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台湾オードリー･タン｢ハッカーとしての素顔｣

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台湾オードリー･タン｢ハッカーとしての素顔｣

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2021/03/22

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台湾にさまざまなイノベーションをもたらし続ける、台湾デジタル担当政務委員大臣のオードリー・タンさん。彼女のこれまでの仕事と思考について、オードリーさんへの丹念なインタビュー取材を元にいきいきと描き出した 『オードリー・タンの思考 IQよりも大切なこと』 より抜粋してご紹介します。

今回は、彼女の過去の特筆すべき活動のひとつ、シビックハッカー･コミュニティ〈g0v〉への参加と〈萌典〉の経緯についてです。

オードリーがデジタル担当大臣として入閣した2016年からさかのぼること4年前に始まり、彼女が今でも参加し続ける、シビックハッカー・コミュニティ〔g0v（零時政府）〕（ガヴ・ゼロと読む。以下〈g0v〉と記載）。

シビックハッカーとは社会問題の解決に取り組む民間のエンジニアのことで、台湾における彼らの数は、世界でも3本の指に入ると言われている。シビックハッカー内にもさまざまなコミュニティが存在しているが、その中でもソフトウェアのソースコードを開放する〈オープンソース〉に関心のある者が集うコミュニティから〈g0v〉は生まれた。

数字のゼロを使った〈g0v〉という名称は、政府の略称が、government に由来した〈gov〉であるのに対し、彼らは「政治をゼロから再考する」というスタンスを表したもの。

「『なぜ誰もやらないのだ？』と聞くのをやめて、まずは自分がその『やらない人』の1人であることを認めよう。万能な人は存在しない」。これが彼らのモットーである。私自身も耳が痛くなる言葉だ。

従来の社会運動にテクノロジーコミュニティを結び付けることで、環境や労働など、社会問題をテーマにしたプロジェクトに取り組んでいる。2年に1度、国際サミットを開催したり（2018年には30カ国近くが参加）、総額1000万元以上のシビックテック・イノベーション助成金を発行するなど、その規模は決して小さくない。

オードリーを語るとき、この〈g0v〉は重要なキーワードだと言えよう。2014年の〈ひまわり学生運動〉でもオードリーは〈g0v〉のメンバーとして貢献しているし、入閣後は自らプロジェクトを実行することはなくなったものの、今でも〈g0v〉のSlack（チャットルーム）に入り、やりとりは続いており、時には問題解決をサポートすることもある。2020年のコロナ禍でマスクマップを開発したのも、彼女が〈g0v〉と共に行ったことだ。

ここでは〈g0v〉のあらましと、オードリー自身がそこで手がけたオンライン言語辞典の〈萌典 moedict〉を紹介する。

きっかけは、台湾史上最悪の広告

〈g0v〉が始まるきっかけとなったのが、2012年2月に行政院が打ち出した〈経済力推進プラン（原名：経済動能推升方案）〉の動画広告だ。ちまたでは「台湾史上最悪の広告」と呼ばれている。

この動画広告で流れるナレーションの拙訳は以下の通り。

「〈経済力推進プラン〉とは、何でしょうか？ 私たちはわずかな言葉で簡単に説明して、皆様にご理解いただきたいと強く思っています。ですが、わずかな言葉数では、こんなにたくさんの政策を説明することはできません。

なぜなら、経済発展のためには完璧な計画が必要であり、それでこそ経済は動き出せるのです。

だからこのプランは当然複雑になります。 重要なのは『たくさんのことが今、加速して進行中』だということです。これを実行すれば、間違いない！」

開いた口が塞がらなくなるような、まったく中身のない内容だが、これは当時の政府が実際に流した広告なのだ。

これに対して、「政府は国民のためにあるものなのに、政策を説明せずに進めるのはおかしい」と立ち上がったのが、高嘉良（ガオ・チャーリャン）、吳泰輝（ウー・タイフォイ）、陳學毅（チェン・シュエイー）、郭嘉渝（グゥオ・チャーユー）ら4人のシビックハッカーだ。彼らは、台湾Yahoo! 奇摩が主催したハッカソン〈Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2012〉に参加し、政府の予算データをオープンデータ化してみせた。

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台湾オードリー･タン｢ハッカーとしての素顔｣ | 中国･台湾

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台湾にさまざまなイノベーションをもたらし続ける、台湾デジタル担当政務委員大臣のオードリー・タンさん。彼女のこれまでの仕事と思考について、オードリーさんへの丹念なインタビュー取材を元にいきいきと描き出した 『オードリー・タンの思考 IQよりも大切なこと』 より抜粋してご紹介します。 ...

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2020/11/14

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Walid Berrazeg/ Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

On December 30, 2019, Li Wenliang, the Chinese whistleblower who later died of Covid-19, sent a group message, warning colleagues about an outbreak of a SARS-like illness in Wuhan, China. Li's private message ended up being shared online and picked up 1,010 km away, across the sea, in Taiwan.

The next day, it was reposted by a doctor with the username 'nomorepipe' on PTT, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit. As Li's revelation spread across Taiwan's social media, it was seen by the country's health officials, who sent an email to the World Health Organization (WHO) to warn the rest of the world. On January 1 2020, Taiwan kicked off a programme of health inspections for all flights from Wuhan. As the country continued to mobilise over the next few days, the WHO stayed silent and the world remained oblivious.

Globally, Covid-19 cases have now surpassed 50 million, with ten million in the US alone. Multiple countries in Europe have entered national lockdowns for the second time as the virus continues to ravage through populations. But despite never having entered a nationwide lockdown, Taiwan is virus-free. To date, it has seen a total of 597 coronavirus cases and seven deaths.

By May, the country had largely returned to normal. In October, it celebrated 200 days without a single case; by the end of the month, thousands marched through the streets of Taipei for the Pride parade.

Many factors have played a part in Taiwan's success, including an ethos of open data and open government, an enthusiastic "open source" movement, and the use of big data analytics in apps and services. Just look at vTaiwan, a platform that sees the country's government working closely with g0v, a group of "civic hackers", to include citizens in the democracy process.

And crucially, trust in the government is high following 2014's Sunflower Movement and the appointment of digital minister Audrey Tang, Taiwan's first transgender official and the youngest-ever government minister.

Taiwan was well-prepared for the possibility of a coronavirus-related pandemic. The country was one of the worst hit by SARS in 2003, with 346 cases and 73 deaths. Following SARS, a careful legislative process resulted in the creation of Taiwan's Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) to manage outbreaks.

Since 2004, Taiwan's citizens have been given a smart card under the government-run National Health Insurance system to demonstrate their eligibility for healthcare access. Over the years more health data has been added to the card, such as a person's prescription history. This card was central to a mask rationing system spearheaded by digital minister Tang early in the pandemic, which ensured that all Taiwan's citizens had access to an allocated quota. When people swiped their card at a pharmacy or convenience store, they were given the masks.

Taiwan understood the importance of face masks from the start - Tang herself calls them "a physical vaccine" - and this initiative meant everyone could easily get their quota. If people already had enough masks at home, the National Health Insurance's own app helped them donate them to countries in need.

To help with the masks' distribution, Tang also released data to the public via an open API and invited Taiwan's civic hackers to create. They built more than 140 apps, including maps showing which pharmacies had supplies, visualisations of how many masks had been distributed and where, and voice assistants for the visually impaired.

Chihhao Yu, a founder of g0v's international arm g0v-intl, explains how the leaderless organisation's contributors worked together with citizens when people were concerned about where to buy masks. "Faced with a lack of data detailing store locations and supply, a concerned engineer called Howard decided to build a website for people to add convenience stores to the map and report mask supply. It's not perfect, but it works," he says.

Taiwan also leveraged technology to build an effective "digital quarantine" system. Those returning to Taiwan from overseas are sent to a "quarantine hotel" - a hotel that has been repurposed for the pandemic - and not allowed to leave their room for two weeks. People who live in a flat with their own bathroom can quarantine at home.

Those quarantining - whether in a hotel or at home - are monitored by a "digital fence": smartphone signal and nearby cell towers are combined by the country's mobile phone carriers to provide a rough idea of a person's location. The authorities can't see exactly where you are, but they can tell if you've left the general area. The telecom provider will automatically text both the person in quarantine and a health officer, if they venture outside the zone. The phone must stay on: if someone runs out of battery, a health officer will soon appear at their door.

The whole process is carried out with privacy in mind, says Tang. "Because it's not GPS, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi, the resolution is very coarse. Even in the most urban areas, it's maybe a 15-meter radius. We don't know which room you are in, but we do know which district." And the telcos process the information entirely within their own data centres. "We can't keep the data, and the telecoms never hand it to a third party anyway, so it can't be sold to advertisers," Tang says.

The country also wisely uses incentives: if citizens stay in quarantine, they are paid £27 a day. If they break it, they are fined up to 1,000 times that.

Taiwan has long been a victim of disinformation, allegedly from China - which regards the country as part of its territory. It has been unable to join WHO meetings following opposition from China. But within its borders, Taiwan's government actively pushes out daily press releases, memes and texts to rebut false information about Covid-19.

Although it was already common to wear a mask in Taiwan, the country's approach to disinformation was a major factor in convincing the population of the efficacy of masks and hand-washing. The message to wear a mask and wash hands was spread by a cartoon "spokesdog", a Shiba Inu named Zongchai, which translates science into funny memes.

"Whenever there's a trending rumour, we make sure there's humour over rumour. Within two hours, we roll out two pictures, each with less than 200 characters and that goes even more viral than the disinformation," Tang says. The idea is that people would see the disinformation and a funny clarification on the same day, she says. That way, after they wake up the following day, the long-term association will likely be "joy and humour", rather than "anger and outrage".

At the same time, people actively identify and flag misinformation. CoFacts, a collaborative fact-checking chatbot spun up through a g0v project, allows those using end-to-end encrypted chat apps to send something they suspect is misinformation to be crowd-checked. Professional fact-checkers, such as the Taiwan FactCheck Center and MyGoPen, also play a role.

It's an impressive approach built on a collective effort that could be difficult to replicate in more divided Western democracies. Is Taiwan a particularly altruistic society? Tang says no. "We know wearing a mask alone doesn't work, you have to wash your hands, too. We say, 'You wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands'. This links hand sanitation and mask use together.

"It is appealing to one's own self-interest. If we had said, 'You wear a mask to protect the elderly, you wear a mask to respect each other', that's a collectivist argument, and it wouldn't work."

Even so, the Taiwanese's collaborative attitude is undeniable. According to Chunhuei Chi, a public health professor at the Oregon State University, most countries don't do quarantine properly. "In Taiwan, the border has been strongly guarded and the country still practices strict quarantine," he says. He quotes Taiwan's former vice-president Chen Chien-jen, who said success lies half on the government and half on citizens. "That's an important political social culture."

Tang agrees, saying that trust in citizens and businesses is vital. She describes how a hostess bar created its own contact-tracing system after a worker was diagnosed with Covid-19. "They invented code names, single-use emails, prepaid SIM cards and scratch pads, so they didn't need to send any data to the central government."

