Thank you.
[Japanese] Live long and prosper.
Once they do, the municipalities eventually require them to say which rules they’re implementing. Based on that accountability, then they’re allowed to reopen. That’s just one of a lot of examples in the Taiwanese counter-coronavirus effort. I hope this conveys the idea of co-creation.
They eventually rose up to the challenge and become part of our conversation about the counter-coronavirus pandemic. Instead of casting any group as outsiders, it’s important to work with each and every group. Even though they’re currently not capable of coming up with physical distancing rules and so on, the ...
If you keep only on paper your contact phone number but under a pseudonym and if you physically shred that that paper after four weeks of no local outbreak, then people actually trust them enough to actually leave their contact details. You can do a SMS or LINE to check ...
There’s some intimate bars that then discovered that if you wear a cap with a plastic shielding, then you can still have a clear view of the people who drink with you and even have drinks while observing the physical distancing rules.
At the time, it was met with some ridicule because people thought the entire point of intimate bars is to break the physical, and there really is no way [laughs] that people would consent of leaving their real contact details to the intimate bars. This is like the Pygmalion effect. ...
They’re not criminals. They’re professionals, and we’re not threatening them even with the closure fines. We’re challenging them to discover ways that they can continue their business while observing physical distancing and real contact. That is to say, people have to find other way to contact them if there is ...
At that point, many people were saying that we should just shut down any like night clubs, intimate bars, and so on, but Minister Chen Shih-Chung insists on saying, we’re not putting them any criminal threats.
The medical officers keep on interviewing, and the next day, we discovered that she works in a kind of intimate bar and as a professional service provider in that intimate bar. She initially provided a different account because she didn’t want to reveal the people that she had intimate encounters ...
In Taiwan, there was a day when there was a confirmed case, and the confirmed case, she said that she stayed at home with no contact to people, a very simple family and so on. There’s no way that she would get infected by the COVID.
This whole point of making sure that people can remix those messages into a way that’s calm, collected, and even humorous is very important to make sure that people don’t panic. Once they don’t panic, they have some mental capacity to understand some epidemiology and working with people who are ...
Even though there were panic, like panic buying of tissue papers which was solved with a meme, panic buying of instant noodles which solved with another very funny meme that says, “There’s endless instant noodles. Buy as much as you want, and add some vegetables to it so you have ...
In Taiwan, we have a very calm minster, Minister Chen Shih-chung, that appears every day.
Don’t panic. That’s always the most important.
Short iterations, quick merging of alternative vision from the civil society, a strong and robust social sector, I think these are the ways that democracies can effectively deal with threats that are advanced and persistent.
The way Dr. Li Wenliang became literally a savior of Taiwanese population is having a collective intelligence mechanism and have a really short iteration cycle from noticing it into sense-making, into triaging, into starting health inspections for all flights coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day, the ...
It gets upvoted, so our medical officers take that in for action. Imagine what would happen if it would take us a or so [laughs] to notice that post. That would have been impossible.
If you have a short enough iteration, then the threats that unfold over long periods will get the collective intelligence sensing it long before it actually become a large problem. For example, when Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower from Wuhan, posted that there are “seven new SARS cases” in a ...
The point of this daily, rather than every four years, iteration is that the social sector can bond together. Instead of just criticizing, they can offer constructive ways, alternative visions, forking the government and merge on a daily cycle just as in open source development.
The very next day, in the daily press conference, all the medical officers started wearing pink. The Minister of Health and Welfare said Pink Panther was his childhood hero, in a way of gender mainstreaming, I’m sure. Suddenly, the boy is the most hip person because only he has the ...
For example, there’s a young boy whose family called saying that “My boy doesn’t want to go to school because you only ration pink medical mask to our district. We don’t have other color of mask and our boy said that he will be bullied.”
If you do this daily iteration cycle plus a toll-free number, 1922, where everybody can call and not only get their question answered but also correct the parts that we did wrong.
I would argue the cycles of the elections are too long for real-time feedback. In Taiwan, during the pandemic, we have the Central Epidemic Command Center doing daily live-broadcasted press conferences such as this one, where the journalists ask anything they want and the minister always respond to each and ...
Which they will do if they handed out all the numbered plates and so on. This is truly a co-creation process. There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.
When the pharmacist says, “OK, we will announce the availability hours, the schedules, and you need to make an additional field in the open API for that,” we just adjust very quickly. Eventually, we also develop a back end button so that each pharmacists can just click that button and ...
