 Minister Tan, welcome to the 2021 Jean-Yves Rivard Conference. It's a pleasure to have you with us. For the benefit of our audience, would you first briefly describe how COVID-19 has been addressed in Taiwan and how's the situation right now just for the benefit of the audience? Certainly. So in Taiwan, we managed to counter the pandemic this time with no lockdown and also the countering the infodemic associated with no takedown. And to date, there's less than 1,000 confirmed cases, the vast majority of which are imported cases detected at a border quarantine. And to date, there's been 10 deaths so far. The mood is quite post-pandemic actually. People do wear a mask and wash their hands and observe physical distancing, but otherwise it's been months since we had a local outbreak. And so I would say that this time we successfully played a SARS playbook that we created during 2003-2004 and I'm happy to share it. Yeah, thank you. Would you tell us after the onset of the pandemic how and when has the digital ministry stepped in and what kind of digital tools were deployed? Perhaps you can provide some examples. Certainly. What I think digital is useful is when it's assistive. That's to say of all the technologies, I think soap, hand sanitizers, mask, these are the actual useful technologies. But digital can assist people's understanding and access to these more important chemical and physical technologies. For example, the earliest memory I had around COVID this time is around a mask shortage. I personally went to four or five different stores only to be told that, hey, our mask has sewed out just five minutes ago or 10 minutes ago. And this is not just me, it's literally everyone because back in January, the Taiwanese people, 23 million people have access only to less than 2 million domestically produced medical grade masks a day. So we invented this way of rationing that coupled with the civic technologies contribution, let everybody see very clearly which pharmacy near them still have masks available. And as they queue in line using the universal healthcare IC card to buy some masks, the people queuing after them can see with their phone in real time every 32nd updated that the pharmacist is indeed reporting this to the National Health Insurance Agency. So this calms everybody down as we ramp up the production to around 20 million masks a day. And the digital also assist people to wear the mask correctly. We have a cute spoke stock, the Shiba Inu named Song Chai that says very early on, wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands so you won't do this. And this is a brilliant digital message because it speaks to rational self-interest. At that time, remember early in 2020, we still don't know much about airborne transmission. The asymptomatic transfer is still being discussed and debated and whether masks are useful to these scenarios are up to scientific conversation. But a mask protect yourself against your own unwashed hands, that's just a fact. So people would remind each other to protect one another and when the cute dog later on discussed, for example, you need to observe physical distancing, the dog said, when your outdoor keep two Shibas away, when your indoor keep three Shibas away and so on. And people remember it very clearly and carefully share the message and they wouldn't be captured by divisiveness, conspiracy theories or outrage. That's another way that digital was helpful. So I guess that within this initiative, you had different forms of collaboration with public health experts and officials and what kind of collaboration you set in place between these ministries or with health experts Yes. Our CECC or the Central Epidemic Command Center is an institution designed in 2004 right after SARS to get all the ministries, all the municipalities, all the city government officials in the same building so that every time they agree on something, the commander, the health minister Chen Shizhong would announce it on that day at 2 p.m. pronto. So for more than 100 days, people just watched these 2 p.m. press conferences and my contribution mostly is to make sure that people who have ideas can speak out and get amplified to these press conferences. For example, there was a professor that invented a way to reuse traditional rice cookers without adding any water to dry steam and kill the virus without killing the musk. So the musk could be reused when there was a shortage. So I personally filmed such a procedure and redubbed it in a lot of languages. Or there was a young boy last April who caught saying, hey, you're rationing our musk, but all I get, my family get is pink ones and all the boys in my class have medical musk that are navy blue. So I don't want to wear pink to school. People will laugh at me and then very much 24 hours after he caught all the medical officers in the CCC press conference regardless of gender, well, war pink. And the minister can even say pink panther was a childhood hero. So the boy become the most hip boy in the class only he has the color that the heroes and heroes heroes wear and these anecdotes encourage people to innovate more and deepen our democracy even during a pandemic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you were trained as a computer scientist. So how and where does a computer scientist learn about co-design strategies and the importance of looking at ways people use these tools in real life? So how come you've discovered co-design? Yeah, my subfield in computer science is computer language design and social interaction design. And these two subfields within the computer science larger field are perhaps the ones most close to human beings. When we design a computer language, this is not to get something done immediately. Rather, it's about getting people a set of tools that they can think with and communicate with. So a language designer need to be humble and empower the people wielding the language to be the true expression creators, poets, storytellers, and so on in the language that we design. And social interaction design is about instead of like radio or television, just one person talking to millions of people, our job is to design the space upon which millions of people may listen to one another, listening at scale. Again, this calls for a more humble, more participatory way of working with, say, professional comedians. That's a nice segue to the next question because as you are aware, misinformation is a real issue from a public health perspective. So would you tell us a bit about the initiative humor against rumor? What were the goals, who contributed, and how has civil society responded to that initiative? Certainly. So while we did not have much conspiracy theories around mask use, or 5G and Tina, around that, thanks to the mask availability map, we did have some misinformation, some of which intentional. So this information about, say, and I quote, the state is confiscating all tissue paper producers' material to make mask. So we'll run out of tissue paper soon. So go out and buy, unquote. This turns out to be started by tissue paper resellers, go figure. And that really caused a panic buying. But when