The most replicable factor in Taiwan's success is the country's high-trust open source culture, says Amy Studdart, a senior advisor at the International Republican Institute, an NGO focusing on digital democracy. "Taiwan has been smart about changing the institutions and structure of government and they have transformed citizens' expectations of what the government does."

But Daniel Faraci, director at consultancy Grassroots Political Consulting points out that parts of Taiwan's approach could be difficult to replicate in the West, where social media are more often weaponised to sow discord than to fight disinformation. "Taiwan has a level of sophistication where the community and government are working together," says Faraci. "Here [in the US] we don't have those types of systems: we have websites."

Despite news that a vaccine is close, Covid-19 is going to be an urgent global issue for some time. In the interim, Taiwan thinks it can help others: Tang's Twitter profile displays the hashtag #TaiwanCanHelp.

"It's a great opportunity for the world to look at this situation and learn that there's no need to go into an authoritarian lockdown, or to succumb to surveillance capitalism to get data," she says. "People don't have to make the false choice between freedom and human rights on one side, and public health on the other."

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On December 30, 2019, Li Wenliang, the Chinese whistleblower who later died of Covid-19, sent a group message, warning colleagues about an outbreak of a SARS-like illness in Wuhan, China. Li's private message ended up being shared online and picked up 1,010 km away, across the sea, in Taiwan.

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Taiwan Is Crowdsourcing an Everybody-Wins Democracy

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Taiwan Is Crowdsourcing an Everybody-Wins Democracy

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2020/11/05

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'WE ARE NOT DIVIDED': ABOUT THE PROJECT

Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners

Every day this week The Tyee partners with the project We Are Not Divided, running stories about people, places and institutions that are succeeding in overcoming division.

We Are Not Divided is an initiative by Reasons to Be Cheerful, an uplifting journalism site founded by the artist David Byrne.

Visit the entire We Are Not Divided multimedia series here. You'll find dozens of written features, infographics, video content and other interactive storytelling about the human capacity for finding ways to move toward each other.

The Tyee is proud to contribute pieces to We Are Not Divided, joining other collaborators including the Guardian, the Marshall Project, Next City, Freakonomics, Solutions Journalism Network and more.

The origin of one world always begins with its feet in another. And so it was on March 18, 2014.

A large crowd had formed, pressing against a tall wire fence that separated them from a large, gray building, resembling something of a mix between a bunker and a temple.

That evening, the crowd - as crowds do - wanted change. The flashpoint had been a trade bill, purporting to bring their country, Taiwan, closer to China. But the problem, the anger, was deeper.

Opponents to the bill felt not just defeated, but invisible. The government had promised to listen to their concerns, but simply hadn't done so, rushing the bill onto the parliament floor. They had the votes; they could get it through. So that evening, protesters scaled the fence, kicked the door open and streamed onto the floor of Taiwan's parliament, the Legislative Yuan.

The Tyee is supported by readers like you
Join us and grow independent media in Canada

The occupation became known as the Sunflower Revolution. It was one of those moments where a new direction is taken, and a new era begins. For as it settled one question, that of trade, it opened another, much bigger one: How could Taiwan's government listen better?

To answer that question, Taiwan did not turn to any of the usual suspects. They didn't ask lobbyists or political consultants. Instead, one Saturday several months later, the government arrived at a bustling lecture theatre on a university campus to ask for the help of a group that very few politicians knew even existed: the civic hackers.

Taiwan's civic hackers were organized around a leaderless collective called g0v (pronounced "gov zero.") Many believed in radical transparency, in throwing opaque processes open to the light, and in multi-stakeholderism, the idea that everyone who is affected by a decision should have a say in it. They preferred establishing consensus to running lots of majority-rule votes. These were all principles, incidentally, that parallel thinking about how software should be designed - a philosophy that g0v had begun to apply to the arena of domestic politics.

In the wake of the Sunflower Revolution, members of g0v joined the government, and one of its members, Audrey Tang, became the country's digital minister. The worlds of power and politics began to mix with technology and hackerdom in ways never seen before in an attempt to create a new way of making political decisions.

As g0v saw it, the problem of politics was essentially one of information. Votes were strung out too far apart to really give lawmakers much of an idea of what the public wanted. And votes, referenda, run-offs and debates often split the public down the middle. They needed a way not to measure division, but construct consensus.

Naturally, they thought the internet could offer a solution. But in Taiwan - like everywhere else - the internet was part of the problem. The kinds of online spaces where political debate happened were engineered for an entirely different purpose: to capture attention. Whether it was Twitter's timeline, Facebook's news feed or the recommendations on YouTube, these platforms served up information that was shocking, horrifying or crazy enough to keep people glued to their screens. And that often meant amplifying the thundering politics of division and outrage rather than the subtle complexities of compromise.

The hackers' answer was called vTaiwan. (The "v" stands for virtual.) A mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise, it was an entirely new way to make decisions. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. Government would start a new vTaiwan process on a political question it was deliberating, and Taiwanese people from across the full spectrum of opinion would join one another to discuss it online.

Crucially, however, the discussants found themselves in an entirely new kind of online space - exactly the opposite of a social media platform that encourages strife. vTaiwan used a platform called Polis, designed by Seattle-based technologists, that turned the engineering of the tech giants on its head. Like any other social media platform, Polis would let anyone share their feelings on the issue with everyone else and agree and disagree with the opinions of others. But that's where the similarity ended.

As the debate began, Polis drew a map showing all the different knots of agreement and dissent as they emerged. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus - consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow-travellers, but the other huddles, too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation - you simply couldn't see these.

"People spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue," Audrey Tang tells me. "Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements." They found that re-engineering the online space had exposed a deeper human truth. In politics, humans spend most of their time concentrating on what they disagree upon. But if you gamify consensus, you expose points of unity that were previously hidden.

Soon, vTaiwan was being rolled out on issue after issue, especially those related to technology, and each time a hidden consensus was revealed. Underneath an angry debate about Uber regulation, for instance, it emerged that what everyone really cared about safety. Then there was the extremely angry debate about whether to change Taiwan's time zone. But what initially had all the hallmarks of geopolitics (closer to China, or further away?) really wasn't about that at all - everyone wanted Taiwan to maintain its autonomy, they just disagreed on whether a time zone was the way to do it. The participants even began to change the questions themselves - rather than argue over whether drunk drivers should be beaten with canes, everyone began to focus on how to prevent drunk driving in the first place.

Most valuable of all, by clearing away the noise and divisiveness, vTaiwan created outcomes that the government could actually act on. It has formed the core of around a dozen pieces of laws and regulations now implemented in Taiwan, on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation. More are waiting to be passed.

New worlds may begin in the old, but they don't remain there. Civic technologists are spread all over the world, and the achievements of Taiwan - and Audrey Tang herself - have redefined what is possible. Through the many hackathons, meet-ups and conferences that knit the community together, and in different forms and guises, the idea spread that here was a way to transform democracy, to make decisions more effectively.

Polis was used to bring 2,000 people together at a virtual town hall in Bowling Green, Kentucky - a world away from Taipei, to say the least. Asked how to improve the local area, residents found consensus around improving traffic flow, adding bike lanes, beautification of the waterfront, even access to broadband internet services.

The local government of Newham in the U.K. used it to help inform parking policy. And all the way over in Singapore, the government used it to hear from young people about their views on active citizenry, inclusivity, and awareness around mental health.

The biggest hurdle, however, is yet to come. For any of these initiatives to matter, the process has to be plugged into power. It has to change things. It has to make decisions. In Taiwan or elsewhere, the process must work within existing systems of democracy, which it both relies on and challenges.

That's a reason to be cautious, but also a reason for optimism. The system's potential to heal divisions, to reconnect people to politics, is a solution made for the problems of our age. What started with a protest on the floor of Taiwan's parliament may lead us towards a world governed by systems that look very different from any parliament at all.

This story was published as part of We Are Not Divided, a special editorial project of Reasons to Be Cheerful that explores the human capacity to overcome divisions.

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Taiwan Is Crowdsourcing an Everybody-Wins Democracy | The Tyee

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'WE ARE NOT DIVIDED': ABOUT THE PROJECT Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners Every day this week The Tyee partners with the project We Are Not Divided, running stories about people, places and institutions that are succeeding in overcoming division.

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How Taiwan's 'civic hackers' helped find a new way to run the country

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How Taiwan's 'civic hackers' helped find a new way to run the country

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2020/09/27

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The origin of one world always begins with its feet in another. And so it was in March 2014.

It came to be known as the Sunflower movement, a sudden three-week stand-off in 2014 between the government and Taiwanese protesters occupying parliament over a trade bill purporting to bring their country closer to China.
There are new ways to do democracy that give me hope. More voices could change everything | Jess Scully
Ultimately, the protesters backed down. But it was one of those moments where a new direction is taken and a new era begins. For as it settled one question, that of trade, it opened another, much bigger one: how could Taiwan's government listen better?

To answer that question, Taiwan did not turn to any of the usual suspects such as lobbyists or political consultants. Instead, one Saturday several months later, government officials arrived at a bustling lecture theatre on a university campus to ask for the help of a group that few knew even existed: the civic hackers.

Taiwan's civic hackers were organized around a leaderless collective called g0v (pronounced "gov zero.") Many believed in radical transparency, in throwing opaque processes open to the light, and in the idea that everyone who is affected by a decision should have a say in it. They preferred establishing consensus to running lots of majority-rule votes. These were all principles, incidentally, that parallel thinking about how software should be designed - a philosophy that g0v had begun to apply to the arena of domestic politics.

In the wake of the Sunflower Revolution, members of g0v joined the government, and one of its members, Audrey Tang, became the country's digital minister. The worlds of power and politics began to mix with technology and hackerdom in ways never seen before in an attempt to create a new way of making political decisions.

As g0v saw it, the problem of politics was essentially one of information. Elections were too infrequent to give lawmakers much of an idea of what the public wanted. And votes, referenda, run-offs and debates often split the public down the middle. They needed a way not to measure division, but construct consensus.

Naturally, they thought the internet could offer a solution. But in Taiwan - like everywhere else - the internet was part of the problem. The kinds of online spaces where political debate happened were engineered for an entirely different purpose: to capture attention. Whether it was Twitter's timeline, Facebook's news feed or the recommendations on YouTube, these platforms served up information that was shocking, horrifying or crazy enough to keep people glued to their screens. And that often meant amplifying the thundering politics of division and outrage rather than the subtle complexities of compromise.

The hackers' answer was called vTaiwan. (The "v" stands for virtual.) A mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise, it was an entirely new way to make decisions. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. Government would start a new vTaiwan process on a political question it was deliberating, and Taiwanese people from across the full spectrum of opinion would join one another to discuss it online.

Crucially, however, the discussants found themselves in an entirely new kind of online space - exactly the opposite of a social media platform that encourages strife. vTaiwan used a platform called Polis, designed by Seattle-based technologists, that turned the engineering of the tech giants on its head. Like any other social media platform, Polis would let anyone share their feelings on the issue with everyone else, and agree and disagree with the opinions of others. But that's where the similarity ended.

