We basically offer our civil society and researchers as resource persons to solve this global pandemic, instead of just thinking of Taiwan only. This, Taiwan as a resource, Taiwan Can Help, I think is, again, something new that we’re seeing.
We’ve had this slogan, Taiwan Can Help, for years, but it’s only after the coronavirus that it actually gained international recognition.
23 million is not a small population. We just have a small geography. [laughs] We’re very densely packed.
First of all, that’s why I mentioned epicenter to epicenter communication. Taiwan is twice bigger than New Jersey, so it’s not like a city state. You wouldn’t say New Jersey is a half city state. [laughs] In any case, what I’m trying to get at is that if we begin with a mindset that says as long as anybody can share…
Yes?
I said that Taiwan is about twice bigger than New Jersey, and so you wouldn’t call New Jersey a half city state, or maybe you would. [laughs] The point I’m making is that what we’re offering is a culture of open innovation. That’s why I mentioned the good example of our collaboration with Tokyo.
In Amsterdam, actually, there’s this mayor city office, and they do a lot of their development in the open. Our own website for not only the masks are from the civil society, but our own website for the revitalization plan, the directory, and so on, these are all open source. They’re developed on GitHub.
What I’m trying to say is that maybe it’s a good opportunity for us to look past the traditional jurisdiction-based multilateral point of view. It’s much more useful if we just compare one epicenter to another and see how they resemble each other, and only on the paths of where they resemble each other.
For example, the Czech Republic use a lot of playbook of the interesting incentive design that I just mentioned around mask use. They did a very successful, fun digital communication campaign that basically changed the norm around mask use over the course of a week.
That’s something, the mask for all campaign, that the Taiwan digital communicators can get behind, and provide scientific evidence that you can revitalize the mask, for example, using rice cookers. [laughs]
In any case, what I’m trying to say is that if then the measure that the #MaskForAll unites people who are in similar stages, then we can collaborate on that particular subject with all the subject matter experts.
That’s why Pol.is, the technology, you’ll find such focus among a swathe of social innovations, is so important in Cohack and similar setups, because otherwise, more people joining actually detracts from the problem-solving, because people have to use their mental bandwidth to look through all the ideas.
For people to cross-moderate each other and then find commonalities between two very different epicenters as one or two things – actually, no, it’s seven things or so – to focus on, that is very useful. That’s, again, how digital deliberative technologies can help to unite the research focus of all the resources into epicenters, and we look forward to do them all.
Yes, we did that with the open contracting partnership in the previous Presidential Hackathon, and it’s such a hit that we’re now doing it again. [laughs] If you have any good ideas around any of the 16 Millennium Goals, and think how open contracting can help solving it, then the International Track of the Presidential Hackathon is exactly what you’re looking at.
Honduras team and the Malaysian team that won previous year’s International Presidential Hackathon, really told us that this Taiwan experience gave them international legitimacy, so that if they talk to World Bank.
Or if they talk to other endeavors, they can say, “No, Taiwan has a very good social sector-led model. I would like to use your resource this way, and it’s been proven that it’s more effective than the traditional PPP model that you’re suggesting,” and maybe the World Bank learns a thing or two.
Yes. I think the government should fully trust the citizens. When we say mutual trust, all too often, people think it’s the people should trust the government, which will lead to people trusting each other.
There’s even this meme of Taiwan being a kind of city state with Confucius thought or things like that, which is actually Singapore. We love them, but it’s actually Singapore.
It really is a city state with Confucian thought, and we’re happy with our relationship with Singapore, but Taiwan is not that. [laughs] Taiwan is far more Daoist, or Austronesian, or Pacific Island than traditional collectivist thought.
A lot of Taiwan’s design comes from the idea that the social sector had years and decades to build legitimacy. The president only had comparatively a small number of time, because we first get the direct presidential election in 1996, after the World Wide Web.
Not only digital and democracy is the same thing in Taiwan, the same generation of people working on it, but also often need to respect the social sector legitimacy that’s already very well-established before even the modern liberal democratic system.
That, I think, is part of the underpinning of why we always say we cannot beat the social sector. We must join the social sector. We cannot control the social sector. We must support the social sector. Even in the language choice, we never say the third sector because they’re the primary sector.
That’s right. As a concluding thought, I’ll share with you a write-up from Medium, from Jon Edward Alexander with the title, “The Nation You’re Not Allowed to Learn From,” that sums up some of these ideas with a citizen republic lens that you’ve been describing.
I did not tweet that because the content is a little bit overly critical to the UK government. [laughs] In any case, if you take out the parts that are critical of the UK government, I think it contains a pretty good reading and comprehensive, too, of the philosophy that we’re operating under.
Awesome. Thank you. Cheers.
I’ll make a transcription anyway, and we can embargo until you publish, so we’ll just communicate over email.
Cheers. Bye.
Yes. In Taiwan, we are a very young democracy. Our first presidential election is 1996, which means that when we had our first presidential election, we already had the World Wide Web.
Like many other newly democratic countries, the elected officials or the representatives is only part of democracy. People care much more about the day-to-day participation of the democracy through, for example, participatory budgeting, e-petitions as sandbox applications, Presidential Hackathons. There is many mechanisms for people to voice their ideas for public policy every day.