we detect such a rumor is trending, have a higher than one basic production rate, the R value, the reproduction value, we roll out a vaccine of the mind against such virus of the mind. And what's a vaccine of the mind? It's just a rumor. Because when people laugh about something, they don't feel this outrage that gets channeled into discrimination or into a hate speech anymore. They instead laugh about it and talk about the facts. So our premier, Su Zhenchang, wrote this out just two hours after the tissue paper conspiracy. He first widows his bottom a little bit. So it's a very large font. It's a wordplay because in Mandarin, a bottom twin sounds the same as stockpiling twin. So this is essentially saying, well, you couldn't use that much tissue paper anyway. And then a table is saying, tissue paper are made out of South American materials while PPPs are made out of domestic material. They're plastic products. There's no way that the state can confiscate one and make another. And this is hilarious. This gets shared much more widely in the traditional conspiracy theory. And when people laugh about it, they can't unsee the table or like the premier, the fact that he made himself literally butt of the joke. And then people didn't panic by anymore. People come down, remind one another, it's not the same material. And the conspiracy theory doesn't have a ground to breed. And so these ideas of humor over rumor enables us to tap into the collective intelligence and storytellers without encroaching on the freedom of speech. That's wonderful. We still have a couple of minutes left. And what do you think, what do you believe are the key lessons at this stage in the pandemic with respect to the drawbacks and also the advantages of digital tools? Would you like to, because I know that in such initiative that are where we need to go fast and respond to any issues that are emerging, there might be also not only ingredients for success, but also ways to either avoid or end all the failures. Yes. The daily press conference is essential and I would encourage people around the world to think about how quickly you can admit the failures or mistakes and how quickly can you really learn the lessons that people have already learned, maybe their frontline workers, maybe their pharmacists, maybe they're just a young boy not wanting to wear pink and how quickly you can integrate their thoughts and ideas into the decision-making process. My way of doing digital development is called agile, so it calls for a fixed, like seven days at a time, spring cycle. So every time anyone criticizes about say our mask distribution, for example, we had an MP Gaohong An, she was VP of data analytics of Foxconn Group, so she knows something about data. She looked at the map and say, hey minister, you think it's fine that the pharmacists overlap almost completely with the distribution of population centers, but there is a bias, she said, to the health minister. On the rural places, even if people have access to the pharmacy on the same physical distance, the public transportation, the time cost is not the same. They may spend up to five times more time on public transportation to get to the nearby pharmacy and by the time they get there maybe the pharmacy has already closed. So there is bias, but the bias could not be seen if you just overlap the two map layers. And so this data bias, which reflects a, I guess, Taipei-centric bias, it's true, right? It's there in our minds. And so the minister didn't defend the process at all. And he just said, legislator, teach us. And so along with the open-street map community, MP Gaohong An's idea did make into the next week's sprint we changed the distribution algorithm. We also worked with Convenience Store to enable pre-ordering and 24-hour pickup so that there's no urban and rural discrepancy when it comes to access to PPEs. But if we had not published the real-time open data open API every 30 seconds, it's impossible to make such an evidence-based interpolation and then co-creation. So I guess the lesson is to admit your mistakes very quickly and say, by next week, your idea will become the policy. So it takes humility, but it also takes capacity to respond. So do you have thousands of data scientists working with you? What's the... Yes. On the F-Zero initiative G-Zero-V there's, I think, at the moment around 9,000 people participating in what we call forking the government. Fork in open-source culture means taking some things already there, taking it into a different direction without writing what's done off, and then with the help of being merged back sometime in the future. So it's a sense of exploration for all the government digital services that's something that G-O-V the T-W, the G-Zero people could fork that into something like the G-Zero V, the T-W. So just by changing O to a zero on your browser bar you get into the shadow government that works maybe better that's a viable alternative and the mask availability map and so on are developed that way. And when we see that these experiments actually work better, we in the government, instead of beating them we'll just join them and merging this contribution which is always open-source free of copyright patent restrictions, we'll just merge it back into digital service for the public sector. This is what we call a people-public-private partnership. That's wonderful. I would like to ask you one more question if I may. From a Canadian perspective we may I may believe that Taiwan was already pretty much digitalized before the pandemic so I would believe that Taiwanese are very proficient users of digital tools so is my assumption warranted and does it make a difference? We have moved beyond this idea of being users of digital tools we now teach instead of digital literacy or media literacy in basic education we talk about digital and media competence meaning that instead of users people are creators and producers of digital tools all the primary scholars have access to high-speed GPU computation with broadband as human rights they can try their own AI models which are our generation's fire they batch process cognitive functions just as fire used to batch process digestive functions and just like fire which is sometimes dangerous it did destroy entire cities AI had its dark sides too but we didn't restrict the use of AI to just trained professionals but we teach six years old how to use them responsibly and also within safety parameters with ethics just like we teach six years old how to cook how to use fire responsibly and share their recipes so I think a competence-based education framework in addition to broadband as human rights is the key to the spirit of co-creation Thank you so much Minister would you like to close this conversation with some thoughts or words of wisdom I'll just quote my favorite Canadian singer-songwriter Leona Cohen in his words ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there is a crack a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in Thank you for your great questions professor live long and prosper Thank you so much for bringing light to this conference Yeah, it's a great way to start a day