Divisive statements, trolling, provocation - you simply couldn't see these

As the debate began, Polis drew a map showing all the different knots of agreement and dissent as they emerged. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus - consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow-travellers, but the other huddles, too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation - you simply couldn't see these.

"People spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue," Audrey Tang tells me. "Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements." They found that re-engineering the online space had exposed a deeper human truth. In politics, humans spend most of their time concentrating on what they disagree upon. But if you gamify consensus, you expose points of unity that were previously hidden.

Soon, vTaiwan was being rolled out on issue after issue, especially those related to technology, and each time a hidden consensus was revealed. Underneath an angry debate about Uber regulation, for instance, it emerged that everyone really just cared about safety. Then there was the extremely angry debate about whether to change Taiwan's time zone. But what initially had all the hallmarks of geopolitics (closer to China, or further away?) really wasn't about that at all - everyone wanted Taiwan to maintain its autonomy, they just disagreed on whether a time zone was the way to do it. The participants even began to change the questions themselves - rather than argue over whether drunk drivers should be beaten with canes, everyone began to focus on how to prevent drunk driving in the first place.

The Upside - sign up here for a weekly digest of pure optimism emailed to you every Friday

Most valuable of all, by clearing away the noise and divisiveness, vTaiwan created outcomes that the government could actually act on. It has formed the core of around a dozen pieces of laws and regulations now implemented in Taiwan, on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation. More are waiting to be passed.

The Taiwan model may be catching on.

Polis was used to bring 2,000 people together at a virtual town hall in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Asked how to improve the local area, residents found consensus around improving traffic flow, adding bike lanes, beautification of the waterfront, even access to broadband internet services.

The local government of Newham in the UK used it to help inform parking policy. And in Singapore, the government used it to hear from young people about their views on active citizenry, inclusivity, and awareness around mental health.

The system's potential to heal divisions, to reconnect people to politics, is a solution made for the problems of our age.

What started with a protest on the floor of Taiwan's parliament may lead towards a world governed by systems that look very different from any parliament at all.

* This story was first published as part of " We Are Not Divided," a special editorial project of Reasons to be Cheerful that explores the human capacity to overcome divisions. A longer version can be found here.
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How Taiwan's 'civic hackers' helped find a new way to run the country

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The origin of one world always begins with its feet in another. And so it was in March 2014. It came to be known as the Sunflower movement, a sudden three-week stand-off in 2014 between the government and Taiwanese protesters occupying parliament over a trade bill purporting to bring their country closer to China.

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2019/03/12

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This is the third in a series of opinion pieces on how to fix democracy.
IN 2012 A controversial government advertisement in Taiwan proposed a peculiar idea: "Instead of wasting time deliberating policies, let's focus on doing the groundwork and get things done!" In response, four programmers with a civic-minded ethos did something else entirely.

These "civic hackers"-that is, politically minded computer programmers with an activist ethos-built a citizen auditing system for Taiwan's central government budget. They made data from the Accounting and Statistics Office accessible, easy to understand and interactive. The public could rate and comment on every item in the budget. This became the foundation of the gØv ("gov-zero") movement, which is now one of the world's most active civic-tech communities.

Since then, Taiwan has put online collaboration at the core of its governance. The idea is to bring technology into the spaces where citizens live, rather than expect citizens to enter the space of technology. The premise is this: the government must first trust the people with agenda-setting power; then the people can make democracy work.

Taiwan did not always enjoy these freedoms, digital or otherwise. In 1987 martial law was lifted after nearly 40 years. The first direct presidential election took place in 1996, just as the internet was taking off. By then, Taiwan had a fairly robust civil society, built on an historic practice of community associations that used "collaborative action" to find common solutions.

The island of Taiwan is about 400km (250 miles) long, a journey of less than two hours by high-speed rail. This has proved a major advantage in deploying internet connectivity. The idea of broadband as a human right is at the core of the government's policy. Some 87% of people over the age of 12 are connected. For a population of 23m, the internet is even more natural as a public space for discussion than the practice of voting.

Today, generations accustomed to authoritarian power and generations accustomed to freedom coexist, and occasionally clash. Yet a common thread running through our digital democracy projects is collaborative participation.

Taiwan's national platform for online participation, called "Join", and the Taipei City government have adopted the gØv system for projects to include the public in budget matters. Data visualisation tools help people to understand what is allocated where. The "Join" platform, with over 4m participants, extends beyond budget matters. Anyone can begin an e-petition on the platform. Once a case has 5,000 signatures, the relevant ministries must respond in public.

As Digital Minister, I have established a network of Participation Officers in each ministry. They serve as the links between the general public and the public sectors, and as channels for inter-agency collaboration. Whenever a proposal is raised, a collaborative meeting can be held, with participants from government departments and the public invited to join the discussion and to jointly create new policies.

So far we have held more than 40 collaborative meetings. We gathered stakeholders to find solutions, be it to improve the experience of filing income tax, the allocation of medical resources in remote towns, or balancing the fishery and marine biodiversity in national parks.

The adoption of civic innovations in the public sector requires an established system for regulation, maintenance and accountability. Thus, it is imperative that the government, the tech community and companies come together to form a collaborative ecosystem to amplify the impact of civic technology: code can support democratic values in a way that wasn't previously possible.

It is only through integrating with the existing legal system, with the backing of laws and regulations, that social innovation can drive regulatory innovation. For example, we launched a Regulatory Sandbox platform in 2017, allowing entrepreneurs to experiment freely without legal constraints for a certain period of time. It is meant to spur fintech experiments and autonomous vehicles, among other innovations.

Another important driver for public participation in law-making is the vTaiwan platform, which was initiated by the gØv community. (Where the Join platform is run and maintained by the government, vTaiwan is run by citizens and maintained by gØv.) The legal status of Uber was heatedly discussed on vTaiwan, supported by a system using artificial intelligence to manage the conversation. This helped the different sides converge towards a "Diversified Taxi Services Plan" in 2016. In 2018 vTaiwan also successfully helped enact regulations for the platform economy.

In addition to lowering the barriers to democracy, this approach is also a process of mutual understanding. When the public sees the results of collaboration, it leads to more participation. Only through this cycle will it be possible for citizens to provide concrete feedback and go even further by applying, adjusting and contributing to the civic tech community.

Our goals for PDIS, the policy lab in Taiwan's cabinet, is to bring these experimental results to people all over the world. We have visited New York, Toronto, Madrid, Tokyo and Hong Kong to co-organise workshops with civic tech communities for sharing democratic innovations, such as our Participation Officers network and collaborative meetings. The gØv programme has been transplanted internationally, with "gØv Italy" set up in 2018.

International co-operation is no longer just about agreements between governments: it is also about people building shared values. For example, at our Presidential Hackathon last year, the cross-sectoral team "Water Saviours" deployed machine learning to assist pipe repair with an accuracy rate of 70%. The team was then invited by the New Zealand government to co-create solutions to address water leakage.

People often ask me about the future of democracy. To me, democracy's future is based on a culture of listening. Taiwan has no "legacy systems" of representative democracy (to use the language of technology) and the internet is highly developed. This means we can experiment with new modes of democracy. As President Tsai Ing-wen said at her inauguration three years ago: "Before, democracy was a showdown between two opposing values. Now, democracy is a conversation between many diverse values."

At a time when the world is rethinking basic elements of governance, Taiwan's digital democracy-in which the people take the initiative, and the government responds in the here and now-can serve as a demonstration of new forms of citizen and state co-operation and dialogue for the 21st century.

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Audrey Tang is the Digital Minister of Taiwan and the first openly transgender government minister in the world.
Author photo credit: Camille McOuat (CC BY 4.0)
Also in this series:
Matthew Taylor: Citizen deliberation is the gateway to a better politics
Cass Sunstein: Political savagery makes self-government impossible

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This is the third in a series of opinion pieces on how to fix democracy. IN 2012 A controversial government advertisement in Taiwan proposed a peculiar idea: "Instead of wasting time deliberating policies, let's focus on doing the groundwork and get things done!" In response, four programmers with a civic-minded ethos did something else entirely.

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2021/01/22

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With a whole year gone by since the pandemic started, it's time to take a look at who got the response right and who got it totally wrong.

In many ways, the pandemic is the ultimate test of a nation's intelligence, resourcefulness and adaptability. It's a global experiment, with every country on Earth participating whether they like it or not.
Some countries passed the test with flying colors. Others got it right for a time only to fall apart late in the year. Still many more got it horribly wrong.
That's desite the fact that every country on Earth started the race at the same time. They had the same information. They didn't have exactly the same tools, but the most basic tools were available to everyone.

Scientists and disease control experts had studied the possibilities of an outbreak for decades and given everyone detailed playbooks to follow. We'd already seen deadly contagions like Ebola and SARs erupt in recent years, so we knew the threat was very real.

And still the results were wildly different.

How is it that every country started in the same place and still got wildly different results?

The answers boil down to culture, clear thinking, a bit of luck, but above all leadership.

The good news is that some countries got the response really right and the rest of the world can learn from them. We can learn from the big failures too. There's a lot of countries to choose from but instead of covering them all, let's talk about three countries with dramatically different results.

One of them got it totally right, the second got it partially right, and the third got it totally wrong.

You can probably guess which is which but the reasons why might surprise you.

The good news is the modern world did a lot better than the ancient world and the industrial world with the Plague and Smallpox but the bad news is we still have a lot to learn when it comes to dealing with mankind's most deadly and elusive enemy:

Viruses, fungi, bacteria and other invisible monsters have killed more humans throughout history than all wars and famines combined.

A close look at what societies got right this time and what they got wrong will help us beat back future outbreaks. And make no mistake, future outbreaks are coming. We're too interconnected now, too woven together for disease not to spread globally.

We'll start in the middle, with a country that showed a ton of early success only to squander it late in the game.

Germany came out of the gates swinging. They managed to flatten the curve early and have a very slow uptick of cases for most of the year.

As of late as Sept 2020 Germany had under 300,000 cases, up from only a 150,000 in April 2020. That was a remarkable result and made Germany the toast of the Western world, a thriving democracy in the heart of Europe that still managed to slow the rapid spread of the pandemic.

They benefited immensely from having a strong, well-respected Chancellor in Angela Merkel, who understood the science early because she's an actual scientist. She earned her doctorate in quantum chemistry in 1986 and she's ruled Germany since 2005. She also has broad appeal across party lines, with both liberals and conservatives continuing to back her across the vast majority of her time at the helm of the Germanic state, something Americans could only dream of in the last four years as they faced increasingly bitter polarization.

In classic German fashion Merkel took a consensus building, conservative, data driven approach to the pandemic. The German government reacted swiftly, with lockdowns, cutting off flights from everywhere, not just from places that were politically expedient. The US did the opposite, blocking only a few flights from China when the disease had long since spread beyond its borders, all while letting in whoever else wanted to show up with no quarantine policy. The government in Germany is well known for balanced budgets but they wisely took the chains off and spent hard and fast to boost the economy, shelling out to keep businesses alive as they got hit by the crisis.

