparency by making sure anyone in any party can witness the talent counting process and take films of such counting process with their own apps in the two leading parties they have apps that gets reported in real time in all the counting ballot boxes we make sure that people see the talent station before their own eyes and trust the YouTubers that are of course of the same party as they are so the counts in the two major parties are very very close and that removes any potential for this conspiracy theory to grow because if there is an invisible ink surely the YouTuber will have filmed it and finally during the COVID we do have not only panic buying but also phishing attacks this is a cybersecurity attack that says if you share this and paste your contact number or whatever then you will get contacted to get a free box of masks this is the height of the shortage in February 6 again people get computer virus not masks if they share their personal information with the spot again this is cleared up by the real time open API so people can see that the reasoning is fair and with acceptable time opportunity cost they too can get medical grade masks to protect themselves and so on so this is essentially treating the infodemic as a pandemic to achieve universal health coverage by having the primary schoolers not attending media literacy classes but media competence classes where they're not just the viewers or readers but active producers of media they too can fact check the three presidential candidates during their debates and public forums and we do have a lot of people who are not even 18 participating in such media competence efforts and then we also develop the kind of vaccination the notice and public notice of the vaccines of the mind humor is a vaccine too and we find communicable diseases by banning foreign sponsored propaganda and advertisements just as we ban campaign donations by foreign parties during our election or democratic process so this is broadly speaking applying the same strategy fast fair fund not on pandemic but on infodemic so this is my second section and I'll again pause a little bit to take questions first and foremost I wanted to I just wanted to say how impressed I am by the practical approach that you have I mean so unbelievably smart practical is not the right word it's just when you speak and you describe the processes that you have it makes so much sense that it's hard to imagine why everyone doesn't copy and use these approaches so that's my question why not? First of all I think many more authoritarian policies do see infodemic and pandemic as a way to expand the administration power through state of emergency and so that so that explains why our nearby jurisdictions don't always copy this way because this way is essentially empowering the social sector and the administration will not grow because the third party fact checkers and so on get legitimacy the state also gets fact check all the time and other policies may not like that but in other liberal democracies and social democracies I think the main thing here is that unless you have like in Taiwan broadband as a human right there's a argument that says by embracing digital democracy digital social sector and digital public infrastructure are we not excluding the people who are not enjoying broadband access who don't have the capacity to participate online and things like that and the answer, the Taiwanese answer is of course anywhere in Taiwan even on the top of Taiwan almost 4,000 meters high if you don't have 10 megabits per second in just 16 US dollars a month it's my fault, personally it's my fault and so I think this equality and equity in broadband access and media competence need to happen is a precondition for the inclusivity to happen and that will make it part of the democracy and that enables us then to think of democracy as a type of social technology but not before so a clever design of spectrum auction rules and things like that to make sure that people do enjoy broadband as a human right I think that's a precondition Okay, and then you spoke about digital competency what is the type of curriculum that is offered to individuals to have digital competence versus digital literacy? Yes, the digital competence pertains to share more, to curate more and to produce more data so this is for example we often talk about AI and I prefer the term assistive intelligence AI like fire, right? It batch processes what we inefficiently process but it's also dangerous it could cause risks and so on fire hazards but the way we teach fire use in democracies at least is to teach very young people like six years old cooking classes sharing their recipes and so on on the safe use of fire for public benefit it's not just to restrict the fire use to a few elites and so on so in Taiwan many primary schools use for example the air box the air box is a very inexpensive component of the climate science and what it does is that it shares the PM 2.5 measurement on a NBIOT or LORA zero G network to a distributed ledger so before we had the Musk map Gavzero first had this air pollution map and thousands now I think tens of thousands of primary schoolers maintained air box all contribute to a better understanding of the air quality in Taiwan so that we can make better environmental arguments I guess and deliberations and that means that people do not blindly trust the environmental protection authority which at the beginning of the air box experiment I think only had less than 100 measurement boxes so that people are more legitimate when they produce more in a data collaborative and the data collaborative again I think teaches the young students to be a global citizen to contribute to sustainable development and then imbue in them this idea of data for public good and that's just one example of the digital competence programs that we roll out as part of the curriculum starting 2019 Excellent All right, thank you so much Any other questions before? That's about it for now, yeah Okay, excellent All right, so on the third part I want to talk a little bit about the assistive intelligence before wrapping up So when Dr. Tsai when first became president in 2016 she said and I quote Before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values but now democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values so from this opposition to co-creation that is the key to think beyond for example environmental sustainability on one side and economy on the other scientific innovation on one side and social equity on the other instead of framing them as trade-offs we always ask a different set of questions we ask even our different positions are there some common values? And this is my office by the way literally my office the social innovation lab at the heart of Taipei and we always have co-creation meetings here because this public art by people with that syndrome when you step into it you automatically become more creative and this fosters for example people who work on self-driving vehicles instead of working on trucks or large metros we first work on this very small tricycles they are very slow they can't hurt people and people walk by and maybe carrying flowers and so on because there's a nearby flower market I encountered a elderly couple who look at this and ask me minister what they're doing with those shopping carts I'm like this is not a shopping cart you step on it you tell you where to go it's a self-driving