People will just call them, saying, “Why are there discrepancies? Are you keeping the masks for yourselves?” Even though they are volunteer, they were not getting paid. This conflict is solved quite quickly, because that we have a weekly iteration cycle.
Actually, they have already rationed all the masks of the day using numbered plates. Those pharmacists are actually quite upset of the map, because map is inaccurate and actually increase their work.
It will create a couple hours in which that they’re just slowly doing this NHI card swiping and telling the people who have those numbers to collect in the afternoon, for example, so that the map will show that they still have mask in-store.
They say that you can get a numbered badge, a numbered card from the pharmacy, in exchange of your NHI card. They just hand out those number plates very quickly and then start to swipe the NHI card in bulk.
Soon as we rolled out the mask availability map, we see that the pharmacies who swiped the NHI card and then hand out the mask praising that it’s working very well. There are also pharmacists that choose a different strategy.
Which the National Health Insurance Agency provided very quickly. It’s updated at the time every 30 seconds. That’s not the hard part. The most challenging part, actually, is in the negative externalities that it caused the pharmacists.
As I said, because the civic hackers already had experiences working with the air pollution map, working with the WaterBoxes, and so on, the code is already there. We just need to repurpose it with a new, real-time news feed, an API – an application programming interface – for the ...
As the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon – there are three points, and two more behind the Earth and behind the Moon – I am in the place where I can more effortlessly balance between the movements as the governments and find a common purpose, common value, ...
I see myself as a channel, as a bridge, as a Lagrangian point, between civic movements on one side and governments on the other.
As long as I don’t take a salary from those organizations, as long as they are not-for-profit, and as long as the premier, the prime minister, feels that it furthers our digital diplomacy, they are OK with me moonlighting as a civic hacker while being a digital minister.
That’s the original Madrid decision-making community after the 15M. Very much civic hacker organizations.
We have a startup, really an NPO, a social innovation organization, called RadicalxChange in New York. I am a board member. I’m also board member of the Digital Future Society in Barcelona, of Consul Democracy Foundation in Amsterdam.
My heart does not lie. Well, I’m a slushie, so I am at once digital minister – that’s my day job – but I am also moonlighting as a civic hacker. Not only for mask availability map, but also, for example, with Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum blockchain, and ...
I think it’s imminently possible to make the best of both worlds happen if you design the interaction space appropriately.
At the same time, we can amplify these face-to-face conversations to various different municipalities, different places, using 5G technology, even to the most rural and highest mountains, so that people can also feel that they are in this co-creation workshop, no matter how remote they are.
If you look out of the door, you can see people just holding such outdoor gatherings at any given time. They can just go through this place and look into outdoors at the same time, look into my office and see very transparently how I’m working, why I’m working.
Having food, enjoying drink together, and using large projectors or virtual reality to connect to many more such places, so you can have the best of both worlds. Indeed, I’m working in the park in the Social Innovation Lab.
In Taiwan, because we never had a lockdown, what we have seen is that people avoid large gatherings during the pandemic. We see education facilities encourage some kind of satellite structure, where people gather in preferably outdoor place, keeping one-meter distance, so we don’t have to wear a mask.
That is harder to replicate in the online way, although I guess we can order the same pizza delivery beforehand and have the same beer or something. It could, of course, be arranged and approximated, but it’s not as natural as people gathering in the same face-to-face place.
In face-to-face conversations, we often make, for example, food, drinks, music, and things like that. Making sure that we can feel that we are not only in the same place, talking about the same things, but feeling the same.
These are the great thing about online, is that you can transcend the physical and acoustic rules. Of course, there’s parts of face-to-face that are not replaceable. For example, the face-to-face conversations that is around understanding what people feels like is very important.
I even had a conversation with people in the primary and secondary schools by shrinking my own avatar in virtual reality to the same height at the kids. That really made them much more eager to interact with me, because I don’t look a meter and 80 centimeters high anymore.
In any case, [laughs] the point I’m making is that mostly we can replace the knowledge-sharing part of face-to-face gatherings using online conference, as we’re having now, or even in virtual reality, where we can share knowledge about three-dimensional spatial objects, buildings, simulations, and things like that.
Speaking personally, because I adjust to jetlag very slowly, it also is much better than long-distance flight. On average, it takes me one day or more to adjust for one hour of jetlag difference. That’s just selfish reason. The other two are public benefit.