After the initial lockdown, the country gradually opened up again and by late spring, cafes and even bars had reopened once more. Unlike in the US where protests against anti-pandemic rules ran rampant, protests were mostly muted and small across Germany, never more than a few thousand people at once.
It was a beautifully coordinated response that proved highly effective early on.
Over and over again when I looked at the data of who got what right, one thing became incredibly clear:
Countries that had clear thinking, realistic leaders did the best when it came to smashing the pandemic early.
It's probably obvious in hindsight but without good leadership a country has zero chance of getting the response right. It's like starting out in a blizzard naked. You're just not going to make it no matter what else happens from there.

But as we'll soon see, strong leadership is no panacea.

It's one factor in a fast moving, chaotic system that has a million variables. Good leadership is simply not enough because even with good leadership Germany's response started to break down in late fall and it's been breaking down ever since.

There's a famous phrase that every German knows "Ordnung muß sein." It means "there must be order."

Germany is a deeply hierarchical and orderly society. There are rules for everything. And people follow those rules.

I saw it first hand, living in Berlin. It's not uncommon for a German to chase you down for crossing the street because a "don't walk" sign was flashing even when there are no cars for 2 kilometers in each direction.

Because of that mask compliance was generally strong. In the early days of the pandemic, I was the only one wearing a mask, having secured n95 masks years before most people knew what they were, since I traveled so much. In a month, I saw masks everywhere, as new rules requiring masks in shops and city centers passed. Unlike in the US where masks turned into a battle for personal freedom, in Berlin I saw everyone from old to young wearing one.

While waiting in line at the post office one day, I saw a young punker, with a bright purple mohawk and a shirt decked with a picture of a woman giving the middle finger. He wore a mask too. Apparently, personal freedom and masks can go together if people don't like getting sick or getting other people sick.

But the initial success didn't hold.

Since October on it's been a very different story.

Cases roared up the exponential curve, going from 295,530 on Oct 1 2020 to 1.6 million by Dec 26 2020, a massive and sudden surge. The country went back into lockdown "light" with restaurants still open but bars, brothels and gyms still closed. It didn't work like it worked early in the outbreak and the country switched to a hard lockdown in late November, shuttering many businesses almost across the board, including restaurants except for take-away. It's still under hard lockdown and it may get harder.

So far the lockdown hasn't resulted in a massive closure of businesses but more and more businesses are struggling as they face many months without real income. It's a slow decline because of Germany's safety nets but it's still a decline.

Unlike the US system, where losing your job could land you on the bread line, Germany has a much deeper and wider social net. The unemployed get 60% of their salary for a year, instead of the measly $600 max the unemployed get in the US, which is driving people to charity to get basic food needs met. The government also embarked on a widespread small and medium business sustainment system, paying businesses up to 70% of what they made the year before during the months they were closed down. They also offered incentives to business to keep people on the payroll instead of laying them all off.

When the safety net works, it's great.

Workers are covered through hard times with a salary that keeps food on the table. It keeps workers from having to burn through all their savings just to stay in their apartments. Businesses take a hit but they don't go broke. They can keep people working even as their doors close, when normally they'd have to cut headcount almost instantly to stay in business.
Germany wisely learned from the disasters leading up to WWII.
Perhaps nothing brought the Nazis to power more than a collapsing economy and a wave of middle class businesses closing all at once. Hitler got a mere 2.6% of the vote four years before being elected with almost 40% of the vote.
Keeping the economy on track is the key to keeping any society from falling prey to extremists who accelerate societal collapse with their deranged ideas.
What was the difference?

A collapsed economy.

But for all its social net success, Germany is also home to a great and unwieldy bureaucracy.

Registering your apartment when you move in with the local authorities in Germany. In a classic catch 22 you have to register an apartment before you can get residence but nobody likes to rent to anyone who doesn't have residence.

I've never seen a country so inundated with paperwork and rules. This obsession with rules and paperwork leads a lot of people to not get paid because they miss a deadline for some strange paper they didn't know they needed to fill out. My partner and I talked to the owners of a fantastic new restaurant that a husband and wife couple opened in late 2019. They're getting no government support because they had no revenue the year before. They fell into a black hole between rule, just the unlucky timing of opening their dream restaurant at the beginning of a black swan event.

Germany is also a "get permission" first society, versus the US which usually favors innovation and then regulation later. All the restaurants got shut down during lockdown and were only allowed to offer take-away if they had a permit in some areas of the country.
It's a society still obsessed with paper. Everything is done on paper.
Instead of abolishing all permits, they kept the "permission first" approach going. The problem is that approach can't scale.

There aren't enough bureaucrats to process the huge surge in applications and even worse, Germany is almost comically backwards when it comes to the digital world.

My landlord has been locked out of the country since the beginning of the pandemic because he lives in another country. He's not a citizen but he owns apartments here, which means he can't get back into Germany. He got a new cell phone. The company wouldn't send him the new activation link digitally. Instead, they insisted on sending a piece of paper in the mail to his apartment here, because that's the one they have on record. I had to wait for it to arrive and then scan it in, so he can scan a QR code on his phone.

That digitally backwards approach backfired when the German government rolled out their centrally controlled contract tracing app that cost 22M Euros. People rightly bristled as they worried about the government knowing where they were every single second of every day, which is why very few people used it.

When we look at Taiwan, we'll look at how to do contract tracing right, with a privacy preserving approach, but for now just know that people will remain skeptical of centrally controlled apps keeping track of their every move unless it's their cell phone itself.

Germany - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Germany's early success boiled down to a strong safety net, great leadership,a big treasury war chest, smart programs to protect businesses and workers, a consensus driven approach, as well as a rule based, orderly society.

Its later failure was ironically because of the same consensus and rule driven approach.

Businesses are struggling because they fall through the cracks of a slow and inefficient bureaucracy that can't move quickly when it really needs to now. And consensus driven approaches often lack the true innovation and insight that a strong, individualist approach can deliver. The lockdowns haven't worked the second time around. The numbers are still climbing but Germany seems to be out of ideas.
Businesses fund government, not the other way around. No government can foot the bill for an entire economy forever, no matter how hard they try.
They are proposing harder lockdowns instead of cranking out FFP2 masks in factories or scuttling their heavy corona app in favor of a highly decentralized, privacy preserving app that everyone could get behind or something more innovative.
Overall, Germany scores a C+.
Its war chest also won't last forever and neither will small businesses existing on the good will of the government.

The German government's approach worked, mostly.

It was a classically conservative approach. It was designed to get the economy through just long enough for biological innovation to take hold. Without the vaccine though, this approach wouldn't have worked for two or three more years or longer. Eventually they'd run out of money and we'd see a wave of business collapse and much worse. They've already struggled to keep mega-state funded corporations, like Lufthansa airlines afloat.

We haven't seen a wave of businesses collapse but that won't be because the government saved the day over the long run, it's because the scientists bailed out the world with a vaccine in record time. Without a strong vaccine, this strategy was a short term solution that would have flamed out over the long haul and is already showing signs of stress.

Of all the countries in the world that western society can learn from, Taiwan has the most to teach us.

The below graphic tells the story. That's cases as of January 19 2021, NOT Jan 2020.

Taiwan is a kind of hybrid between east and west. It still has a powerful collectivist pull where people give greater value to the whole and family but it's also got a strong entrepreneurial and individual spirit. Taiwan is the semi-conductor center of the manufacturing world. It moved from a martial law driven military dictatorship for 38 years, after WWII, to a democratic republic in the 1980s and its never looked back, rapidly building a highly agile democracy.

Despite never implementing a national lockdown, they recently celebrated 200 days with zero new cases.

What did they do so differently from the rest of the world?

They benefited from strong and innovative leadership, as well as a brilliant anti-disinformation campaign, highly effective policies, and a superior digital innovation platform, led by a brilliant and charismatic digital minister, Audrey Tang.

To start with, the country quickly blocked travel into the country from everywhere until they could get a handle on the situation. As they opened it back up they required mandatory quarantine for travelers. People coming in are required to stay in their hotel and they get a call from someone daily. They must install contract tracing software, so if people break quarantine, someone shows up at your door to ask why.

According to a report from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, people "quarantine...through the ' Electronic Fence System,' which uses cell phone location data to ensure that travelers do not leave their quarantine location. If a traveler violates their quarantine by leaving their house or hotel, the government will issue an automated text message warning to their cell phone to notify them to return home, as well as alerts to the relevant government authorities, ranging from the local police precinct and the local city government."

But unlike the contact tracing apps many western powers tried to jam down the throat of their citizens, the Taiwan app doesn't stream back detailed surveillance data to the government. The contract tracer is only accurate up to 15 meters. Authorities know you broke protocol but they don't know you went to Starbucks and then a rave, where you paid with your credit card for two beers. It's just enough for them to call you and make sure you stay in line and nothing more.

The Klein report goes further:

"Rather than using GPS tracking, the five major telecommunication companies in Taiwan work with the government to " triangulate the location of their cell phone relative to nearby cell towers." The government claimed that although the Electronic Fence System is not as accurate as GPS tracking, it is less privacy invasive, and that this technology has drawn the interest of several other countries. Only the CECC [the country's Center for Disease Control equivalent] is able to access the aggregated data from the Electronic Fence System. City officials are restricted to city-level information, and the police responding to quarantine alerts are only able to see an individual's name, phone number and address."

Germany could have used its privacy focused mentality to do the same.

One of the reasons they use so much paper is because Germans lived under the horror of the Nazis and then under the horror of the communists in East Berlin up until the 1980s. They know exactly what it means to have a total surveillance in society. Not having central records of everything is healthy instinct after living under decades of secret police monsters.

But because Germany isn't a digitally forward nation, or one with a healthy, agile and innovation first approach, they couldn't conceive of an app that's both privacy preserving and keeps people safe so they bungled together a heavy handed, centrally controlled one that nobody used.

The Taiwanese also figured out how to deal with the more underground parts of society. They figured that if they shutdown clubs and adult entertainment centers, it would just push those things further underground and they'd loose visibility into the outbreak. They didn't want to shutter those places either because that would just push the parties off the grid and officials would lose track of the outbreak fast.
Don't underestimate how difficult it is for moralistic leaders to take an intelligent approach to the seamy side of life. It takes incredible foresight and a brilliant leadership team to understand all aspects of a society holistically and it's incredibly rare throughout history.
They also knew that if they forced people to adopt a centrally controlled, contract tracing app that send back a constant stream of info about people partying and paying for sex nobody would adopt it. So they took an open source approach. They told underground businesses to come up with their own tracking system of face closure. The clubs and sex workers sprang into action and built their own double blind style systems with one time address, color coding and more to keep privacy but still allow them to notify people if things went wrong.
But if you can't deal with reality as it actually is, rather than how you imagine it to be, you can't deal with a pandemic.
It worked. The underground businesses stepped up and made it happen.

In highly ideological or religious or culture war driven nations this is all but impossible because those forces blind leaders to parts of the population they think of as evil.

