Audrey Tang

We don’t directly say that you have to use our model but if you choose to remain a liberal democracy, that would make us really happy.

Proactive. Of course, media competence, right? Starting from age seven in the primary school, instead of teaching literacy, which is treating students as viewers and readers, teach competence, which is they are YouTubers. They are producers of media.

They need to be responsible about checking their sources, about balancing their narratives, aware of the framing, all the training that journalists need to go through, all the media makers need to go through.

In Taiwan, broadband is human right. That’s everybody, so we really need to put it into the basic education curriculum, which we did, starting last year.

Of course. If you check the mlearn.moe.gov.tw, it has material from first grade all the way to lifelong education.

Humor over rumor is still the best way unless you do take-down but we don’t do take-down, so humor over rumor remains the best way. I have to go to a cabinet meeting now.

It was great, thank you.

Welcome and really nice chatting with you. I think the last time we chatted, you were still working on Docker.

That’s right.

That’s right.

Pretty good.

Yeah, keeping busy. I have early morning calls with people in the Americas and, of course, Canada and so on. During the day, I talked to the Asian people and during the evening to Europe and Africa. Our average is now seven meetings through video conference per day.

That’s right. It’s the new normal.

We’re now officially post-pandemic, just for the record. We’re over the pandemic now. It’s been eight weeks with no locally transmitted cases, and we’ve lifted all restrictions on public gatherings.

That’s right. Maybe in a couple of months or so, we’ll join in a bubble or something.

Right. Also on case-by-case basis, business visits. That’s what I meant by a bubble. If we’re ready to join the bubble, then people in that bubble could travel safely between different jurisdictions.

I know.

You’re still exercising outdoors?

[laughs] OK.

I just read yesterday on Hacker News this idea that investing in mental health, is very important. I’m glad to hear that you’re at least still making some investments on the mental health part.

Sure. That’s part of our Fast, Fair, and Fun strategy. The fast means that we ramp up the production of our mask from 2 million medical mask a day to 20 million medical mask a day very quickly, over a couple months. Once we produce that many, we want to ensure that everybody have access to those mask.

In the very beginning, we ask the pharmacies – I think there is 6,000 of them – to help distributing them on a real-name basis, meaning that people who use their national health insurance card, which is an IC card, can go to the pharmacies. Initially, people can get two per week. Quickly, became 3 per week. After a while, become 9 per two weeks, or 10 if you’re a child.

The trick of the pharmacies distributing mask is that we want to avoid long queues because long queues is, by itself, a transmission vector. The civil society, civic technologies, build a map that visualizes all the real-time stock level. That’s not our idea. It’s just people in the g0v community came up with those ideas.

Even when we are still not doing the real name rationing, they already built a mask. My contribution is just that when I see the initial prototype getting taken down because the creator, Howard Wu, owed Google because he uses the Places API, which doesn’t allow for caching.

Actually, he could cache the Place ID, but he didn’t know that trick. He owed Google 20K US dollars, so he had to take that down.

I showed his work to our prime minister, to our premier, Su Tseng-Chang. Premier Su said, “Oh, let’s just support the civic technologists.” We nationalized not only the mask production, but also the open data production.

The stock level of medical mask in pharmacies we publish every 30 seconds, in which case it become open data really, like open API that enabled distributed ledger to be built. We have two mask maps, one chatbot on the very first day of launch. Now, it’s over 140 applications.

No, it was the only one at the very beginning. Then we made a website. Actually, I personally coded that website called mask.pdis. All this does is that it lists all the available implementations. I just paste it on Discord. You can see that there is a map. There is a table for visually impaired, people with blindness.

There is also maps that can zoom out and shows various different regions, every supplier and their supply. There’s a heat map, many things like that.

There’s also a dashboard, which also, we review it every week to adjust our supply strategy. It not only shows the availability of adult and children mask, there are several tabs that shows the time series of the district distribution, the precinct distribution, township distribution.

These are all godsend for our decision-making when it comes to evidence-based policymaking. It’s all just implemented by social sector, consultation with pharmacists and so on are all done by civic technologists.

That’s right.

I’ve read the design spec. I saw the change that they made from their initial design based on their privacy-enhancing technology community’s feedback.

We’re now post-pandemic.

Taiwan has always based our strategy on a no-lockdown premise. Just as we fight the infodemic or disinformation crisis with the no-takedown philosophy. No lockdown means that we need to avoid going into community transmission stage and there must be no community spread. Otherwise, we have to do at least a small-scale lockdown.

We do most of our technological measures at the borders. That is to say at the airports and seaports, of course. We make a very strict quarantining process. You either go to a physical quarantine hotel for 14 days.

If you live with no people in the vulnerable group, then, of course, you can choose home quarantine, in which case the phone is used to build a digital fence out of the cell tower triangulation data that’s there already collecting anyway.

If you escape, your phone escape, that 50-meter or so radius, it’s not GPS, so we don’t know which room you’re in, but if you stray too far, then the local household managers and police got a SMS immediately. The same if your phone runs out of the battery, or if you haven’t responded to the chatbot in a while.

In any case, the point here is that we do the control at the borders, so that people locally do not have to use Bluetooth-level, app-level tracing. There are civic technologies like the AI Labs that have developed, Bluetooth-based technologies similar to the one that Google and Apple is doing. I think they’re working with Teams in UK for that.

There is a limited experiment in the smaller islands and such, but in Taiwan, we have seen no need nor the social mandate to adopt it.

Yeah, but the tech is just one part. Just like mask wearing, you need a majority of people using for it to have any effect. The other part is social interaction design, with the right incentive design. Like in Taiwan, we say you wear a mask to protect yourself from your own hands. [laughs] You don’t touch your face, and you’re social signaling that you’re washing your hands properly.

When built this way a few people in a large crowd can convince other people to wear a mask. It’s harder if you say wearing a mask is a sign of respect. That doesn’t spread as easy, so you need a social incentive design for the Bluetooth-based contact tracing or exposure apps also, in order for it to work.

Every culture is so different. Every epicenter is so different. I don’t think there’s a universal way to convince people.

You would be social signaling that you’re sick.

I’m also quite delighted to see that, I think three days ago, that World Health Organization is finally on board.

They’re finally recommending for the use of masks during the pandemic in the places where virus is spreading.

Yeah, Taiwan can help convince the WHO that wearing mask actually works.

The thing with medical mask is that they’re lighter. It’s easier than fabric mask to wear all day. Trust me, I’ve wear both. That’s why we need to ensure that medical mask rationing works.

In addition to the rationed mask, which you don’t get to pick the color, you can also freely buy a mask on the free market, because we nationalized only part of the production to ensure the rationed supply. The rest of it is free to sell to people.

Also, we’re exporting the mask-making machinery so that any place with plenty of electricity, and water, and a parcel of land can set up this 24 hours a day, almost entirely automated Taiwan model, a factory that produce two million masks, either medical or N95, your call, per day. That’s one of the main export that we get asked a lot.