Do you record all interview with the press?

Not necessarily. If you publish as video, I can also publish as video, in which case there’s no transcript. But if you’re just writing in text, then most journalists find it easier if we make a transcript and publish that instead. It’s your choice.

Is the transcription automatic?

It’s augmented. Of course, if we upload the video to YouTube, YouTube automatically make a transcript. If you’re going to make a formal transcript, then we also run it through humans that make, necessarily, edits.

I see. Is this part of an open government policy?

Yes, indeed. We have this visitor protocol. Maybe you have already seen this. It spells out when, where, why, and how we make such transcripts. I’ve pasted a link to you.

Cool. Can you point out other government transparency measures based in Taiwan like this one?

Like what?

Like this one to share all the interviews, which other measures…?

Definitely. For example, I’m currently in the Social Innovation Lab, which is a park. We tore down the walls. Because of that, it’s very accessible. Every Wednesday, from 10:00 AM to evening, anyone can just walk in, knock my door, and have 10 minutes to 40 minutes of my time.

Again, if they agree that we make a video or the transcript available online so that they will lobby for the public interest not for only their private interests because that wouldn’t look very well in the public transcript or video. That is also very accessible.

For people who cannot travel to Taipei that easily, I also tour around Taiwan. I just returned from Taichung this early morning to work with people locally and also conference in, through video conference, people in the central government.

I want to start asking how do you describe yourself politically?

I’m a lower-case minister.

I know. No, I mean like you are individualist, anarchist?

I’m a lower-case minister, with a small m. I’m not a upper-case Minister. As a digital minister, lower-case, I communicate, advocate, preach sometimes, and write poems.

You think of me not as a top-down, like order-giving minister, but rather just someone who serves as a channel between the various different positions in order to find common values, more like a chat room moderator than anything.

I was talking about like do you have a civic…You were a civic hacker for a long time.

I still am.

Yeah, you are. I want to understand a little bit more about, how do you define yourself as a non-anarchist to stuff like, I want to know this concept.

It’s conservative anarchist, important distinction. Being a conservative, I conserve all the cultures. For example, in Taiwan, there’s more than 20 national languages, each representing a culture.

Instead of sacrificing the values of various indigenous and new cultures in the name of progress on any particular culture, I work transculturally to make innovations that respect the dignity of their various cultures in a transcultural way. That’s the conservative part.

The anarchist part means that I don’t give orders. I don’t receive orders. I don’t believe in coercion. I work with voluntary association, and people who want to work through this method, I work with them. People who don’t want to work with this method, I don’t force them.

This will be OK. Taiwan had a different approach on coronavirus, and that explains why you’re now in a post-pandemic moment.

For quite a few weeks now. Actually, we’ve been basically over by end of April or so.

Wow, it’s a long time.

Yeah, it’s a long time. We’re firmly in a post-pandemic.

What was the whole technology in this area to avoid the spread of the virus? Can you talk a little bit about those actions?

Of course. The most important technology in fighting the coronavirus is chemical. It’s called soap, like washing hands properly. That’s the most important, and alcohol hand spray, sanitation, temperature checks. These are also very important.

I’m referring to the mask as physical vaccine. The message is if you wear a mask, it protects you from your own unwashed hands. It’s a reminder for you to wash your hands more thoroughly, and also a reminder for other people to also wash their hands more thoroughly. These are the most important technologies. The quarantine hotels, of course, helped a lot for everybody returning to Taiwan.

We asked them to stay in the quarantine hotel for 14 days most of the time, but if they have a large space to live in their own home, if they have their own bathroom and do not live with people who are very vulnerable to the Coronavirus, they can also choose home quarantine, in which case their home is put into the digital fence, in the sense that the cellphone towers triangulate the positions of the phone.

They are already doing that anyway, but if the phone breaks out of the 50 meters or so radius, an SMS is sent to the local household manager and police to track people’s whereabouts if their phone runs out of battery or breaks out of the digital fence. One way or another, it’s just to ensure that there’s a 14-day quarantine for people returning home so that the rest of the society can live in a common collective fashion.

Can you describe to me the system of masks and the map?