Smart leaders deal with the underground parts of society practically rather than trying to hopelessly stamp it out while a virus is raging.

They realize that side of life will never go away and if they want to survive they have to view it realistically, which is all but impossible for most global leaders.

In an interview with NPR, Tang talked about how it worked:

"There was a case when a worker in an intimate drinking bar was diagnosed with COVID. She did not initially review the contact because of, you know, professional requirements. But, of course, that will hurt the reliable information requirement for contact tracing. And we did not, however, do any top-down, shutdown, takedown, lockdown of those places.

But rather, the people in the CECC, because they already had extensive prior experience working with HIV-positive communities - so they designed what we call a real contact system. So as long as people can be effective contacted and also social distancing requirements are met, no data is sent to the central government. And so they develop creative approaches such as leaving codenames, single-use email, pre-paid mobile phone numbers, hats with the plastic chuting to maintain physical distancing. And then they reopened."

Beyond big data and contact tracing, the Taiwan government understood incentives really well. You get paid to stay in quarantine but if you break quarantine you get fined 1000x what they paid you so it pays to stay inside until you've proven you're not caring the virus.

Don't underestimate how hard it is to get incentives right.

Incentives are tricky. Pick the wrong incentives and people game the system.

It's called the Cobra Effect, after a famous story from the turn of the century when the British government grew increasingly concerned about venomous Cobras in Delhi. They offered a reward for every Cobra turned in dead. At first it worked great and then enterprising folks started breeding Cobras to turn them in for bigger rewards. When the government found out they canceled the program. The entrepreneurs now turned their worthless Cobras loose in the woods, doubling the Cobra population.

The exact opposite of this intelligent approach to the underground happened in Germany. They shut down the big clubs and brothels (which are legal) in the country. In Berlin, the clubs are some of the most highly regarded in the world and people travel from all over to go to four or five day parties. When the clubs shut down, the parties shifted to people's houses and into the woods. Police regularly busted illegal parties everywhere but the damage was done. The government just pushed partying underground and the virus continued to rage.

For prostitutes it was even worse. Working girls no longer had the protection of a safe and secure place to work, so they went back to practicing high risk meets in hotels and homes, effectively falling below the radar as they had risky contact with anonymous partner after partner, likely accelerating the spread just like traveling salespeople did in the early days of the pandemic.
But maybe Taiwan's biggest success was combating misinformation.
Taiwan also understood the importance of wearing masks. While it was already fairly common to wear a mask on public transport that didn't mean people did it across the board or did it well. The government figured it needed at least 2/3rds of the population to wear a mask to break the chain of transmission.

They used an open source, transparent approach to data to help get it done. In the early days of the pandemic they opened most government data with APIs so that citizen coders could go to work. Those coders rolled out over a 100 apps to help people, with apps "including maps showing which pharmacies still had supplies, visualizations of how many masks had been distributed and where, and voice assistants for the visually impaired," according to Wired. They made sure people didn't queue at a store for nothing, only to find masks were sold out.

In times of trouble, rumors and fear spread faster than a virus. Everything from utterly insane conspiracy theories, like the virus spreading via 5G towers, to anti-masks movements can quickly bombard people with so much crazy information that they give up and don't know what to believe anymore.

In another piece in Wired, by Kate O'Flaherty, Tang talked about how the country enlisted "a cartoon "spokesdog", a Shiba Inu named Zongchai, which translates science into funny memes."

In other words, they countered misinformation with memes.

"Whenever there's a trending rumor, we make sure there's humor over rumor. Within two hours, we roll out two pictures, each with less than 200 characters and that goes even more viral than the disinformation," Tang says. The idea is that people would see the disinformation and a funny clarification on the same day, she says. That way, after they wake up the following day, the long-term association will likely be "joy and humor", rather than "anger and outrage".

"At the same time, people actively identify and flag misinformation. CoFacts, a collaborative fact-checking chatbot spun up through a g0v project, allows those using end-to-end encrypted chat apps to send something they suspect is misinformation to be crowd-checked. Professional fact-checkers, such as the Taiwan FactCheck Center and MyGoPen, also play a role."

You might think it's hard to replicate something like this in a highly individualistic and selfish western world and you might be right but Taiwan still offers hope there too because Tang doesn't see Taiwan as a particularly altruistic society. Instead she just works with human nature:

"We know wearing a mask alone doesn't work, you have to wash your hands, too. We say, 'You wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.' This links hand sanitation and mask use together."

Taiwan - Sane Policies, Enlightened Leadership

The last part of the Wired story leads us right back to incentives. If you link masks to altruism, like most Western governments tried to do with messages like "protect grandma," "protect others," and "it's the right thing to do" people tune out.

As much as we love to believe people are altruistic, they're selfish too. The Taiwan government knew to appeal to selfish interests first and that gave society the bonus of a collective benefit too. Appealing to the selfish is a classic strategy in history but it takes enlightened leadership to marshal the dark algorithms of human nature for the benefit of good.
If Germany, got a C+, Taiwan gets the highest marks possible, a A+.
You can't fight human nature. If you try, it only backfires.

If anything characterizes the Taiwanese approach it's realistic approach to human nature balanced with sane policies that work.

They crushed the curve. They didn't use economy destroying lockdowns. They kept even the most secretive and vulnerable parts of society in line. They used trust, privacy and openness to win hearts and minds.

Every country on Earth can learn from them but I'm afraid they won't because it takes a rare combination of the right people in power at the right time, people who can see clearly and who make good decisions based on reality instead of imaginary monsters in their own minds.

If Taiwan was an unqualified success, the United States was an utter failure in just about every way.

It was a failure across the board, a cultural failure, a government failure and a leadership failure. When people look back in history they can study the United States for exactly what not to do.

On Jan 1 2021, the US recorded 166,000 new cases. On New Years Eve, they recorded 234,000 new cases. They've been averaging 200K plus every day, ever since.

The next closest country was Brazil at 56,000.

Most other countries weren't even close.

The United States had every single chance to get it right. They had a pandemic playbook, left by the last administration and a team in place to execute it. They had more resources, more money, more open information exchange and more digital infrastructure and digital innovation than almost anyone else on Earth.

And yet they still failed.

It started with their non-existent safety net. The US is known for having little to no social net. It's a country built on the idea of exceptionalism. Work hard and you can make something of yourself is the American dream. The idea of socialism and safety nets is still a dirty word for much of America.

Believe me, I get it. While Germany has an amazing social net, they have brutally high taxes that I'm now paying. As much as 45% of your salary goes to your silent partner, the government.

But at least you get something for that money.

In the US for your 25-34% tax you get nothing but a tiny unemployment benefit and social security if you're lucky enough to make it to old age and retire in the US.

The superb unemployment benefit in Germany kept many people out of poverty when the economy crashed. There's also mandatory health insurance. It's paid for on a floating scale. Richer folks pay more and it scales down as you make less. In the US there was backlash against a measly $800 tax for not getting insurance and the latest administration did everything in its power to crush the US attempt at a universal healthcare system by defunding and attacking it from every angle.

In the US, never has the horror of insurance tied to employment looked so brittle and downright sadistic. As millions of people crashed into poverty when unemployment surged to scary high numbers in August, they lost their health insurance and a COVID trip to the ICU with a ventilator could bankrupt them.

That measly little $600 in unemployment insurance left many people in the richest country in the world waiting in line to beg for food from food bank charities. At least Americans have proved a generous bunch, as charitable giving surged along with unemployment and people sliding into debt and poverty, which kept the crisis from spiraling out ever worse. But when the social net system is the equivalent of a Go Fund Me page, you've got big problems.

It never should have come to that and from the very beginning it was clear that something was terribly wrong with the American response to the pandemic.

It started with the CDC.
But instead of saying that they needed those masks for front line workers, they stupidly told people masks didn't work.
They failed with masks right out of the gate.

Worried about a run on n95 masks, they wanted to conserve as many of them as possible for front line workers, who faced exposure daily. If you can't keep hospital personnel on their feet, it doesn't matter how many ICU beds you have because there's nobody to service them.

That total disaster of a policy had a lasting impact that's still destroying any chance to control the pandemic to this very day.
A, published in the Journal for Infectious Diseases, showed that "in an adjusted analysis of compliant subjects, masks as a group had protective efficacy in excess of 80% against clinical influenza-like illness." A study from 2009, shared on the CDC's own website no less, concludes "We found that adherence to mask use significantly reduced the risk for ILI-associated infection."
They warned that a mask would give people a "false sense of confidence."

The belief that masks "don't work" took hold and festered across American society. It didn't matter that the studies showed masks "didn't work" not because they're ineffective, but because often people didn't use them right like wearing them under their nose, or not washing their hands.

Other studies show the same story again and again. People who don't bother wearing the masks or wear them haphazardly, get sick. People who wear them right have a significantly lower risk of getting the flu or SARS-COV-2, aka COVID-19.

The studies also showed that only certain kinds of masks were really effective, like n95 masks, that get built from a storm of "infinitesimal plastic strands blown together to form a random thicket that, under a microscope, '[that's] going to look like pickup sticks,' says Nikki McCullough, 3M's global leader for occupational health and safety," in this article in Bloomberg. "If you're a submicron particle, it's quite the journey through there."

In other words, N95 respirators are a maze of plastic that a virus can't navigate easily.

If America had simply used its economic might to rapidly crank out factories and ramp up production of n95 masks like I recommended way back in April of 2020, they could have stamped out the virus' wild spread.
But he also had exactly the wrong skillset to handle the pandemic.
It didn't matter that the CDC later backtracked on masks and told everyone to wear them. It was too late. It had already turned into a cultural wedge issue.

While Taiwan was effectively countering misinformation with funny memes, the US had a master of disinformation and information warfare in charge of the country.
That works when you're trying to do politics or get a real estate deal done. What it doesn't work on is a virus. The virus doesn't care if you're a great bullshit artist.
Instead of telling people to wear masks, Trump repeatedly does what he always does, hedge his bets and cast doubt. On April 23 he said:

"The C.D.C. is advising the use of nonmedical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure. So it's voluntary. You don't have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary. I don't think I'm going to be doing it. "

Now, I'm not one of those folks who think Trump is the second coming of the anti-Christ. The man was highly effective at getting his agenda across the line again and again whether you like that agenda or not.
"Are my methods unsound?" "I don't see any method at all, sir."
He comes from a New Yorker school of bullshit that I understand well as an ex-New Yorker myself. If you can out bullshit the next guy then you win.

As relentless Trump promoter Scott Adams has told us repeatedly, Trump is a " master persuader " and a master of framing. Trump can frame almost any argument or idea in a way that makes other people's arguments looks weak and ineffective. The left underestimated him as a mumbling, stumbling idiot who can't talk right but he's incredibly effective at simplifying issues, using repetition, and using words and images that stick in the mind like an annoying cartoon jingle you can't forget "build the wall, Mexico will pay for it; Make America great again; Crooked Hillary."

