How to empower citizens so that they have the skill to be active democratic participants? How to digitally transform the government so that people can participate beyond elections?

That’s like two sides of the same tunnel, so to speak. You do so by preserving the value of inclusion. That is to say, instead of excluding people along the way, you want to include people who could not participate before, all the while protecting their data, their dignity, and their privacy.

Taiwan has done quite well. There’s a five-minute film, six minutes really, called “Digital Social Innovation – Taiwan Can Help.” You can find it on my Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube page, or I can send it to you afterwards.

What is your data strategy, and how it applies around contact-tracing in the COVID?

The main focus here is about how what we call digital competence, not just literacy, which assumes that their readers are viewers, but competence as fellow creators and producers effects policy change in Taiwan. That’s your focus.

Let’s start with the empowerment. There is a really good example if you can type in your browser. I don’t know whether you can browse that website but probably can. It’s called taiwancanhelp.us. That’s one website.

There’s another website called taiwancanhelp.com.tw. These are the two websites, that if you have with you open, that best demonstrates how citizen empowerment works. The taiwancanhelp.com.tw has an English mode that you can talk into and taiwancanhelp.us is entirely in English.

The point here is that both websites are crowdsourced. These are not government endeavors.

These are endeavors that are enabled by the social sector, by people who have higher legitimacy than government, because when we lifted the martial law there’s already a lot of social organizations, including co-ops and NPOs that have been focusing on regional cultivation, community building, revitalization, and so on.

They digitized before the government does. They got social legitimacy before the first presidential election. Our presidential election, which is ‘96, starts building a democratic legitimacy, but already at that time the social sector has a lot of legitimacy and is good with digital tools, also.

Always, in Taiwan, the social sector makes the calls, makes the directions, and it’s the government working to implement those social sector demands or social sector prototypes. This is a very different direction from your typical public-private partnership, where the public sector sets the direction and the private sector implements it.

Here the social sectors sets the direction and the public sector implements it, whether it is in the taiwancanhelp.com.tw, where you can see yesterday there was more than one million medical mask dedicated from more than 120,000 dedicators telling the Minister of Foreign Affairs that we should send more to people in need, including in Germany.

That’s the social sector thing. It’s open data. People using an app can dedicate the mask quota that they have not collected so far into this pool, either anonymously or with their real name. Again, it’s the choice by people.

People can also participate in a lot of other things, but this shows one of the prime examples of the social sector power at work.

Taiwancanhelp.us is a crowdfunded response to send a account of what if Taiwan is a full member of the WHO.

Then it shows that people around the world can save at least 10 days of time because we start inspecting flight passengers, health inspections, from Wuhan starting the first day this year, whereas the WHO did not start recommending until 10 days later or even later. Everybody can save 10 days of time if Taiwan has been a full member of the WHO and have ministerial access.

None of this thing is written by our foreign minister or things like that. It’s all crowdsourced by famous YouTubers and designers and so on. They crowdfunded a “New York Times” advertisement and things like that. It’s what they ask of us.

For example, they need more open data of the mask availability. They need more sharing of how our Central Epidemic Command Center gets the tip of the whistleblower Li Wenliang from the Taiwan equivalent of Reddit. It’s not for profit. It’s called PTT.

It’s a discussion board. It’s a collective intelligence system that then combined with the daily press conference that’s always live-streamed. All the journalists ask all the questions. We answer all of them.

It’s always translated into fun dog pictures by the Ministry of Health and Welfare spokesdog, or Zongchai, which translate, for example, social distancing. If you are indoor, you have to keep three dogs-length. If you are outdoor, you keep two dogs-length and so on. [laughs] It’s very funny. That goes viral.

It also makes it possible for everybody to treat each other as fellow students of digital epidemiology, rather than as a top-down relationship where people rely on the experts in the technocracy. That’s just a few examples that you can look in more detail in the websites. That’s the basic idea.

The idea of bridging the digital divide is done by intergenerational solidarity. We amplify the local elders. We design the mass rationing system so you can take your NHI card to your convenience store, insert it into a kiosk, pay for it at the counter, and receive nine mask the next week.

You can do it every other week. Nine mask for adults every two weeks. It’s all medical-grade mask. 10 if you’re a child.

The user testing experience is done collaboratively. I personally invited my grandma, who is 87 years old, and her friend, who is 77 years old, to be one of the first pilot testers of the user experience. They told us a lot about how to improve the digital. We always bring technology to the people instead of asking people to adapt to technology. That is how we bridge the digital divide.

On data protection, we have a Personal Data Protection Act that is loosely the same as the European one before the GDPR. We’re working with the GDPR office on adequacy. I think we’re pretty adequate except for the single independent data protection authority, but we intend to bring this act forward this year. Then we’ll probably get GDPR adequacy.