tricycle and they're like no this looks like a shopping cart and we have this very long journey throughout the jungle flower market I want to change it so that I can shop flowers put into the basket and it can form a platoon and follow us as we shop and by the end of that I'm okay for the bicycle to help someone else so this is a sharing not ownership model well the makers from MIT who did those open data open software and open hardware self-driving tricycles certainly didn't anticipate this need but we did work with the nearby type attack people in a couple of hackathons to make that actually work and for that to work they have to for example look at how people interact in real time in the flower market they have to signify where they are following and things like that so this is a co-domestication this is designed by the people who will benefit from this technology not the technologist and we always discover common values despite the initial different positions if we make sure everyone can participate in the co-creation process which fosters an effective partnership now we have an institutionalized way to do this this is called presidential hackathon every year we select five teams and the five teams are always tri-sectoral social, public and private sector that work on a common issue for example last year we didn't have any typhoon in Taiwan so saving fresh water become very important and turns out that in the Jilong region a small region when this pilot started it took on average two months before a water pipe leak happens and someone with this hearing equipment listened to those pipes and so we really need to shorten the two months into well two days after three months of co-creation people did an assistive intelligence AI chatbot so the repair crew can wake up and see the line bot and the bot will tell them what are the three most likely 70% chance leaking places near them so they don't have to tour in vain they can just like the mass availability map I guess go to the place that actually need human intervention and they want this trophy which is shaped like Taiwan with a micro projector underneath and if you turn on the micro projector well it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing you the trophy so this is a self-describing trophy and what this trophy represents is not money there's no money in the presidential hackathon but whatever small scale pilot the civic technologist did if they get a promise from the president it will turn into a presidential promise it will get implemented in the next 12 months using whatever budget personnel or even law changes that's necessary so this is essentially presidential executive order power as hackathon award so the selection of the cases of the project is very important we need to make sure it doesn't sacrifice anyone but we tap into existing data collaborative such as as I already introduced the air box initiative and ask these civic technologists if there is one budget item, one legislation one personnel change that will make your life much easier what would that be and can you prove it in a small scale that it will actually work with your theory of change so more often than not using a new voting method which I don't have time to go into called quadratic voting more than 10 million active participants in our national participation platform join GOVTW collectively decide the top teams that mix into the incubation period of presidential hackathon which covers marine debris fraud detection like safe and affordable housing and so on and all teams need to correspond to a specific sustainable Google target there's 169 of them so this ensures this is also of public interest to the world indeed the water savior team eventually went to Wellington to New Zealand to also help their water company to cultivate such assistive intelligences and when we select some place for pilot testing we always consult the people there indeed we ask the people what are the agenda that you would like such social innovations to solve first and so I personally tour around Taiwan every month or so in addition to the weekly Wednesday office hour in the social innovation center I also tour around Taiwan so that I listen to the people sometimes with indigenous language cultural translators but in the social innovation lab the central government people 12 ministries all are in this place we use telecommunication to weave the very role place and the central type of city together so that we respond to the here and now because then the Minister of Interior for example wouldn't say I understand your concern but I have to talk to the Minister of Health and Welfare for the Minister of Health and Welfare is literally sitting next to them right so we just had a large gathering of all participation officers around 100 people in the social innovation lab last week and this is a horizontal network that ensure that all the local issues that needs this cross sectoral solutions reach the competent authorities in a way that's uncompressed that is literally face-to-face communication instead of just as A4 papers either as documents or as slideshows which tend to over abstract oversimplify the issue and this is how we use teleconferencing to ensure a responsive and inclusive decision making the public servants love this arrangement because they don't have to travel physically and also across the screen people behave much more civilly than the face-to-face communications sometimes anyway and so when we do have a sandbox that's selected by the presidential hackathon and try out for the first time after three months or half a year how do we know whether it actually makes good sense how do we know whether the people there likes the idea what does that even mean if they like it we can of course design some surveys some polls but that of course reflects the bias of the person designing the survey so we use instead a weekly survey a new survey system called POLIS and the name is P-O-L that I asked is now a national public infrastructure at polis.gov.tw after we did a cyber security audit and so on so the POLIS system first used in 2015 is an assistive intelligence conversation tool this is a real map that you're seeing in 2015 the first time we're using it to deliberate the UberX case at the time the ministries of economy, of taxation and of finance transportation all have very different views on the UberX phenomena some ministries think it's geek economy some people think it's platform economy some people thought it's sharing economy sharing time at least and there really is no way for us to map the emerging technology to what's existing in the law so the law obviously should change but how should it change so we ask people to use their phone and this is my friends and families my social media friends and the clusters are the different takes their different feelings they have on the UberX phenomena in 2015 we first share all the facts the open data real-time open data on transportation and things like that but using POLIS we ask for people's feelings and this is important because there's no right or wrong about feelings around the same fact I can feel happy you can feel upset that's all fine and once we give people sufficient time to reflect on each other's feelings ideas will emerge and the best ideas are the one that take care of most people's feelings which we then turn it into regulation so for example this and this is the pro-social part of social media you will see a