The first system that goes online on South Korea for mask map stock level is written by 江明宗 (kiang) in Taiwan. We export our civic technology to South Korea, which may or may not be an island, depending on how you look at it but, certainly, in a similar situation. When they decided to ration their masks through pharmacies, they can use the Taiwan source code directly.
When Tokyo built its dashboard, I participated by translating, helping to correct one typo in the translation, the mayor of Tokyo Tweeted to thank me for it. It’s a lot of people in g0v helped translating. Not only now the Tokyo dashboard has a Mandarin Taiwan version, but also Taiwan can visualize our own cases using the Japanese code base.
It’s all made in the world in a sense. People are sharing those technologies. We have launched the cohack.tw event which was just launched. If you click it, you can see that it’s a part of the joint US-Taiwan contribution. We’re looking at six different categories. People can crowdsource, meaning that they can share their ideas of what is the most important thing to solve in one of the six groups.
You can see a lot of contributions from people in French, from people in the US, from people from across the world. We will soon announce what is the top thing to solve in each of the six category and focus our development energy on it. Even though they may not be useful in Taiwan, we are still very committed to developing it.
It was an email saying that we’ve learned. It’s on PTT, which is Taiwan’s equivalent of Reddit. There was a repost of Dr. Li Wenliang’s social media post. It’s the same information as what’s already circulating in the PRC social media except, of course, for a while, the people in Wuhan did not learn about it. It was harmonized.
Dr. Li Wenliang gets a punishment from the local institutional police for spreading rumor, basically. Technically, it’s not SARS. It’s a new SARS, so it’s a rumor or something like that. They have a way to explain this. It already got attention in Taiwan. In a sense, that could be…
Dr. Li Wenliang saved Taiwan. The scientific community did learn about the new coronavirus. It’s more like the ministers and the journalism community did not learn of this in time.
If Taiwan is a full member of the WHO, that would mean that we have full ministerial access and not just scientific community or occasionally academic community access. The difference is very clear. Unless your vice president happened to be the person who write the textbook on epidemiology, having the academic access doesn’t always translate into government action.
Ministerial access always translates to direct government action. Our scientists can sometimes talk to fellow scientists. Unless the scientist on the other side happens to be a vice president, it’s not the same as a ministerial access.
I will say something factual. Last December, the last day of December, we took a note. We contacted the WHO about the emergence of the new viral disease. Then, immediately, we decided for the next day to start health inspection for flight passengers from Wuhan to Taiwan.
Until January 10th, WHO at that time still does not recommend health inspection for flight passengers from Wuhan China. What this means is that if our measures, which was start health inspections for flight passengers from Wuhan, starts implemented at ministerial level at all the different countries, everybody can start responding at least 10 days earlier.
I would say that if other countries as we did, were to begin health inspections for flight passengers from Wuhan either through Taiwan’s participation in WHO or other international organizations, then everybody’s response would be 10 days earlier.
In science, we cannot go back in time. I would simply say that, personally, I feel sad that it was not heeded at the time. I do not know in a country-by-country basis how much would 10 days of foresight change things. That I cannot say. I would say that I, personally, feel sad that we did not have that opportunity at the time.
Yes. We have many bilateral conversations with different epicenters, which is a better term to use than different countries. One country may have multiple epicenter. Every epicenter is very different. We do support them by sharing our experience, sharing our medical research, and providing medical resource to all the epicenters around the world.
It’s an amplifier. If you are already authoritarian, it amplifies the authoritarianism. If you are already a participatory democracy, this can amplify the participatory democracy. That’s a quote. If you go through the timeline on Taiwan Can Help which is a link I just pasted you, you can find more in that timeline.
Thank you. I will embargo the transcript until you publish. That was our…
That’s just fine. I’ll send you the transcript anyway. Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Collaborative governance — COGOV — is the most effective way to counter the COVID.
COGOV refers to “Decentralized co-governance architecture” here, which includes government platforms but primarily are based on social sector platforms.
That is to say https://join.g0v.tw is even more important than https://join.gov.tw here :-)
As a technologist I’ve studied it with great interest but cannot comment on specific implementations, especially because Taiwan has currently no pressing need to deploy it.
I’ll, of course, share with you both the recording and the transcript.
Very well.