In addition to the GDPR, which mostly just talk about singular controllership, there’s a concept in GDPR called joint controllership or shared controllership. That is…I wouldn’t say ill-defined. It’s defined OK, but it’s not very much practiced, so that very few people know what does a joint controllership of data work in a real context.

In Taiwan, we have plenty of such data collaboratives. For example, the air quality crowd intelligence system, the AirBox. For example, the water quality crowd intelligence system and now the mask pharmacy availability map. All of these are people voluntarily donating their data for a public good, for the society to set a direction governed by the society.

The government only support but do not control such data collaboratives. We’re also working on new regulations and acts that enables such data collectives to thrive as a different direction than state surveillance versus capitalism surveillance. That’s for data protection.

Finally, for the tracking idea, we use triangulation from all the telecom providers voluntarily joined using what we call open algorithm. That is to say the five telecom providers do not share the raw triangulation signal strength data with each other, but rather agree to run the same statistics algorithm so that we can know, for example, where the density cannot keep the social distance. Then we publish this as open data for everybody to look.

There is no individual record. We only publish where are the most popular hotspots.

Or, for example, for people in home quarantine, the triangulation is built using the digital fence algorithm so that if they break out of the geofence, then they get a SMS. The local police or household manager do get a SMS, but not anyone else. Nor does it cross the telecom operators’ boundaries.

None of it is additionally surveillance data. All the triangulation data is already collected by the telecom operators. It is used out of purpose for home quarantine uses in a way that is constitutionally granted since the SARS epidemic.

The Constitutional Court says that if it has due process, it has a firm termination time, it is better, it is less intrusive than the physical isolation, that is to say barricade, then it is constitutional. That’s why we use the digital fence instead of bracelets or anything invasive.

We do not yet have a Bluetooth application, unlike Singapore, because there’s two weeks with no domestic cases now. We’re nowhere near community spread. It doesn’t make sense to roll out Bluetooth app at this point. That is the basic idea.

Finally, I would like to say that because all of these memes, pictures, and so on, like how to wash your hand properly, we offer them in easily sharable meme-etic ways. Even my photo is shared using CC license ShareAlike.

People are encouraged to remix, and by encouraging remix they become natural co-creators so that we can also learn how to share this message more effectively. That’s a very brief example for you to maybe ask deeper questions.

People voluntarily forming data collaboratives and governing it alongside the government, allowing government to use people’s data in a creative way. This obviously requires a deep trust from the citizenship to the capability of the government, and also to the unlikelihood for the government to use it for invasive or malicious purposes.

How did the trust come about? Please explain without using the old, which is very much not really a useful trope, of Confucianism.

Whether it’s technical or legal, or whether it is something that is rooted in the culture, Taiwan’s folk religion, the popular folk religion, is Daoist. It’s not quite Confucius…

First of all, I would say that it’s the government that trusts the people. People have a healthy mistrust in the government.

If you ask people why they wear mask they say, “That’s because we protect ourselves, and we remind each other to protect our self, because wearing a medical mask can remind yourself not to touch your mouth. It reminds you to wash your hands properly, so when we see people who do not wear a medical mask, we remind them that they need to protect themselves.

“It’s not the government’s mandate. Actually, the government, for a while, during the mass shortage, said that we should leave the medical mask to the medical workers. We will have none of it. The government should ensure everybody have medical masks.” That’s a average response from people in the street.

This says two things. First of all, it’s far more Daoist than Confucius. The Daoist idea is that the people think it’s what is natural. It’s a norm-based approach. It’s what’s natural to do.

The second thing is that it’s an interesting incentive design, because people know that medical mask mainly protect others, rationally, but intuitively people tell each other that medical mask protect themselves, in a selfish way, by reminding them self not to touch their mouth with unwashed hands, and so on. It’s a hand sanitation social signal.

Because Taiwan works on a culture where people can care for each other by reminding each other to protect them self, but not others, to protect them self, that enabled a kind of incentive design where people participate voluntarily into mass mask wearing.

Only a few people in a large crowd wearing medical mask can successfully socially signal everybody else to start putting on a mask, because they would say, “Hey, I’m reminding you to protect yourself.”

This is interesting mechanism design right there. Interesting social technology. The other thing, which is about technical or legal issue to make sure that government doesn’t overstep on its boundaries. I think most of the countries, when there’s a Freedom of Information Act, place the burden of reasonable timeframe on government to publish, for example, daily.

For example, when the pharmacies ration the mask, of course, you will want the daily statistics of how many adult and child mask each pharmacy sell every day, obviously. However, in Taiwan, the norm is for them to publish every three minutes. They actually publish three minutes.

This is very different, because when you publish daily, there is a human being, a civil servant looking at the data before it goes out, usually. They could be liable. If it’s published immediately whenever the NHI card is inserted into a pharmacy card-reading machine, then no people see it. It’s published upon collection.

