There’s nothing altruistic in this use, and it combines mask use and hand sanitation. I bet that this message will also have a higher R-value than, “You wear a mask to show respect,” or, “You wear a mask to protect other people,” in your country as well.

I think one of the things that we get right from the beginning was taking an entirely rational self-interest message when it comes to mask use. The spokesdog literally said that you wear masks to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.

That’s social innovation. That’s promoting social innovators and amplifying their new ideas so that we can hit that three-quarters goal, and people would actually understand that it’s their idea, their innovation that makes it happen sooner, not a top-down government approach.

We invited Professor Lai Chane-yu, the social innovator, to explain the science in our daily CECC press conference while the Minister of Health and Welfare, Chen Shih-chung, literally cooked a mask in front of the nation.

Even though it’s designed as one-time use, but you can reuse it three to five times. Now, that’s social innovation, because rice cookers wasn’t invented for that purpose. Neither is medical mask, by the way, but our Food and Drug Administration repeated the experiment as scientifically required and found that ...

People are not satisfied until they can get to that number, so becoming popular demand, so comes along the social innovation. For example, using traditional rice cookers, one can disinfect the mask, kill the virus, but not destroy the PPE material, and reuse the medical mask.

Even when CECC for 48 hours said that, in well-ventilated places on the metro when the metro is running, and if you are healthy, you don’t need to wear a mask, well, people wear masks, anyway. The idea is that there’s a strong social sector demand for the economic sector ...

I think the Pygmalion effect is the strongest when the people think that when the CECC – that’s the Central Epidemic Command Center – tells us to wear masks where we wear a mask.

At a time, we all learned from the CECC that there is just this three-quarters goal to be met. The thing is that we can ramp up mass production. We can even deliver it to people’s homes, but it doesn’t ensure necessarily proper use. It doesn’t ensure necessarily that people, ...

Because very early on, we understood that if we get three quarters of people wearing masks and washing your hands regularly, then the R0 value will be under one. That’s, again science. It’s a modeling by our top epidemiologist who literally wrote a textbook, also actually our Vice President at ...

Social science is a kind of science too. One of the most rigorous findings of the social sciences, at least, around our corner of the world is that the more the government trusts its citizens, the more citizens become worthy of trust. It’s called the Pygmalion effect. It’s been studied ...

When I was a child, I read mostly evidence-based science fiction, literally, the short-story evidence from Asimov. Not all science fiction are fantasies, like the amazing stories. [laughs] There are also stories based on scientific rigor.

How this society at large, the worldwide society, now, most of the countries have some experience with lockdowns, how that may motivate them into working into a more resilient way of working with the virus, both of the mind and of the body.

It’s called humor over rumor, with a cute spokesdog and things like that, and just reflect how this…No takedown, no lockdown premise, because in Taiwan, we remember the martial law, so we wouldn’t do administrative takedown. We remember how bad SARS 1.0 and the lockdown was, so we wouldn’t do ...

It’s been an interesting experience. Just yesterday, around 24 hours ago, I was in the Confronting Disinformation, a Harvard Kennedy School conversation, and it was really interesting to look back at our counter-disinformation strategy.

My week so far, like the past four days?

Pretty good. I just woke up, returned from the Taoyuan City back to the Taipei City. Now, I’m back in the Cabinet Office.

Hello. Good local time, everyone.

That was dress rehearsal. [laughs]

Thank you. Live long and prosper.

We do not have to polarize or divide among ourselves just because we’re a liberal democracy. Rather, we can ensure that everybody plays a role in the social mobilization against the pandemic and also the infodemic. That is the main message that we want to send. For more, consult TaiwanCanHelp.us.

Recently, the Czech Republic’s Head of the Senate visited Taiwan and declare that “I am Taiwanese,” paying homage to the “Ich bin ein Berliner” quote a few decades ago because they also agree with this message. The message starts with the proper co-creation across sectors in a society.

We need not only to play defensive here but also aggressively make sure that the innovations – what we call the Taiwan Model – that you can take care of the economic growth without restricting essential freedoms. That is a very powerful message to share and exchange with the world.

That role Taiwan’s very much willing to play in addition to offering, for example, student exchange, and safety programs, and so on. We have a special office for this.

We made sure that the Hong Kong people can safely in Taiwan, not only share their experience but also as you mentioned, radiate a message of hope that if the liberal democratic countries all keep our eyes a watchful coalition on the Hong Kong situation, then it will not deteriorate. ...