Yes, of course. It’s already a given in Taiwan that people are using map-based technology and their own measurement stations to track, for example, air pollution, and also water pollution levels, and so on. We repurposed that civic sector technology for the distribution of masks in pharmacies.

It’s not a government idea. It’s a civic technologist in Hainan inventing this way of people reporting where has masks and where does not. We ensure that we trust the citizens radically with an open API so that after a couple of days of Howard Wu, Wu Chang-Wei inventing this technology, we made sure that we supply him and everybody else, more than 100 teams developing the availability mask map, with the real-time data.

Every 30 seconds, we refresh the availability level of children’s masks, of adults’ masks of all the pharmacies in Taiwan, and so people can very easily, even if they have conditions like blindness, they can also use a voice assistant or they can use a chatbot and so on to get the remaining stock of the pharmacies that’s closest to them, and go there and swipe their NHI – the National Health Insurance – card.

If they are an adult, collect 9 medical masks for a very low price, and if they are a child, they can collect 10 medical masks for every two weeks.

Once they do, after a while, just a couple of minutes, they can see on the map or chatbot that actually, the level of the stock depletes by 9 or 10 in that pharmacy. There’s participatory accountability. People don’t have to blindly believe the government or populations. People can check for themselves. Anybody visiting a pharmacy will check for themselves that this technology is actually working, and everything is accountable.

We are now using the same technology to display the availability of the Triple Stimulus Vouchers. The Triple Stimulus Vouchers, again, are distributed not in pharmacies this time, but rather in post offices, where you can also see where the post offices are and in real-time how much Triple Stimulus Vouchers do they still have for purchase, and so on.

It’s using exactly the same API. Again, there is a multitude of people implementing such maps and so on. I just pasted you such a map. Again, just like pharmacies, the post office workers can just press a key and say, “OK, I’m closed for the day,” in which case they disappear from the map as a green dot.

Can we adopt that in Brazil?

Very easily. South Korean people, their civic technologists there, used this map to convince their own government when they’re rationing the medical mask. Our implementation was in February, I think. By March, the Korean people convinced their government to do the same, using the same API.

The first rationing strategy brought out in Korea was also through pharmacies. The first map that works in South Korea was coded by someone in Taiwan. Finjon Kiang [Mandarin] from Tainan provided the first map for the Korean people. Even though he doesn’t speak Korean, he speaks JavaScript.

You also have a strategy against disinformation on COVID, right?

Yes, called “humor over rumor.”

How does it work?

Very easily. Whenever people share a disinformation, a rumor that has a high r-value, that is to say each person shares to two or three more people…Maybe it travels on outrage, like panic buying, maybe get trades of fear, like various conspiracy theories about coronavirus.

Whenever we detect such a high r-value, because Taiwan is a liberal democracy, we don’t do administrative takedown. We cannot take down these messages. By the way, the takedown doesn’t really work, like lockdown, unless you do it in a very strict fashion, like taking down pretty much everything.

A takedown deprives the civil society of the opportunity of learning from each other, so we don’t do takedown. Instead, we debunk the myths, like a “Mythbuster,” but in a way that’s really funny. We use memes, that is to say, funny pictures, and make sure that we roll out a funny picture a couple hours, at most, after each trending rumor.

For example, when the tissue paper, it was panic buying because there is a rumor that says we’re ramping up the mask production from 2 million a day to 20 million a day. It’s the “same material as tissue paper,” so they are going to run out soon, so people panic buy.

Within a couple hours, our premier, Su Tseng-chang, roll out this funny picture, wiggling his bottom a little bit. That says, “Each of us only have one pair of buttocks.” Basically, it means that it doesn’t make sense to stockpile tissue paper because stockpile and butt sounds the same in Mandarin. Anyway, it’s a pun.

People laugh about it a lot because the premier made himself the butt of a joke. Then the meme has a table that says the material for tissue paper came from the South American pulp material, while the medical masks are actually plastic products. They came from domestic materials, so ramping up production doesn’t hurt the tissue paper production.

Because it’s so funny, it maybe has a r-value of five. Each person will share to five people, so very quickly, people get vaccinated against the infodemic virus of the mind. If you feel joy, humor about something, literally, you cannot feel outrage about the same thing.