If you have published upon collection, you approximate something that a distributed ledger technologies a.k.a blockchain do, which is participatory accountability. Everybody can go to a pharmacy, swipe their NHI card, and after three minutes, refresh their phone and see the number decrease by nine.

Because of that, the ledger of accountability rests on participatory confirmation, so people do not have to trust the government. People only have to trust in press freedom, because if there’s anything going wrong and abused, the freedom of press ensure that it will be amplified and the government will be held to account.

When you say ledger, do you mean blockchain?

When we say ledger, obviously we used a blockchain for its accountability purposes and not other purposes. The air quality measurement uses IOTA as one of the ledgers it uses. My personal transcript system that I’m going to publish this is using GitHub and Git as a shared ledger to host my meeting records.

It doesn’t have to be Ethereum or blockchain. It doesn’t have to be based on proof of work. When we say public ledger, it means multiple people have a copy. If people want to change the number, other people will notice, but it’s not necessarily with blockchain technology. It could be through Git or through IOTA.

How do you deal with disinformation and fake news, while preserving press freedom?

To answer the question about press freedom and disinformation, it’s important to note that we do not use the word fake news in Taiwan, because news, xinwen, and journalism, xinwen gong zuo, is the same word, basically. Journalism is literally news work or news business in Mandarin here.

If we say fake news, it’s a offense to journalists. It’s a oxymoron in Mandarin here. Because my parents are both journalists, out of filial piety, a Confucius thing, I shouldn’t be using the F word. [laughs] Disinformation, we have a legal definition. It’s intentional untruth that causes public harm. It’s a very narrow definition.

As you can see, harming the image of a minister is fine. It’s just good journalism, because it’s not public harm. You need to actually harm the public, like saying, “Give me your social media accounts and share this message, you can get a box of mask for free.” That’s disinformation, because it’s malicious. It’s spear phishing.

It’s actually sending people a computer virus instead of medical mask. It’s done for nefarious purposes. It’s basically built on the idea that the more you share, that it gets to more gullible people. It’s like scam or spam email. This is the same thing. That’s intentional, harmful to the public, untruth. For that, we have a rapid response system.

As soon as we detected that trends on the social media, we started preparing our radical transparency of mask rationing through pharmacies. At the same time, Taiwan FactCheck Center, a member of independent journalists, part of the IFC, the International Fact-Checking Network, published a clarification and rebuttal to that disinformation.

Because they work closely with social media platforms, such as LINE, Facebook, Google, PTT, and everybody who signed up on the counter-disinformation, self-regulatory idea. EU versus Disinfo is a voluntary thing, then it definitely just dialed down the virality of that message on all the participating in social media platforms.

There’s also antivirus companies such as Dr.Message from the Trend Micro, which is one of the leading antivirus companies. You can get it at getdr.com, so get doctor dot com. It’s a chatbot that you can add to your end-to-end encrypted LINE system as a friend.

If you befriend, add it as a contact to your LINE, which is like WhatsApp, it just scans all the messages sent to you and send out clarification. It’s very advanced. You can detect videos, synthetic videos, or images, as well as other scams, as well as disinformation.

If you invite that to your group chat, it also scans each incoming message and reminds people if any of them contains such malicious disinformation. Of course, it doesn’t store it on the local server. It’s just like a antivirus application. If you don’t trust it, you can download the underlying technology, such as Meiyuyi, from GitHub and compile a bot yourself.

That is how we fight disinformation through rapid response, through a funny clarification that’s rolled out at most two hours with two fun pictures, with 200 characters at most. That makes the humor more trendy than the rumor. So we enlist the press as our friend, and the press, in turn, enlists the citizenry as their friend.

During the presidential debate, for example, there was a collaborative fact-checking account with more than 1,000 people joining each one, listening to one part of the presidential debate speech and platform speech, transcribing it, finding out possible inaccuracies.

They fact-check along with the leading journalists to offer real-time fact-checks. That is important because it enabled everybody to be participatory journalists. The more journalists there are, the less likely that we will alienate from the media’s community.

Rather, when everybody can democratically become a journalist and participate in the collective fact-finding, which is journalism, then we ensure that people started learning about it from the first grade in our new curriculum rolled out last year, all the way into their 80s and 90s through community colleges.

All this relies on public participation. Are there any statistics of who is more likely to participate for the public good by sharing voluntarily their energy and time into collective policymaking and fact-finding?

The Join platform, which is the largest government-run platform, join.gov.tw, while not as important in the anti-coronavirus as the join.g0v.tw, which is the shadow government, the g0v Join with more than 7,000 civic hackers. The join.gov.tw is more about broad participation rather than deep commitment, which is what g0v is better at.