That’s greatly sped up Taiwan’s democratic activists outreach to the world through the help from the journalists and activists in Hong Kong. We have been, I guess, returning the favor in the past few years when Reporter Without Borders moved their headquarters to Taipei, when the Oslo Freedom Forum [laughs] ...

Also, in the early days of Taiwan’s young democracy, as you mentioned, when we just lifted the martial law in the ‘80s, we rely in large part on the freedom of the press, especially international correspondence, journalist, and so on in Hong Kong to help working out what we have ...

They are definitely at the forefront of this be water form of activism compared to which the sunflower is but a seed, a prototype. We’re all learning from Hong Kong.

In terms of the “be water,” – well more than 2,000 leaders, so it’s not very countable anyway – might as well be leaderless form of social organization. I think anywhere from Taiwan to Barcelona to everywhere in the world is learning from Hong Kong.

People who participate in this kind of co-creation, their minds gets changed, that whenever people feel anger, they no longer turn the anger into helplessness but rather into social outrage, which is an impulse for co-creation. My main suggestion is to not take this personal but take it social.

These give people a taste of what it feels like to live democracy day to day. It’s not just uploading three bits every four years to a ballot box, which is called voting. It’s still very important, but far more interesting and important is to co-create reasonable things, solutions, decisions ...

Fast forward a few years in the Anti-ELAB protest, instead of 20 centers, we’re now seeing maybe 2,000 centers. Each and every single person can start a flashmob or to compose “May Glory to Hong Kong” together with essentially adhocracy, LIHKG and other connected places.

Indeed, in the Sunflower Movement, we have seen a poly-centered, maybe 20 different NGO. Each have their own center. With horizontal connection enabled by the Internet, later on, we will see a very similar configuration in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong.

As Buckminster Fuller have said, the best way when you see a broken system is not exactly to try to repair the system. Instead, innovate, think of a new system that renders the old one obsolete.

A motorized is more expensive than using, say, Nokia or Ericsson components. That decision on the street and also international communication commission was made back then, six years ago. We’ve been enjoying so-called Clean Path in our 4G network and now 5G this year with no PRC components. We’re thriving. ...

If you choose any particular component for your 4G network, it’s likely that for 5G and other extended long-time evolution networks, you will be using components from the same suppliers as well. For each and every upgrade, you have to do another systematic risk assessment of whether it has been ...

That Trojan horse metaphor was not coined because of 5G. Rather, it was coined six years ago for the 4G deployment. The consensus on the street was that the overall total cost of ownership of having to reevaluate whether a supplier has been taken over by the thumb, the Chinese ...

One of the deliberations there was about core communication infrastructure components made in the PRC – that’s People’s Republic of China regime – in the 4G communication network.

At that time, the students and people were concerned about the so-called Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement occupied the parliament for three weeks. Each NPO in one corner of the occupied parliament deliberated on a street one particular aspect each of the CSSTA.

The Trojan horse metaphor, I did not create that. I was merely relaying the consensus on the street when we occupied the parliament back in 2014. It’s called the Sunflower Movement.

We think the nine percent for asking the MPs for us to have to do a interpolation and explanation session after which the posts show approval rate grows to 94 percent. Of course, we thank the six percent for keeping us honest and accountable.

By reusing mechanisms that’s already in place, we make sure that the human rights organizations can better communicate with the CECC, the Command Center. The approval rate about this CECC’S digital quarantine measures was at 91 percent.

The digital quarantine where the phone, instead of asking people to install anything that communicates over Bluetooth or collects GPS data, or Wi Fi, or anything like that, we use a very rough estimate of the position of the phone using cell phone tower signal strengths that we are already ...

For example, when we do the mask rationing, it’s essentially the same procedure as receiving recurring prescriptions from the pharmacies. When we collect those in the kiosk, it’s essentially the same experience as filing your income or local taxes in the convenience store.

This serves a very good bridge into the civil society, human rights organizations understanding because if we repurpose something that’s already in place before the pandemic, its privacy properties are more well understood.

Because of this constitutional restriction, we only make use of the data collection method already in place before the pandemic. We do not, as a rule, collect new data in the name of the counter-pandemic effort.

In Taiwan, because we never declared either a lockdown or a state of emergency, our administrative actions need to go through the oversight from the parliamentarians, including interpolations, public hearings, and such.

This essentially tripled our mass availability just by showing this simple social innovation and all this imbues into the civil society. This idea that innovation does not need to originate from top down, it can come from grassroots. That’s the core of democracy.

That is to say, whenever a new idea gains legitimacy through democracy, the government, even though it may resist that at first, for example, using traditional rice cookers and do not add water. You can disinfect the mask and reuse it for three to five times. This is very counter ...