Then we found the people who spread the rumor in the first place, and they were tissue paper resellers. They were prosecuted.

How do you define what is true and what is not true? You don’t see a risk of censorship, the content, or something like that?

There’s no censorship. They can still freely speculate about tissue paper shortage, but something that is not true – for example, the tissue paper are made out of plastic – that’s just not true. It’s not a fact, scientifically and materially. You can probably try to set it aflame [laughs] and see if tissue paper are made out of plastic.

For the scientific facts, I don’t think there’s much room for opinions. For us, we’re just sharing our piece of the puzzle – science, that is to say – but we don’t share it in a top-down way. Rather, we share it in a way that’s funny.

When we introduce physical distancing, the spokesdog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare posted a meme that says, “If you’re indoor and you have to keep three dog away from each other. If you’re outdoor, you have to keep two dog away from each other.”

There’s Shiba Inu as spokesdog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare that translate all the scientific announcements every day at 2:00 PM daily press conference, and then into very funny dog meme pictures. It’s lovely. They’re very cute, so people share it, and it’s a very high r-value. We don’t do censorship, period, but we make the truth, the science, funny and accessible.

How many people are working on this?

A lot. In each ministry, there’s a team of at least five different roles, people who are working on the comedy, on the images and video, on the political assessment, on the science, like fact-checking accuracy, media relations, and so on. They have this cross-functional team in pretty much all the ministry related to social innovation, so more than 12 ministries.

In the Cabinet, our spokesperson, Evian Ting, was the person in charge of designing this butt joke and also many other jokes. He is very good as a comedian also, but our administration spokesperson. They have a network of, I would say, more than 100 people working together to debunk this in a very rapid fashion.

It’s not just governmental people, right?

We provide the memetic package. Of course, professional journalists, they don’t have to listen to us only. They can fact-check many other points. Taiwan has two organizations, the Taiwan Fact-Check Center and MyGoPen, who are both part of the International Fact-Checking Network.

Our job is just to get the message out to the fact-checkers as soon as possible. The fact-checkers can also check our messages. It’s not like we don’t make mistakes. When we make mistakes, they also help us in getting the clarification out very quickly.

I want to know more about how is it post-pandemic COVID. How is life after this? After we’re living here, how is the behavior in the restaurants, in the stores?

How is in the restaurant? I’m sorry.

The behavior of people.

Everybody in Taiwan over 30 years old remembers SARS in 2003. This is as collective inoculation of sorts. We remember how bad it was, how we had to lock down a hospital unannounced, how 37 people dead, and 37 people too many.

When Dr. Li Wenliang last December sounded the alarm on seven SARS cases in Wuhan, it ring an alarm bell to everyone in Taiwan. In fact, in December 31, when the Taiwan equivalent of Reddit, the PTT board, re-posted Dr. Li Wenliang’s whistleblowing, it gets escalated to the central response of the Disease Control within a few hours.

Because of that, we started inspections for people flying inbound Wuhan the very next day, the first day of January. This rapid response enabled this whole society to begin wearing masks, to begin washing our hands much more vigorously, and basically brace ourselves for impact. The Central Epidemic Command Center, which has a daily live press conference working with all the journalists, was set up even before we had a first locally confirmed case.

Yeah. I want know a little bit more of your two years. You created a startup. You lived in Silicon Valley. How did you move from the private to the public sector and then to being a minister?

My work before joining the cabinet was the g0v movement in which there is many people in Taiwan that look at all the government service and websites that they don’t like, but instead of protesting, we code up viable alternatives. Any website in Taiwan that’s government-run ends in gov.tw, just like in other parts of the world, like join.gov.tw.

If you don’t like it, instead of protesting, you just code up join.g0v.tw, just changing an O to a 0 gets you in the shadow government that works better and more interactively. This is what I call forking the government. Important pronunciation, fork the government. Instead of erasing what’s done by the government, we take what’s there but put it in a different direction.

Before the pharmacy statistics were published maybe every week or every day, but the people in the g0v movement thought if you publish it every 30 seconds, then it becomes a distributed ledger that everybody can participate to guarantee the correctness. People don’t have to trust blindly the government or the companies anymore.