Join.gov.tw have more than 10 million unique visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan. We did run some surveys and analytics as well. Based on the surveys, the people who participate the most are people around 15 years old and people around 65 years old. There is no obvious gender or rural/urban differences.

The hypothesis is anecdotal. It’s not RCT-tested. Its anecdotal hypothesis is that the two, the very young and the very old, have more time on their hand. They care both more about sustainability.

Would you like to repeat the last part about the Join platform?

I was talking about the join.gov.tw website, which has more than 10 million visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan, whereas it’s not as much of a deep commitment as the join.g0v.tw, which has more than 7,000 civic hackers now. Some of them consider themselves civil engineers because the mask map they built is used by 10 million people also, so it qualifies as infrastructure now.

Join.gov.tw have the surveys. The survey of the 10 million visitors tells us that the most active participants are people around 15 years old and people around 65 years old. That is to say the very young and the retired. I think both have more time on their hands, both care more about sustainability, I guess, in the next generation.

For the 15-year-old, because they don’t have voting rights, this is literally the only binding way that they can participate in a civil society. They are very good at starting campaigns, at setting the directions like banning plastic straw for takeout drink of our national identity drink, the bubble tea.

That was started by a 16-years-old as a civic class assignment. It got 5,000 people in no time. We thought that it must be a seasoned environmental activist. There’s plenty of these people helping her but she’s just 16 years old, our Greta.

Instead of not going to school on Fridays, all she had to do is to sign a e-petition and then we mobilized the people who make those one-off utensils. They, in their 60s, say when they were young, they joined to produce such throw-away equipment because they want to save people from Hepatitis B. It was for public health benefit. We now know, of course, Hep B is cured now.

You don’t need throw-away utensils anymore, but it formed a habit. They started talking about maybe we can use eco-design materials, carbon-neutral even negative materials, or redesign the cup so you don’t need a straw anymore, and so on. It became again yet another of intergenerational solidarity. That’s the rough profile.

Three questions. The first is about digital competence and how it connects to civic education?

The second is, how does it make it cool for young people to work for the government and for public policy in general?

The third is, is there additional follow-up questions that, in addition to join.g0v.tw, are there other places for us to direct our questions or our interviews to?

I’ll address them one by one.

The first one, in Taiwan, the core curriculum separates the three core competencies, that is to say autonomy, interaction, as well as the common good, into nine aspects. One of the aspect is the use of digital technologies and media competency. Media competency and digital competency is one and the same.

As I said, we took a position where the young people are more active media producers. In Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right. Anybody can enjoy for 16 euros a month unlimited 4G connection even if you’re on the top of Taiwan’s peak, the Yushan Mountain, almost 4,000 meters high. If you don’t have good reception on 4G, it’s my fault.

You have, by definition, 10 megabits per second at no marginal additional cost. Because of that, everybody can be a YouTuber. Everybody can start producing videos. Everybody is media. We design our curriculum with the idea that people are producers and they need to take social responsibility because they are producers that can influence how the societies think.

For the basic education level, we have problem-based learning curriculums that they try to report on a local problem, surface it for a township or a mayoral office.

If they’re slightly more senior, they can work with one of the social responsibility programs in their local nearby university, the USR programs, so that they choose one of the sustainable goals and use their media competence skills to amplify people’s awareness-specific target.

When they’re a little bit older, they can join petitions, they can go online, and so on, and on Presidential Hackathon, which guarantees five teams every year.

The president give a trophy that has a micro projector that when turned on, projects the president giving the cross-sectoral team the trophy promising whatever they prototyped in the past 3 months will become public policy in the next 12 months nationally.

That’s the highest level of social innovation binding power. Along this ladder, it’s built on face-to-face solidarity. It’s based on what we call a community of practice with common purpose. It becomes amplifying the classical offline encounters. What we do is to make sure the offline encounters including rallies, and protests, and occupying the parliament widely live-streamed and participatory.

Everybody can feel by inputting, contributing online, they changed the course of history offline. That is why we always take a face-to-face-first approach when it comes to encounters. It is a amplifying instead of replacing structure of re-presentation. Digital is a re-presentation of the classical, not a representation of the classical. That’s the answer.

I’m not working for the government. I’m working with the government. Young people in Taiwan also think it’s not very cool to work for the government. When I say I only work with the government, people think it’s pretty cool.

It’s important that we do not fall into this hierarchy. If people know that I’m joining only on the ground of radical transparency, voluntary association, location independence, then that’s pretty cool. Everything that I publish allows people to be remixed. Everybody loves a portfolio of creations that people can build upon from scratch for programming to media wiki for Wikipedia.

Finally, you can find me on Slack channel join.g0v.tw. My handle is @au there. There you will find the COVID-19 channel if you want to ask about COVID-19 questions as well as many other channels for random questions. That’s it for today. Thank you for the great questions.

Thank you for your answers.

Thank you. Stay safe.