Actually, people in Hong Kong didn't see that message. There is a very concerted operation.
Instead of taking it down, we add this mandatory banner whenever it's showed in social media, a self-regulation by the popular social media companies include Facebook would then show, "This has been disputed and the investigation from the Taiwan FactCheck Center pointed out that the first time that this narrative came out was from the Weibo account of the PRC central political in-law unit, that 长安剑 Weibo account.
They fabricated, misused Reuters photo attempting to paint the image as the teenage protesting engaging a violent activity for monetary gain, but that there was not what the original Reuters report said.
Just by adding this frame to the conversation, people still share it, but they share it with competence, with agency, and understanding that they are really is disinformation operation going on.
Imagine if we took that down instead, then there will be a lot of accusations about censoring speech. Actually, the conspiracy will even fuel itself by changing to different keywords.
I do believe engaging citizen journalists and professional journalists to provide real-time fact-checking in the form of notice and public notice again is a longer-lasting vaccine.
The journalists take practice is being democratized. It's like participating open science, open access and research. It doesn't mean science goes away.
It means people who are primary and middle schoolers, even in very rural areas as long as they have Internet connection, they can do science. That doesn't mean that science need to be forever a privilege.
It means that science need to establish its mutual support with the society so people feel proud in contributing to science. The same goes for journalism.
I think the divisiveness, which I called antisocial corner of social media is there. I don't think anyone disputes that there is polarization as where distrust on the Internet, but it doesn't mean that there's no pro-social elements in social media.
What I'm trying to say is that, instead of saying, "Tech is good," or "Tech is bad," we simply say: Whether it's built for this purpose? For our purpose, like in a government to further democratic deliberation whether Facebook is a good medium or not?
I usually use that analogy saying that I love the nightclubs with dances and drinks, and it's a pretty good place to relax and chill out. But if you want to hold a town hall meeting, you will not choose your local nightclub because it's very loud. You have to shout to get heard. There's addictive drinks and private bouncers.
You would probably choose a public library or university campus. You will not choose that nightclub, but it doesn't mean that you say nightclubs are bad, or the entertainment sector is bad. It's just it's not fit for the purpose of holding a town hall. I believe the same for the digital infrastructure.
There's private sector infrastructure that's designed to entertain people so people can relax and share cute cat pictures, but there are digital infrastructure built for democracy.
We need not to confuse these two, and the government need subsidize and honor, and hold ourselves accountable to the pro-social part of the social media that is designed with democracy in mind.
I believe that democracy is self. It is a social innovation and technology. Back when in Ancient Greece, they use very innovative stone tools to pick their people randomly to attend their castles. That's technology.
You can't deny that it's technology. It's not digital, of course, but it's still very innovative. The point is that we can improve democracy, just as we can improve, say, semiconductor design and layout.
People can think of innovative way to improve the bitrate so that individuals don't think that they can only contribute to the community of democracy by voting, which, like three bits every four years uploaded.
It's a very small bandwidth is that we can design, like quadratic voting, Presidential Hackathon, things like the continuous petitions, and like that, so that people can say, "Oh, I wake up with a good idea, and 24 hours later, it became policy."
By making the democracy relevant, it is to think of democracy itself as a technology so that if we keep thinking, "Oh no, democracy is just this fixed ritual, and new tech has nothing to do with democracy," then you have people in the public service and people in the tech sector not understanding each other and talking different languages.
The insights that people deliver from the Wikipedia community, that OpenStreetMap community, the larger free software and open-source movement would not have a chance to apply to the government as a platform.
I do believe speaking common language is like design thinking, media and the digital competence shared vocabularies between their practitioners of democracy and of digital technologies is one of the most important thing of our era so that we can further digital democracy together, not just defending democracy, advancing democracy.
Sure. I talked about the 1-9-2-2 SMS toll-free number contact tracing and vaccines, but I think if you ask a random Taiwanese person what g0v project they have personally used, they will say is the mask rationing map.
Last February, when we introduce mask rationing, people did not have easy access to wear in their vicinity are there still pharmacies with masks left.
Without asking the government, civic technologists simply build their own maps to show in real time the availability. Not everyone is comfortable of using maps on their smartphone.