Instead of waiting for the government to act, the g0v civic technologists just build their imagination of that right away, relying on the Cloud, this collective intelligence, to report the numbers. I show it to the premier just a day after, and the premier look at it and say, “Oh, it’s such a good idea. Let’s support them with everything.”

This is what I call reverse procurement. Instead of government thinking of an idea for the private sector to implement, it’s the social sector thinking about the good idea, prototype it, working with the private sector and the public sector to make it happen. This is open innovation.

My career has always been a bridge, a liaison between the economic sector on one side and the social sector, the free software movement on the other side.

In a sense, I’m working still in the same job, like a Lagrange point, the point between the Earth and the moon, for example, that’s not orbiting the Earth or the moon, but rather keeping a stable distance from both sides and making sure that people of different positions can, through communication, find common values and innovations to deliver that value.

Interesting. This collective…have these group influenced the Sunflower Student Movement?

Yes. During the Sunflower Movement, the g0v movement was one of the three new trope groups. There was the medical volunteers that protect the health of people. There is the lawyers, the pro bono legal volunteers that protects the dignity, the human rights of the people involved, and the g0v, which protects the rights of communication, also a fundamental right for people who occupy the parliament.

Because of the three groups of work, we supported all sides. We literally take all the sides, all the different sides of the Occupy Parliament. There is 20 different NGOs, each deliberating a different aspect of the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement and come to consensus.

This demonstrated to everybody in the world that it doesn’t have to be chaotic for an Occupy movement to end. Rather, every day, we can each together, inching in on consensus. After three weeks of non-violent Occupy around parliament, people did arrive on consensus with half a million people on the street and many more online. It was then taken, ratified by the head of the parliament.

The political norm changed in Taiwan afterward. All the mayors that supported over government gets elected, and people who didn’t, didn’t get elected.

What is the concept of an open government today? What is its importance for democracy?

Democracy for me is just some social technologies. There is a saying, anything that I am born with is human nature. Anything that’s introduced after I’m born is technology. Because I’m born in the martial law, when I was born, Taiwan was still a dictatorship. There’s no freedom of making political parties, organization. There’s very limited freedom of the press.

For me, the first time I cast presidential vote was in 1996, our first presidential election. I was already 15 years old by then and already quite versed in the World Wide Web. For us, Internet and democracy, those two things, they happened together.

Democracy, we analyze it both on Internet terms. Voting for president is like uploading two bits of information every four years. It’s very inefficient, not very effective to communicate priorities of the population. With the advent of social media, people feel very closely together with the right hashtag. Instead of waiting for a representative, people just banded together a hashtag, MeToo, ClimateStrike, TaiwanCanHelp, and things like that.

These are the new forms of organization. If the open government is founded on the same principles as open source and open data movement, basically saying the government needs to work not for the people but also with the people, and not with the people only, but also after the people.

That is to say, to work with social innovators in a way that’s transparent, like making sure that every day, work of a minister is published online for everybody to know and contextualize. Participation. People can find me on my office hours with sandbox applications, with petitions online, with Presidential Hackathon, and accountability.

I mentioned in the CECC press conference, anyone can call 1922 and ask them anything related to the pandemic every day, and the immediate pickup rate is more than 90 percent. All the questions get a timely answer, and all the suggestions.

For example, there was a young boy in April, and they called saying this boy doesn’t want to go to school, because when you ration masks, you don’t get to pick the color. You only have pink for that district. The boy doesn’t want to wear a pink medical mask, because he says his classmates will laugh at him, and so that’s a problem.

Then the next day, everybody, all the medical officers in the CECC, including the commander, Minister Chen Shih-Chung, wore a pink medical mask to support the boy and to share gender mainstreaming ideas. That’s accountability. If people demand explanation, if they make good suggestions, it becomes policy right away. That’s accountability.

Finally, inclusion, to empower people who don’t even have rights to vote. That boy probably isn’t of voting age. Our most popular petitions, like banning plastic straws and so on, were all petitioned by people who are like 16 years old, 15 years old, not even of legal voting age.

They are included because of digital technology that allows thousands of people to speak to each other and listen to each other, not like radio and television, which would only allow one person to speak to thousands of people. That’s the main difference between open government and previous forms of government. It’s symbiotic with digital technology.