Opinions mean shit to the virus. You might be able to effectively convince 50% of the people that gravity doesn't exist but if those people go jump out a 100 story window they'll learn very quickly that gravity doesn't care what you believe. The same with the virus. You can believe it will just "just disappear, like a miracle" as Trump said in February 2020, but the virus didn't care and it didn't disappear.

While I agree with Adams that the ex-president had a way with words, unlike Adams I don't see a method behind Trump's madness. I don't see a strategic genius making 3D chess moves. I just see someone who wants to win at all costs, no matter if winning the battle means losing the war.

In fact, it's a lot like that famous line in Apocalypse Now when Colonel Kurtz asks Captain Willard:

If Trump really had a strategic genius behind all that bluster he would quickly have had the country wearing masks. He would have said something along the lines of "the stupid liberal, far left don't want you to wear a mask and that's why we're going to wear the brightest, most star spangled banner covered masks of all time to show those losers they can't tell us what to do" and 80% of his supporters would have fallen in line. Liberals already overwhelmingly believed in wearing masks and with that kind of brilliant framing America might have crushed the virus.

But instead he used masks and just about everything else related to science as a cultural wedge issue. In the end, Trump wasn't a master persuader, he was a master at riding the shifting waves of right wing opinion like a weather vein. He could smell the way the wind was blowing and just go with it. He wasn't guiding anything, he was just parroting what people were already thinking.

The failure at leadership and critical thinking ran deep. The top posts in the land were a revolving door as Trump repeatedly fired everyone and replaced them with loyalists who parroted his party line, instead of thinking for themselves, until he was surrounded by yes men and women and there was nobody left to tell the emperor his dick was hanging out because he had no pants.

In the early days of the pandemic, the president focused on the culture wars, shutting down flights from China, one of his favorite targets, and nowhere else, an utterly incompetent and ineffective strategy no matter how you slice it. While Taiwan closed every flight and quickly ramped up contact tracing and quarantine protocols, the president let infected people stream into the country from everywhere with no plan whatsoever, despite the massive level of border control in the US that could have easily been turned to helping track incoming passengers and enforcing quarantine.

He tried to do what he always does, use rhetorical tricks like calling COVID-19 the "China virus." While the left got lathered up about the racism layered into that label, the phrase started working at the hypnotic, sub-verbal level of association that Adams is always running his mouth about on his coffee breaks from reality. Calling it the "China virus" is a way to associate the entire rise of China with that of a virus that's spreading.

It might have worked, if the ex-president hadn't vastly underestimated how fast the virus would spread. If the US had managed to contain COVID, he could have continued to call COVID the China virus and pivoted into more rants on how China is taking over the world.

But he underestimated the virus big time.

The US and the Lily Pad Problem

While Germany had a quantum chemist in charge, the US had a science-denying president who proudly "doesn't read" in the top spot.

It's no surprise he didn't understand the lily pad problem and underestimated the exponential growth of the virus. The lily pad problem goes like this:

The farmer sees lily pads covering a quarter of his pond and thinks nothing of it before going on vacation. I'll deal with it when I get back in a few weeks, he thinks.

But he comes back to find the whole pond covered.

That's exponential growth. It's sneaky. It ramps slowly and then explodes all at once.

Once it got out of control in the US it was too late.

The US had squandered any and every advantage they had.

Overall, the US gets a D-.

Why not an F?

Because America had one last Hail Marry that may have saved the world.

The US had one thing going for it:

America still knows how to do big business and big deals.

The Trump administration wisely struck deals to buy up 100s of millions of doses of vaccines before they got approved. That helped the companies financing the vaccine revolution drive the vaccine to completion fast because they knew they were going to get paid.
In the end, American money and Germany's intelligent immigration policy may have saved the world. If we faced a world with no vaccines for years, let's just call it like it is, we weren't going to make it without tremendous disasters that built on the initial disaster of the pandemic.
It's also American business that helped bring the incredible, new, cutting edge mRNA vaccines to market. Biontech and Pfizer were the first to get a vaccine approved in record time. Vaccines usually take a decade or more and the world had one designed, tested and delivered in under a year.

Biontech is a German company, founded by immigrants. As nations struggled with their various strengths and weaknesses of their societies, the virus put those traits to the test. On the strength side, the Germans had a liberal immigration policy that helped the founders of Biontech flourish, but on the weak side their markets were too conservative to find funding. Again and again Biontech found rejection from Germany financiers who want to bet on sure things only.

They found funding in America, with Pfizer partnering with them for distribution and sales, while Biontech did the R&D. America did what it does best, spend big on the future and innovation. American entrepreneurs love to place big, risky bets and they count on the last minute home run again and again to give them a breakout win.

It worked.
But instead, the scientists bailed us out.
The traditional vaccine approaches in China and everywhere else all failed, while cutting edge, long shot biotech like mRNA succeeded. It was a stunning turn around for a technology that once cost a leading scientist her job but was now the foundation of a new kind of disease control. Authoritarian governments may have been quick with the iron fist to crush outbreaks but iron fists don't lead to agile and out of the box thinking. That's why no breakthroughs came out of countries that rule with the iron fist, even if some of them managed to crush the virus early with social controls (though their lack of transparency when it comes to communications makes that highly doubtful too).

We would have seen the exponential curve go absolutely ballistic and we'd have seen waves of economic collapse as small and big businesses failed in droves while governments struggled to prop them up.

The world was on a Black Mirror timeline, a collision course with horror. As the virus tore down society, we would have faced world war as hungry, angry people do what they always do when they're hungry and angry:

Fight.

Nothing but a vaccine in record time was getting us off that very dark timeline. Germany's approach was too conservative. It wouldn't have lasted because eventually they would have run out of money. Taiwan is an island and islands fall if the world collapses in chaos and fire.

We got off the Black Mirror timeline and we have a chance to get back to a normal world once more.

It will take most of 2021 to finish one of the largest undertakings in the history of man, a global rollout of a vaccine in record time. It's a logistics, manufacturing, planning, politics, training and science problem all rolled into one. You have to manufacture it at scale, ship it, store it, train people, schedule people and more. It's crazy but it's happening.

Churchill once said, "the Americans always do the right thing, after exhausting every other possibility."

Not anymore.

America floundered with incompetent leadership, culture wars, arrogance and outright stupidity run rampant.

In early days of the corona outbreak, I remember seeing stories about the anti-maskers during the 1918 pandemic and thinking, "Well, at least we've gotten smarter than that."

We got worse.
I'm an , engineer, pro-blogger, , public speaker. My upcoming book, Mastering Depression and Living the Life You Were Meant to Live tells the story of how I battle depression and still live a big, bold and beautiful life that I'm proud of every day.
"Two things are infinite: universe and human stupidity. But I'm not sure for the universe," said Einstein (maybe, but who cares because it's a great truism regardless of who said it.)

Humans can't seem to get out of their way all too often in history.

But at least Americans still know how to do one thing, take risks and place big bets on tomorrow.

And that might have just saved us all in the end.

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With a whole year gone by since the pandemic started, it's time to take a look at who got the response right and who got it totally wrong. In many ways, the pandemic is the ultimate test of a nation's intelligence, resourcefulness and adaptability.

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Si les citoyens ne s’intéressent pas à leur vie privée, rien ne peut arrêter le gouvernement

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Si les citoyens ne s’intéressent pas à leur vie privée, rien ne peut arrêter le gouvernement

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2020/04/07

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Entretien avec quatre hackers éthiques taïwanais autour des questions de traçage numérique et de civic tech à l'heure de la pandémie.

La France " y réfléchit ". Alors que certains pays ont mis en place des dispositifs numériques plus ou moins intrusifs pour suivre l'évolution de la propagation du Covid-19 au sein de leur population, le cabinet du secrétaire d'État au Numérique Cédric O indique à RTL que " des contacts sont en cours afin de mieux comprendre les solutions technologiques retenues par nos partenaires et évaluer leur intérêt sanitaire ".

Quelles formes pourraient prendre de tels outils ? Les pistes sont nombreuses. Les regards se tournent notamment vers certains pays d'Asie ayant recours depuis quelques semaines à la méthode dite du contact tracing, Singapour et la Corée du Sud en tête. À Taïwan, l'utilisation des données de géolocalisation pour suivre (uniquement) les personnes placées en quarantaine ( environ 55 000 à ce jour) a également suscité l'intérêt de la presse internationale.

Toute aussi cruciale dans le succès impressionant du pays pour contenir l'épidémie, la mobilisation des communautés civic tech et des réseaux de hackers locaux a été beaucoup moins soulignée. Dès le mois de février, des développeurs, designers et militants taïwanais ont pourtant su mettre à profit leurs compétences en créant des applications " grand public " de suivi des stocks de masques ou de l'évolution géographique de la propagation du virus, à partir de données publiques.

Pour mieux comprendre les ressorts de la situation à Taïwan, nous avons posé quelques questions aux hackers kiang, Jetter, stimim et chihao (pseudonymes), qui font tous les quatre partie de g0v, une communauté collaborative ouverte que " personne ne peut représenter " ( ils tiennent à souligner ce point) et qui vise à " contribuer à l'amélioration de la société civile taïwanaise grâce aux technologies et à la collaboration ".
Usbek & Rica : À quels projets citoyens avez-vous participé dans le cadre de la lutte contre la propagation du coronavirus à Taïwan ? Pourriez-vous raconter vos expériences personnelles au cours de ces dernières semaines ?
kiang : J'ai d'abord créé une carte où s'affichent les statistiques relatives aux cas confirmés, grâce notamment aux données fournies par Taïwan, la Chine et l'université Johns-Hopkins. Le 21 janvier, au moment où un premier cas de Covid-19 est identifié à Taïwan, je commence à m'intéresser au développement de l'épidémie. À cette époque, la plupart des cas apparaissent en Chine. Après avoir repéré quelques informations sur le site du Centre pour la science et l'ingénierie des systèmes (CSSE) de l'université Johns Hopkins, issues notamment du réseau social de santé chinois DXY.cn, je tente d'utiliser ces données pour en faire une carte. Parallèlement, les mises à jour de toutes de ces informations sont enregistrées et intégrées au programme, auquel j'ajoute ensuite les données du Centre de contrôle des maladies de Taïwan.

Capture d'écran de la carte des cas créée par kiang. Source : https://kiang.github.io/2019-nCoV/

Un autre de mes projets concerne les stocks de masques disponibles : j'ai créé une carte où s'affichent les points de vente dans les pharmacies, leur inventaire en temps réel et quelques informations de base sur les différentes marques. Le 4 février, notre ministre Audrey Tang annonce sur le groupe Slack de g0v que la politique de distribution des masques va être ajustée. Les informations que le gouvernement nous fournit sont complètes, donc je mets à jour mon programme, que j'achève le 5 février. Depuis le 6 février et jusqu'à présent, le service fonctionne officiellement.