Not really. We’re very calm and collected. I just gave a talk at The Web Conference about the three ingredients of the Taiwan counter coronavirus strategy which is, and as you probably know now, fast, fair, and fun . We’re keeping things fun.
Yeah, techno-optimism.
We’ve not deployed any Bluetooth technology here. I don’t know how that get there.
[laughs] That’s exactly right. Not to mention, we’ve never entered community spread. A lot of characterizations doesn’t apply simply because there’s nothing to apply to.
We’ve heard of this before. It’s called distributed ledger technology. [laughs]
First of all, I would say that decentralized social technology really works. It’s like proper hand sanitation, washing your hands with soap. That’s a decentralized social technology that really works. It’s reliable. It’s robust. It’s very inexpensive.
It’s social innovation, because people keep reminding each other, like in Taiwan, we have even nursery rhymes like [non-English speech] that reminds you how to wash your hands properly. That’s social technology for you. That really works well and is thoroughly decentralized. There’s no penalty. There’s no top-down regulations that regulate hand sanitation, but you’ll do it anyway. It’s magic.
I think, because I assume you’ve watched my six minutes film, a lot of it boils down to just norms. People expecting that anyone who have some symptoms will take a medical mask, go to a local clinic, and report whatever they have done in the past 14 days.
They do so not because there’s a strict penalty, there’s a top-down way, or they’re being Bluetooth traced. No, none of the above. They do it because we have a single-payer health system, and it’s a logical thing to do.
The coordination may look like very compliant. I’ve even seen things like this is a Confucious thought or something like that, which is…I’ve read Confucious “Analects.” I understand that it’s a useful metaphor, but this looks far more Taoist than Confucian to me.
The people really said that it’s they who’ve done it. People criticize the government usually not for that we’re not top-down enough. They usually criticize us for not responding fast enough.
Which means that the people think most of the coordination is the people’s own merit, is the people’s own mobilization. That’s a very Taoist thing.
Exactly. It’s all rational choice. It’s all participatory mechanism design. There is no magic about it. If you know that you will incur a large financial or social burden for reporting your symptoms, you don’t. If you know that there is no social and financial burden, you do. It’s that simple.
I think that’s one of the advantage of being an island is that you don’t have accidental people crossing the borders. That just don’t happen.
Because of that, [laughs] our single-payer universal health system, which covers more than 99.99 percent of the population, including residents, migrant workers, and foreigners staying in Taiwan, there is no free rider, period.
That’s the interesting thing. It’s that the mask, while it actually protect others, is billed in Taiwan as something that protects you. We say that with some scientific backup, because our masks are medical masks.
They are properly PFE-certified masks, and so they do protect you, to a degree, but they mostly protect others.
This is a selfish incentive with a far more positive than to the user to the social externality, positively speaking. That encourages prosocial behavior, whereas people who do not wear a mask and do not keep a social distance gets shamed, basically.
Everybody is wearing the medical mask as a signal. They get shamed not for threatening others, but for not protecting themselves. Other people can say, “Why don’t you take good care of yourself?”
It’s a very interesting incentive design in that it encourages people to adopt prosocial behavior, but the justification is of self-interest.
That’s right, exactly, yeah. For example, I was filming myself. There was a photo of me in a convenience store trying out the mask collection system. I was helping a friend of my grandma.
My grandma’s 87. Her friend is 77. I’m just working on the experience of preordering masks using a convenience store kiosk. The 77 years old friend of my grandma was just trying it out in a kiosk. I was filming, like a user research program, behind her.
I’m facing her, and she’s facing the kiosk. There’s zero chance of she infecting me, because she’s in front of me, and she’s facing the front. Whereas there is non-negligible chance of me infecting her, because I’m not wearing a mask when I’m doing this user research.
We’re roughly 1 meter and 20 centimeters apart, 1.2m, but the convenience store is an indoor place. Our social distancing is 1.5 meters. Strictly speaking, I’m violating the social distancing protocols.
I didn’t take that picture. I didn’t know that the head of the convenience store was taking a picture, but they posted it on social media. I get a flood of comments saying that Audrey is not protecting herself.
Like, “Audrey is very important to us. We need to remind her.” I have to reply to each and every comment, saying, “I do have the mask. It was on my hand. I am just taking it down for the photo. Once I’m done with the photo, I’m putting it right back on.”