We also have a problem of the echo chamber, that’s how you probably call it, in social media. How can government can support other platforms or other ways to engage people with public debates, not only just through Facebook, or WhatsApp, or other big social media?

Of course, antisocial media is also social media, I guess. What we are focusing on is prosocial media. That is to say, it’s important to know that the current antisocial media sometimes serves the interests of advertisers or other forms of precision targeting and so on, are not the only way to manage our attention together.

If we design spaces to find common ground and create consensus, collective intelligence, we don’t have to fall victims to the echo chamber. As I mentioned, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, the PTT, is not a corporation. It’s just a computer club, really, by the National Taiwan University. It’s thoroughly in the not-for-profit sector. They don’t sell advertisement and indeed do anything that’s resembles the business.

There’s no shareholder value to maximize. Rather, it’s supported by the academic network and run by just students from the National Taiwan University.

The point here is that if you have a media that serve the people instead of serving particular interest groups, then you’re much likely to get design patterns that encourage people, instead of attacking each other, they can contribute to the opinions and ideas.

You see that there is no reply button, for example. There is not nested threats on PTT or on the Join platform of e-petition. You have pro column of comments, con column of comments, but they are not allowed to reply to each other. You can only upload and download.

In a way, taking away the reply button leaves no room for trolls to grow. People can upload important ideas, but they cannot make personal attacks on each other.

Just by simple ideas of social interaction design, you can very easily reflect the true situation to people, which is most people agree with most of the things proposed by most of their neighbors most of the time. It’s just the divisive antisocial media over-concentrates on a few controversies or ideologies, which may be good to keep people’s attention on their platform and sell advertisements, but is detrimental to the society overall.

We work with our own prosocial media teams. We’ve built our own interaction patterns, and we do not rely antisocial media to hold our public discussions.

For example, we are now deliberating, for the next two weeks or so, the ocean policy, how to do we open up the ocean and make more prosocial activities around the oceans. If you click the link I just pasted you, you get to see our Join platform, a platform that has more than 10 million unique visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan. A lot of people visit it.

You can see the five consultations where people participate in an AI-assisted intelligence-based, collective intelligence platform called Polis, that talks about people’s feelings, sharing their feelings, but there is no reply button. You get people’s ideas clustered around the different groups and identify those cross-group consensus.

Are people engaging in public debate like they are…?

Of course. The point here is that we share all the facts. That’s what open government means. It’s transparent, open data. Of course, people have different feelings, and it’s all OK. You can feel happy. They can feel angry. The idea is to share our feelings to find the common ideas that resonates with everybody, that everybody can live with.

Debates are very healthy if they are done in a way that everybody brings their piece of puzzle to complete the puzzle together, instead of taking away each other’s pieces.

We are facing a huge debate now about fake news in Brazil. Do you have regulations for that in Taiwan?

We don’t use that term, because in Mandarin, news and journalism is the same word, xÄ«nwén. Journalism is literally news work in Taiwan. There is no way to say the F word or “fake news” without offending journalists.

Interesting.

Because both my parents were journalists, out of filial piety, I cannot use the F word. We use the word instead, disinformation. It has a legal definition, which is untrue messages that was spread intentionally to cause public harm. This is very precise definition. If it’s unintentional, it’s not disinformation. It’s just misinformed. If it’s not causing public harm but just harming the image of a minister, that’s just good journalism. [laughs]

If it’s not making an untrue statement, if it’s scientifically, factually true, then, of course, it is just science, inconvenient truth.

The point I’m making is that if it’s intentional, harmful to the public, untrue message, we don’t do an administrative takedown. Rather, we specifically call out that and do a public notice, a notice in public saying that this is intentionally spread. We work with the fact checkers who will prove that it’s actually untrue and intentionally spread.

Then it’s attached to various different channels so that you can see the original message still, but with an addendum, with a note that says this is actually sponsored by a malicious foreign organization, and we can prove it. Click here to know more.

This makes sure that people participate as amateur journalist. They learn about how journalism works instead of taking it away, in which case there is no way to learn how journalism works.