Very quickly, chat box through instant messaging, voice assistance for people with seeing difficulties...really more than 100 different applications were developed concurrently in just a few weeks to visualize, to help people navigate to the places that still have masks in stock.
I think one of the most insightful thing is that it also corrects data bias.
When we designed a mask rationing distribution, we said, we look at the pharmacies and they overlap almost completely with population centers distribution. We think it's fair because on average, any individual in Taiwan, have the equal distance to the mask.
However, the people in the OpenStreetMap community working with the legislator and golf, analyze our data and say, "No, it's not true because not everyone on the helicopter." The same distance on a map doesn't translate to the same time opportunity cost.
In the most rural areas, they have to wait for the bus for public transportation, they have to spend three hours, to reach the same amount of distance to a nearby place with small business.
Now, imagine if we don't publish open data. Then the people may criticize through anecdotes, but they could not suggest better distribution algorithm, because they do not have the raw data.
We're publishing the real-time raw data in a dashboard, just like stock market prices, and so on, so that people can co-create what they're not just demonstrating to protest. They're demonstrating by offering a demo, saying that if you do these tweaks, then you'll be more fair.
The administration -- Minister Chen -- far from defending the existing policy, simply said, "Well, legislator, teach us." So the very next day, we changed our distribution algorithm. We introduced pre-ordering, pre-registration, and so on, and solve their problems together.
Not many members of the parliament previous to the open data ideas offers this kind of co-creative solution, but now everyone is just part of the solution, because instead of accusing one another, the best innovation simply wins through popular support.
I call this the people-public-private partnership. The people came up with the idea, we amplify the idea, and the private sector implements the idea.
Yes. It is a g0v project...the mask rationing map.
Yeah, I'll see you this weekend. Live long and prosper. Bye.
It's good to see you again and good local time, everyone.
We're down to low single digits of local confirmed cases now. I remember when we last talked, we talked about how to counter disinformation, the info-demic with no takedowns. We've been quite successful on that and so far we've countered a pandemic with no lockdowns.
Because of that, in Taiwan, our digitalization is incremental. For example, to use tele-education.
Today, the students still go to school, but we make sure that in the places that require the broadband as an alternative to going to school, because individual schools may be quarantined and so on...from the individual confirmed local cases, they can switch seamlessly into online education and health delivery and so on.
When we last spoke, I think, less than one-tenth of Taiwanese people use the national health care via a mobile app. Now, up to one-third of Taiwanese citizens can use the national health insurance as a virtual health card, so that we can scan the health service over at the cameras like this. Indeed, it has been amplified a lot, but not forced.
Yes, indeed in our education system, in both the basic education where people learn about data science and machine learnings. As well as the higher education.
Instead of doing exercises, we just pair them with small and medium enterprises in the manufacturing sector, agricultural sector, that want to get their chores basically automated in an assistive fashion. Meaning that, it must be aligned to the privacy and the human values as well as being accountable.
The students, instead of being seen as interns, we call them the transformation ambassadors or T大使. These ambassadors bring the perspective of a digital native to a traditional industry. They may get education in Taipei, but actually do their exercise in Kaohsiung as a team.
I believe, this pairs the best of both worlds. The wisdom of the people who have spent decades in their verticals, but also the new imagination and design thinking, computational thinking from the younger people who are digital natives and ambassadors.
Taiwan is quite unique in that many people, including my Silicon Valley friends, actually chose to stay in Taiwan while working for their original team. Not necessarily a talent domestic company using our Employment Gold Card.
The Gold Card community is really growing. I believe there's more than 3,000 Gold Card holders. You can get this residence certificate even while filing this oversea request. Then after getting this all-in-one card, you can just go and stay in Taiwan.
Again, before the pandemic, I believe it's in the low hundreds. During the pandemic, because Taiwan is quite safe, we're now seeing more than 3,000 foreign talent contributing to Taiwan's start-up as well as many other science and technological fields, while holding this Gold Card so they're not restricted by employment.
A part of it is the exchange rate between NT dollars and other international currencies, and the market, of course, is working on that.