fellow citizen's feeling and I said I think passenger liability insurance is very very important regardless of whether UberX hires professional drivers only you can't agree if you do you move toward me if you disagree you move farther away from me but there is no reply button and with no reply button there's no room for trolls to grow there's no way to make a personal attack to me if you don't like my idea or my feeling you can propose another one for other people to vote on and the magical thing is in the situation like this in a pro-social conversation method there is maybe like five ideological divisive statements that polarize the population but far more people agree with their neighbors most of the time on most of the things and this is not a Taiwanese culture thing this conversation is a civic assembling in online as a virtual town hall in Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA and regardless of whether people identify as Democrats or Republican people all agree that the existing STEM education which stands for science, technology, engineering and math need to become STEAM the arts are an important part of it because it's creative it's part of the competency a more diversified broadband broadband is human rights it's again a cross-partisan thing and there's far more of these things than the national media or social media or anti-social media would lead us to believe and so once we do have this rough consensus we would then invite all the like Uber drivers, taxi drivers and so on and say, well this is the rough consensus of the people and we need to make this regulation happen and which is why Uber has been legal for a while now it's illegal taxing the Q-taxing in Taiwan but they never undercut existing meters and the multi-purpose taxi law also benefits the existing co-ops and line taxi and so on so this is like a KPI a measurement of progress that's crowdsourced it's crowdsourced agenda setting that's what enable us to assist the collective intelligence or ACI and turns the societal and the business concerns not in polarizing directions by inco-creating directions so and I guess this is the conclusion of the webinar I would emphasize that even though there are 17 global goals my training and my focus is on the 17s which is the partnership for the goals and what we're now doing is to make availability of reliable data effective partnerships and open innovation work so that people with different sides not only come to common values but can innovate to foster those values without leaving anything behind so that's the end of my material and let's take some more questions sure how do you think that the IT infrastructure under your leadership has contributed to containing COVID-19 spread? mm-hmm yeah there's a couple things first it's an assistive role as I explained the most important technologies are definitely soap, hand sanitizers, vaccines and digital is a supporting role but the digital supporting role is important because it gets people into this sense of calmness of not being distracted by conspiracy theories of getting what they need to tell their friends and families from the leading epidemiologist indeed we have our then vice president Dr. Chen Jianren record a massive online open course on epidemiology for he is the textbook author of the epidemiology in Taiwan so by having a VP and a leading epidemiologist giving people time and a kind of massive online open university lecture and so on we make sure that's the truth the facts, the science spreads faster than rumors so that's the first contribution and the other contribution is that we also make sure to use technologies to simplify the chores that one need to go through for example in ensuring home quarantine ensuring the reporting of people who need to stay in the same place for 14 days and take care of themselves for seven more days and so on and we use for example the digital fence which is a SIM card telecommunication tower enforced triangulation method that does not read for example WhatsApp or email communication because it's not an app what it does is repurposing existing data collection points which is the telephone towers sending advanced warnings for earthquakes and flood evacuation and turning it into the same location based warning system for people breaking out of quarantine and so people understand that already there's no a new cybersecurity or privacy touch points that we invent during the pandemic so that again makes people feel that even though the 14 days is kind of I guess painful but there's Netflix Brabant as human right helps with that and it's applied with equity okay so throughout today's webinar you've mentioned conspiracy theories quite a bit yeah ten times from conspiracy theories to digital tools technology infrastructure healthcare what do you think has compromised the efforts of other countries most is it conspiracy theory because it drives misinformation is it lack of technology lack of digital tools what would you say what do you think is the most prevalent reason I think it's the government not trusting the citizens enough that's the root cause if the government issues top down well lockdown take down shut down orders without people understanding the underlying epidemiological reasons the underlying science and so on people are going to fill in the void anyway that's what I refer to as a void of facts and that's what makes it right for the conspiracy theories to grow so the conspiracy theories are a symptom it's not a cause by itself I think the cause is the lack of trust from the government to the citizens and if we work for the people but without working with the people then the people always have more information sources that feels closer than the government and in Taiwan we realize we can't beat them we must join them so we always work with the people instead of for the people indeed in civic technologies like the air box map and the mask map we work after the people mm-hmm excellent I don't have any other questions at this time but Audrey this was so very enlightening what a great Sunday night I did not expect to have such a great time being here I've learned so much so many great comments coming through is there anything else that you'd like to share even if it's some humor to leave I'll write something that explains these sustainable goals nowadays the SDGs are more well understood but back in 2015 when I declared these are my work description of my job the HR people said ministry have to write it in plain language nobody memorizes 1718, 1718 or 1716 so I wrote a prayer, a poem that translates these SDGs into I guess plain language and I'll share it now which is also pinned on my Twitter it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear the singularity is near let's always remember the plurality is here thank you for listening and live long and prosper thank you so very much this was such a treat all of you who have joined us today thank you for your time I know that you have learned so much today after the session is over you will receive a survey so for those of you who are joining and looking to get contact hours for today can complete that survey and we will make sure to follow up with you Audrey, anytime you wanna do this count me in, this was just wonderful excellent, thank you for the great questions have a great start of the week thank you all for being part of this event and we look forward to seeing you all again soon thank you thank you, bye bye