This is important because without this kind of day-to-day mechanism, the distance between the government and the people, which stays the same, is going to be dwarfed by the distance that is massively shortened with hashtags and other kinds of social media between the social sector groups, which means that people would care less and less about politics and public affairs, and more and more about entertainment or even divisive ideologies and things like that.
The only way for democracy to continue functioning is to integrate it into the fabric of the new public forum, and making sure that we work with the social media platforms so that they are pro-social rather than anti-social.
Mm-hmm. In Taiwan, there is no crisis. It’s been three weeks with no domestic confirmed cases. Our professional baseball league has been playing for some time. Tomorrow, the stadium will have one thousand people in it watching the professional baseballers play their game.
I would say that Taiwan is very fortunate, because we have a robust civil society that not only warned on the Taiwan column of Reddit, the PTT, last year when Dr. Li Wenliang did his whistleblowing on social media that immediately circulated in Taiwan. Instead of like Dr. Li Wenliang who got punished by his local police, in Taiwan, the whistleblower’s re-poster do not get any punishment. Rather, it escalated to the CDC, the Center of Disease Control immediately.
We started health inspections for fliers originating from Wuhan the very next day, that is to say, the first day of 2020. This fast response enabled a collective intelligence system where the CECC can get tips from anybody. They just pick up their phone and call 1922, and then they can have this collective swarm intelligence to device new ideas, for example around mask use, or even around mask reuse using traditional rice cooker.
Or when there was a boy who wore the pink medical mask and refused to go to school, because other classmates may laugh at him. The next day after learning this, the CECC, everybody including the health minister wore pink medical masks to show solidarity and gender mainstreaming. This shows that it’s not just that we quickly listen to the people, people also quickly listen to each other when there is novel ideas that can enable Coronavirus mitigation.
There is still no lockdown. We didn’t have any lockdown.
Yes, definitely. When we first starting to ration out the masks, there was a lot of confusion of which pharmacies still have masks in stock. In other countries, I’m sure that the pharmacies will be able to publish their numbers, but usually, by the end of the week or end of the day at quickest.
In Taiwan, the open data is published every three minutes, meaning that you can go to a local pharmacy, swipe your NHI card, collect 9 masks every two weeks if you are adult or 10 if you are a child, and then after a couple of minutes, refresh your phone and see exactly the stock level deplete.
Everybody can see on a dashboard contributed by civil society that at this very minute, which is 1:00 PM, 1:10 PM today, there is still 71.7 percent of adult masks in stock in pharmacies and 81.7 percent for children. You can drill it down to each municipality and each county as well. Everybody feel very calm and collected, because they know wherever they live in Taiwan, it’s very easy to get medical masks.
We also use these contributed open-source tools in our own decision making. Like in the weekly meeting, I actually just showed our premier this analysis of this dashboard. This, again, works both ways.
Let me first state that we mean we are making the state transparent to the people. We never mean making the people transparent to the state. When I say transparency, I always mean that how the state functions, like the mask levels and so on, are made transparent to the people, but individual masks are identical to each other, other than color and shape. There is no privacy issue involved.
We do not make, for example, the confirmed cases, their name, their travel history, and things like that, we do not publish it until absolutely necessary and it’s very rare. We, as a rule, do not publish the whereabouts of the confirmed cases.
First of all, we have a strong Personal Data Protection Act. We are getting GDPR adequacy. Basically, our Personal Data Protection Act is a copy of the European privacy laws before the GDPR. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that there is a constitutional limit, because we’ve never declared emergency situation for the Coronavirus. We’re still operating under normal law basis. It’s not like the administration do whatever and the legislators approve it afterward. Everything we do need to have a legal and constitutional basis that is pre-approved by the legislature for the administration to do, or that it relies on a previous constitutional court ruling.
We have exactly the same continental law system as Germany, and because of that, the key checks and balances of the legislature and the courts keep us in the administration honest, because there is no emergency declared.
Yes, definitely. We’ve published on peer-reviewed journals. Our vice president is the authority actually on epidemiology. He wrote epidemiology textbook. Not only did he open a massive online open course on Epidemiology 101 – German translations welcome. I think people are working at it, but there is English captions and so on.
This idea of treating everybody as a co-learner is very important. This by itself is important. When I say that our vice president is an authority or that our vice premier, who used to be his student in epidemiology and public health, they don’t see themselves as top-down authorities, including the CECC commander. Everybody, when there is anyone who propose a new idea, they always take a habit of questioning themselves.
The epidemiology they used to learn was classical, but now it’s digital. There is bound to be a lot of new ideas. You can look at those ideas at cohack.tw. There is English for each of those new ideas, and we ask every participant to relinquish most of their copyright, and they are open-source licensed.
Whatever they have developed in the next week or so is available for everybody around the world to use. You don’t have to rely on the goodwill of a Taiwan operator. You can just download the code and run it yourself and inspect yourself.
I think the civic technology community in Germany is very strong. It’s just that the civic technologists do not often see themselves as traditional civil engineers.