Do you use a lot of Facebook? Which social media you use the most?

Definitely Line. It’s an end-to-end encrypted channel like WhatsApp. The state cannot look into the content of the message. There is many bots like the Trend Micro bot, Dr.Message, which is based on the idea from another g0v project called CoFacts.

Dr.Message, which I pasted you, is an all-purpose bot, which is also in the form of a cute dog that you can forward anything that you suspect is spam, or scam, or disinformation to the bot, and the bot checks that and gets back to you whether it’s a scam or not.

If you invite the bot to your chat room, then just like an antivirus – it’s coming from an antivirus company – it scans each incoming message, comparing to the database of people already reported, and then if it’s not true, it will just respond with a clarification.

Again, there is no takedown, but just like for spam, people voluntarily flag things as spam, and at some point, the spammer cannot reach people’s inbox that easily, but it’s not a takedown. It’s still in the junk mail box. If you have too much time, you can check your junk mail folder, but not many people do that.

It’s a way for the community to manage our attentions more effectively through collective intelligence, and not through this top-down layer of people saying this is true, this is not true.

Yeah, perfect. Interesting. I have more four minutes. We talk a lot about sharing economy, but there are a lot of criticisms about this word and about the huge platforms that connect workers with their service. What’s your opinion about sharing economy? What do you think is like your sharing economy in your concept.

In our regulation, we call it platform economy.

For what?

We call it a platform economy, which, again, has a very precise definition. The idea here is that platform economy is, of course, mechanisms designed by platforms, Internet platforms, that mediates between providers on one side and people who use these services on the other side, and the platform determines the rules.

Where we are saying is that if the platform is transparent, is a mere conduit, it merely forwards messages both ways, instead of monopolizes the data flow, then it’s just like a chat room, in which case the platform itself can operate mutually.

As soon as the platform starts to capture the value, for example, to do its own dispatch, hiding the provider information from the requesters and so on, then the platform is engaging in the trade of a platform that’s the same as providers, in which case they need to be regulated the same way.

For example, Uber and Uber Eats is registered as a local Taiwanese company. They operate their own taxi fleet, the Q-TAXI fleet. They obey exactly the same rules as other taxis. They say, “But we want to offer surge pricing, which is a better price when there is more demand.”

Of course, you can do that, and through Polis, people say other taxi companies need to be able to use that too. Every other taxi company can also do surge pricing, but they cannot evade their duties to set up a taxi company. They cannot evade their duties of doing insurance and a professional credential for the drivers.

Of course, because they de facto doing the same thing as the taxi dispatch companies, you need to be regulated as such.

Interesting. My last question, can you tell me the political impact on you being a transgender minister for representative groups?

I don’t think people care really. Taiwan has been, of course, very liberal for LGBTQIA+ communities. I think Dr. Tsai Ing-wen also a very good example, because she I think is the only woman leader in Asia that is a president by merit, instead of because she is in any political family or whether she has connections through her father or her husband.

In Taiwan, we believe in the idea that biology should not control anyone’s destiny, and so there is no discrimination. Our parliament have I think more than 40 percent of women.

I don’t think being transgender poses a challenge for me working as a minister. I think in Taiwan, we are very much gender mainstreamed. Not only we have legalized marriage equality, but actually, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became president not because she is the wife or daughter of any one political family or things like that. People just enter parliament and see more than 40 percent of legislators are women.

It’s just not a big deal. Personally, I think being transgender also enables me to become more transportal, and that I can empathize with various different people. I don’t have this binary duality in my mind. I wouldn’t say half of the population is different from me, so it’s easier for me to take all the sides.

Wow, interesting, cool. That is, Audrey. Is there anything you wanted to share, anything more?

Of course. You can check the Taiwan model more. It’s not even a government website. It’s done by people who crowdsource and crowdfund the website at taiwancanhelp.us. Check that website out, and live long and prosper.

That’s true. Thank you. Do you share this transcription with journalists?

Yeah, of course. You can make your own edits. We can embargo our publication after you.

That’s great. That’s awesome. OK, thank you so much, Audrey.

Thank you.

Congratulations for your work.

Thank you. Cheers.

Bye bye.

Live long and prosper. Bye. [laughs]