" C'est la première fois qu'un si grand nombre de hackers citoyens se concentrent sur un seul problème "

Jetter : J'ai moi aussi lancé une application permettant d'avoir des informations en temps réel sur les masques disponibles [cette fois selon les points de vente disponibles dans un rayon de 500 mètres à 3 kilomètres autour de chez soi, ndlr]. La société de service dans laquelle je travaille fait d'ailleurs partie des entreprises mobilisées pour servir d'usine de production de masques. Une fois que le système de rationnement des masques a été revu par le gouvernement, ce dernier a permis la finalisation de ma page web, qui se base principalement sur un mode texte mais qui doit aussi utiliser la localisation du smartphone. Depuis le lancement officiel de mon site le 2 février, il compte environ 17 millions de vues.
Est-ce la première fois que vous participez à des projets citoyens d'une telle ampleur, en lien direct avec le gouvernement ?
kiang : C'est en effet la première fois qu'un si grand nombre de développeurs et de hackers citoyens développent des centaines d'applications qui se concentrent sur un seul problème. Dans le passé, la participation aux projets de g0v était très dispersée, chaque projet était principalement porté par un nombre de développeurs inférieur à 10. Certains projets ont pu attirer beaucoup de personnes au niveau de l'édition des données, en raison du modèle décentralisé que nous privilégions, mais jamais des centaines de développeurs ne s'étaient attaqués en même temps à un seul problème comme c'est le cas cette fois.

Jetter : C'est aussi la première fois que je participe à un tel projet, où des développeurs s'investissent conjointement dans une seule cause d'intérêt public. Et ce sont mes premiers pas au sein de g0v.

Capture d'écran de la carte des masques créée par kiang. Source : https://kiang.github.io/pharmacies/

chihao : Auparavant, lors de crises causées par des tremblements de terre, des explosions, des inondations ou encore des mouvements sociaux, les contributeurs de g0v, les plateformes et les outils que nous utilisons étaient déjà utiles pour transmettre des informations à ceux qui en avaient le plus besoin. Mais les réponses du gouvernement ont pu être plus lentes ou moins adéquates.
Lors de l'événement Civic Hacking For Public Health, que g0v et l'association Facing the Ocean ont organisé fin mars avec des hackers de Taïwan, de Corée du Sud, du Japon et de Hong Kong, certains ont résumé ce genre d'initiatives en disant : " Le gouvernement se doit de fournir les bonnes données, et les hackers se doivent de créer les bons outils. " Etes-vous d'accord avec cette formule ?
kiang : Il faut dire que seul le gouvernement est en mesure de collecter des données à grande échelle dans un intérêt public. Les particuliers, ou même les petites et moyennes entreprises, ne sont pas en mesure de le faire car ils n'ont pas la même taille. Par conséquent, la plupart des gens s'attendent à ce que le gouvernement leur fournisse des données, pour pouvoir les utiliser à des fins de recherche et à d'autres applications. Le gouvernement n'est pas qualifié pour développer des outils parce que les hauts fonctionnaires ne sont pas les principaux utilisateurs de ces outils. Outre la difficulté à comprendre les besoins des utilisateurs, les processus décisionnels des administrations, longs et variables, font que les applications développées par les gouvernements ont souvent du mal à répondre aux attentes de la population.
Comment le gouvernement taïwanais vous fournit-il toutes ces données ? S'agit-il d'un processus transparent, ou avez-vous besoin de les vérifier ?
kiang : Lorsque le gouvernement est disposé à fournir des informations, celles-ci peuvent généralement être consultées sur sa plate-forme Open Data. La culture de conformité aux lois et aux réglementations de nos fonctionnaires - qui ne date pas d'hier - rend la plupart des informations [liées au Covid-19, ndlr] dignes de confiance. En revanche, ce n'est pas la même affaire lorsqu'il s'agit de données controversées, comme celles concernant des dossiers illégaux constitués par des entreprises ou des informations sur les terres contaminées, etc. Souvent, le gouvernement déforme ce type d'informations ou les diffuse dans des formats difficiles à appréhender, par peur de protestations des parties intéressées. À l'heure actuelle, nettoyer ces données ou continuer à les réclamer prend encore beaucoup de temps. Mais d'une façon générale, au fond, nous avons très peu affaire à des fausses informations.

" Nous manquons peut-être de processus de vérification des données gouvernementales "

chihao : Je pense que la confiance du public envers les données gouvernementales est globalement satisfaisante. Mais nous manquons peut-être de processus de vérification des données gouvernementales.
Quels types de contre-pouvoirs (lois, tribunaux, ONG, associations, etc.) existent à Taiwan pour garantir que ces données sont protégées et respectueuses des droits humains ?
kiang : Il existe de nombreuses lois et réglementations avancées à Taïwan mais, habituellement, elles ne sont pas strictement suivies ou appliquées. C'est le cas notamment pour les infractions liées à la circulation routière, aux violations des permis de construction, ou encore à la pollution atmosphérique. Par conséquent, on assiste à des exceptions, ou à des réductions du montant des amendes pour certains délits. Dans ce cadre, le gouvernement et les entreprises adoptent souvent une approche spéculative : ils agissent d'abord d'une façon ambiguë, attendent que le conflit arrive et tentent finalement de réparer leurs erreurs.

Mes craintes concernant ces questions sont similaires à celles relayées par l'Association taïwanaise des droits de l'homme. Mais les avertissements qu'elle exprime ne sont pas toujours faciles à entendre, car Taïwan est passé d'un régime autocratique à une démocratie depuis seulement quelques années. La plupart des gens sont habitués à accepter passivement les arrangements gouvernementaux. Même s'il me semble que certaines pratiques en Europe et en Amérique du Nord violent aussi les principes des droits humains.

Taipei, la capitale de Taïwan. Crédits : Heeheemalu / Wikimédia (CC).

Selon vous, quels facteurs ont permis à ces initiatives technologiques de voir le jour à Taïwan ? Avoir au sein du gouvernement une ministre comme Audrey Tang, elle-même codeuse et chantre de la gouvernance numérique, a-t-il aidé ?
kiang : Taïwan attache une grande importance à la volonté collective et au leadership des élites. La présence d'Audrey Tang au gouvernement répond à ces deux éléments de base. Elle a une influence sans précédent et favorise les projets créatifs collectifs : Audrey Tang connaît bien la technologie et la culture hacker, elle peut directement donner des suggestions spécifiques lors de réunions et de prises de décisions en haut lieu.

Ces suggestions sont considérées comme des instructions effectives par le gouvernement. Les hackers citoyens, eux, privilégient plutôt des processus " de bas en haut ", horizontaux et souvent rejetés dans les discussions à tous les niveaux, ce qui est clairement dommage. Le rôle d'Audrey Tang en tant que ministre du Numérique est certainement utile mais j'ai bien peur que ces structures puissent disparaître le jour où elle viendra à être remplacée.
Pour lutter contre l'épidémie, Taïwan utilise également le traçage numérique, notamment grâce aux données de localisation issues des smartphones de certains citoyens. Par exemple, lorsque des cas de coronavirus ont été découverts sur le navire Diamond Princess après une escale à Taïwan, des SMS ont été envoyés par le gouvernement à toute la population pour énumérer les restaurants et les sites touristiques que les passagers avaient visités. Du point de vue de la protection de la vie privée, quel regard portez-vous sur cette méthode ?
kiang : Intuitivement, je dirais qu'il s'agit d'une violation de la vie privée. Le gouvernement n'a pas eu besoin de passer par des débats publics ou une autorisation spécifique du Congrès lors de la mise en œuvre de cette politique. Seul un texte assez vague lui permet d'utiliser ce type d'informations privées à l'infini, en s'appuyant sur quelques personnes qui n'ont pas leur mot à dire pour décider si leurs propres données peuvent être rendues publiques ou non. L'absence de principes clairs fait craindre que l'ampleur de ces violations de la protection des données personnelles s'approfondisse à mesure que la durée de l'épidémie s'allonge.

stimim : En ce qui concerne le respect de la vie privée, je pense qu'il y a trois aspects différents à aborder : la façon dont les données sont collectées, quelles données sont collectées, et comment elles sont utilisées. Je ne sais pas si le gouvernement a reçu le consentement des touristes du Diamond Princess avant de recueillir leurs données de localisation. De même, je n'ai pas de détails sur le type de données que le gouvernement a obtenues de la part des opérateurs de réseaux mobiles. Par conséquent, je suis surtout préoccupé par ces deux premiers aspects.

" L'historique de localisation des touristes ne révèle aucune information à caractère personnel "

Mais de mon point de vue, lorsque le gouvernement publie l'historique de localisation des touristes, les données divulguées ne révèlent aucune information à caractère personnel, aucune " PII " [Personally Identifiable Information, ndlr]. Les lieux visités sont recensés dans un seul fichier, et ils sont tous indiqués à travers une plage horaire assez large - " si vous avez visité ce lieu tel jour e ntre telle heure et telle heure ", si je me souviens bien. Il est difficile d'en savoir plus sur les touristes eux-mêmes sur la base de ces informations. À mon avis, cette manière d'utiliser les données devrait être acceptable car elle ne pose pas de souci de confidentialité.
Plus généralement, comment vous situez-vous par rapport au débat récurrent sur l'équilibre à trouver entre sécurité sanitaire et respect des libertés publiques ? L'utilisation d'outils technologiques est-elle inévitable dans un tel contexte ?
kiang : La situation de transmission à grande échelle de l'épidémie fait que cette crise est en effet extraordinaire. Tant que ces dispositifs sont déployés par le gouvernement après des inspections publiques et parlementaires, que des garanties existent pour qu'ils ne soient utilisés que sur une période et avec une portée limitées et qu'ils ne remplissent que l'objectif de lutte contre l'épidémie, cela me semble acceptable.

" On peut difficilement trouver une meilleure méthode "

Dans la situation actuelle, on peut difficilement trouver une meilleure méthode que d'utiliser les signaux des téléphones portables pour suivre les déplacements des gens. D'autres solutions obligeraient les utilisateurs à effectuer des opérations compliquées. En même temps, il est très fréquent que les utilisateurs ne soient pas disposés à révéler leur véritable emplacement. Le problème est que chaque manque de ce genre entraîne de grands risques pour la prévention et le contrôle de l'épidémie. À Wuhan le virus a eu un impact proche de celui d'une guerre. Face à un enjeu de survie humaine, nous sommes contraints de franchir certaines frontières et d'essayer de mettre en place le plus de scellés possible dans un deuxième temps. Discuter de la protection de la vie privée n'est possible qu'à condition de " vivre ".

Crédits : Ken Hawkins / Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

stimim : Comme je l'ai dit dans la réponse précédente, les gouvernements devraient clairement spécifier la façon dont ils collectent les données qu'ils collectent, de quelles données il s'agit et comment elles sont utilisées. Ils pourraient commencer par annoncer des mesures d'urgence qui clarifieraient cela. Ensuite, ils pourraient aussi fournir aux citoyens des moyens de contrôler leur action, par exemple à travers les notions d' open source, et d' OpenAPI [ou spécification Swagger, une interface de description de langage de programmation qui permet de comprendre les capacités offertes par un service sans avoir besoin d'accéder à son code, ndlr].

Pendant cette période, la communication et la transparence sont fondamentales. Les gouvernements, mais aussi les sociétés civiles, ont besoin de bonnes données pour lutter contre le virus. Si les citoyens se méfient et protègent leur vie privée, cela pourrait également nuire à la qualité des données. Que se passerait-il, par exemple, si les gens commençaient à éteindre leurs smartphones et à ne l'allumer que lorsqu'ils en ont vraiment besoin, simplement parce qu'ils soupçonnent que le gouvernement les suit à travers leurs téléphones ?

" Nous avons besoin que plus de gens s'intéressent à la politique et aux activités du gouvernement "

Dans la plupart des cas, les mégadonnées n'ont pas besoin d'inclure des informations à caractère personnel. Par exemple, si le gouvernement veut savoir combien de personnes se trouvent dans une gare à un moment précis, il peut compter le nombre de signaux cellulaires, mais il ne devrait pas avoir besoin de connaître l'identité des propriétaires de téléphones. D'un autre côté, lorsque le gouvernement doit suivre un cas de contamination confirmé, il doit alors connaître - ou connaît déjà - l'identité de la personne. On ne parle plus de " mégadonnées ", c'est un cas différent qui concerne davantage la façon dont les données sont utilisées. Les contraintes et les exigences doivent alors être définies différemment.
Comment s'assurer que ces dispositifs ne seront plus utilisés par les autorités une fois l'épidémie terminée ?
kiang : Il faudrait établir des processus de punition sévères, et enrichir les lois sur la protection des lanceurs d'alerte. Mais aussi introduire, au moment opportun, des audits par des tiers neutres, pour que toute personne qui abuse de ces outils au sein du gouvernement soit sévèrement punie.

stimim : Nous avons besoin que plus de gens s'intéressent à la politique et aux activités du gouvernement. Si les citoyens ne s'intéressent pas à leur propre vie privée, rien ne peut arrêter le gouvernement. De là à faire en sorte que ces dispositifs ne soient " plus utilisés ", le mot est fort. S'il y a de bonnes raisons de continuer à utiliser certains outils ou mécanismes technologiques développés pendant l'épidémie, il faudra adopter une nouvelle loi qui accorderait des autorisations formelles au gouvernement, avec des limites claires.
SUR LE MÊME SUJET :
> COVID-19 : " Il aurait fallu s'inspirer de Taïwan, mais c'est trop tard "

> COVID-19 : des États utilisent la géolocalisation pour savoir qui respecte le confinement

> Audrey Tang : " La création collaborative de jeux vidéo est très utile pour les élèves de primaire "

> Le confinement peut-il faire exploser Internet ?

> Les employés de la tech pas tous égaux face au coronavirus
Image à la Une : Le métro de Taipei. Crédits : Wallpaper Flare (CC BY 2.0).

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" Si les citoyens ne s'intéressent pas à leur vie privée, rien ne peut arrêter le gouvernement "

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Entretien avec quatre hackers éthiques taïwanais autour des questions de traçage numérique et de civic tech à l'heure de la pandémie. La France " y réfléchit ".

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2020/10/15

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Wie lässt sich das Internet aus der Umklammerung von Desinformation, Hass und Plattform-Monopolen befreien? Die digitale Demokratiebewegung in Taiwan zeigt, dass das Netz doch konsensfähig und progressiv sein kann (wenn es auch nicht jeden glücklich macht). Das Internet ist kaputt, also müssen wir es neu aufbauen, denn es ist für unsere Zukunft viel zu wichtig, um es den Gafa-Monopolisten (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) zu überlassen.

Anfang Februar hackte der taiwanesische Software-Ingenieur Howard Wu die populäre Messenger-App Line, deren Nutzer sich zu diesem Zeitpunkt bereits im Zustand dauerfrequentierter Hysterie angesichts von Covid-19 befanden. Wu verknüpfte die App mit Google Maps, sodass die taiwanesische Bevölkerung schnell erkennen konnte, in welchen Läden noch Mund-Nasen-Masken vorrätig waren und wo nicht.

Google verlangt eine Gebühr pro 1.000 Zugriffe auf das Kartensystem. Wu flatterte deshalb einige Tage später eine Rechnung in Höhe von 26.000 US-Dollar ins Haus. Die aktive Community sprang Wu bei, wenig später verzichtete Google auf die Zahlung, weil Wus Hack sich als äußerst hilfreiche Maßnahme gegen die Pandemie herausstellte.

Audrey Tang, Taiwans Digital-Star im Rang einer Ministerin, brachte das auf die Idee, den für die schnelle Pandemiebekämpfung wichtigen Maskenvertrieb über das Apothekennetzwerk der nationalen Gesundheitsbehörde zu organisieren. Der Vorteil dabei: Die Daten, die in diesem Prozess generiert werden, können von den Nutzern, den Behörden und der lebendigen Hackerszene des Landes weitergenutzt werden.

Wenn sich in Taiwan Konflikte anbahnen oder Pandemien zerstörerisch zu werden drohen, wird zuallererst eine Frage gestellt: Wie lassen sich Datenpunkte möglichst effektiv verknüpfen? Daten, am besten in Realzeit analysierbar, sind der erste Schritt, um Probleme in der analogen Welt zu lösen.

Situative Apps für eine zukunftsoffene Gesellschaft

Der digitale Raum spielt eine große Rolle, wenn es darum geht, gesellschaftliche Themen zu adressieren und Alltagsproblemen beizukommen. Dazu sollten die dort generierten Daten jedem zur Verfügung stehen, und es sollte eine digitale Öffentlichkeit geben, die alle Bürger zur Beteiligung anregt.

Taiwan ist in Sachen Vernetzung offenbar ziemlich weit. Das Corona-Containment funktionierte in dem 23-Millionen-Einwohner-Land vor allem deshalb besonders gut. Taiwan verzeichnet lediglich sieben (!) Tote seit Ausbruch der Pandemie.

Die taiwanesische Demokratie ist offensichtlich mit einer digitalen DNA ausgestattet. Audrey Tang, die hochbegabte Trans-Frau, gründete mit 16 Jahren ihr erstes Unternehmen und setzte sich 2014 an die Spitze der taiwanesischen Civic-Hacker-Bewegung, als sie an der Besetzung des Parlaments durch das Sunflower Movement teilnahm. Die Protestierenden bewegten die Open-Source-Aktivistin und ihre Gruppe dazu, durch Realzeit-Berichterstattung und den Einsatz von digitalen Beteiligungs-Tools direkten Einfluss auf das umstrittene taiwanesisch-chinesische Handelsabkommen (ECFA) zu nehmen.

Die damalige konservative Regierung musste sich in vielen Punkten dem digitalen Protest beugen. Und es wurde deutlich: Das Netz lässt sich offenbar doch zu etwas Vernünftigem gebrauchen.

Progressive Staaten, Kommunen und Verwaltungen sollten überall auf der Welt entsprechende Kommunikationswerkzeuge entwickeln ( Clay Shirky bezeichnet sie als „situative Apps"), die maßgeschneidert in gesellschaftspolitischen Debatten bis hin zu Abstimmungsprozessen eingesetzt werden können.

Demokratie ist in Taiwan nicht ohne Digitalisierung vorstellbar

Was wir außerdem von der digitalen Demokratie in Taiwan lernen können: Politik ist manchmal wie Coding. Zwischen 1991 und 2005 wurde die Verfassung des Inselstaates siebenmal überarbeitet. Für einen Programmierer ist es normal, seinen Code immer wieder umzuschreiben und den sich verändernden Anforderungen anzupassen. Für die taiwanesischen Aktivisten sind politische Interventionen entsprechend Programmierungsschritte, die möglichst einfache Lösungen herbeiführen sollen.

Womöglich liegt der Grund für die taiwanesische Liebesheirat zwischen Demokratie und Digitalisierung darin, dass sich der demokratische Aufbruch in Taiwan zeitgleich mit der Entwicklung des Internets vollzog.

Die ersten freien Wahlen in dem Inselstaat fanden 1996 zeitgleich mit der Entwicklung des Internets zu einem Mainstreammedium statt. In Taiwan entwickelten sich also in der Zeit zum ersten Mal demokratische Strukturen, in der sich das Internet etablierte. Demokratie im 21. Jahrhundert - glückliches Taiwan! - ist hier ohne Digitalisierung gar nicht vorstellbar.

Zumindest für die junge Generation in Taiwan ist klar, dass die Open-Source-Idee, das freie Teilen der Codes und vernetzte Informationen nicht nur ein Weg sind, hervorragende Software zu produzieren, sondern auch der Königsweg zur Entwicklung einer weltoffenen Gesellschaft.

Ein paar Beispiele: Mit der g0v-Community-Seite wurde ein Instrument geschaffen, das die Regierungsseiten spiegelt und für permanentes Kommentieren öffnet. Cofacts.g0v.tw ist eine Fact-Checking-Seite, die von Freiwilligen betrieben wird und in kürzester Zeit versucht, jede Desinformationskampagne durch inhaltliche Prüfung zu entlarven. Eine Chatbot auf dem beliebten Messenger Line tritt sofort in Aktion, wenn bei Nachrichten der Verdacht der Falschinformation aufkommt.

Taiwan ist laut einem Bericht des Forschungsinstituts V-Dem wie kaum ein anderes Land Fake-News-Kampagnen ausgesetzt und reagiert (ähnlich wie Finnland als Nachbar Russlands) mit großer Ernsthaftigkeit auf Desinformation. Pol.is ist eine Plattform, auf der Meinungsbildung zu vielen unterschiedlichen Themen organisiert wird und Entscheidungen herbeigeführt werden. Das Ziel besteht darin, aus einer anonymen Masse selbstbewusste Bürger zu machen: Teilhabe statt Troll-Kultur.

Konsens statt Disruption

Gibt es wirklich so etwas wie ein konsensfähiges Internet? Disruptoren wie Trump haben über Plattformen wie Facebook und Twitter unsere Demokratien an den Rand der Zerstörung gebracht.

Den Civic-Hackern in Taiwan geht es um konsens- und lösungsorientierte Kommunikation. In den für jedermann zugänglichen Beratungen, ob das Geschäftsmodell der Mobilitätsplattform Uber in Taiwan zugelassen werden soll, stellten die Organisatoren einfach keinen Reply-Button zur Verfügung, denn die Antwort-Funktion ist das Einfallstor für Trolle, Hasskommunikation, Desinformation und Spaltung. Bei der Frage, ob Uber die etablierten Beförderungsunternehmen preislich unterbieten dürfe, steht nur Ja und Nein zur Auswahl.

Taiwan wendet sich aktiv gegen das Prinzip der Disruption. Es geht genau um das Gegenteil: Konsens. In der Welt der Open-Source-Programmierung gibt es den Begriff des „rough consensus". Nicht jeder muss mit allem glücklich werden. Darum geht es den digitalen Demokratieaktivisten auch in der Gesellschaft. Es muss nicht jeder bei jedem Detail die Meinung des anderen teilen, aber es sollte zumindest eine grundlegende Übereinkunft geben - ein bedenkenswerter Ansatz in Zeiten von Populismus und Polarisierung.

Der Uber-Diskussionsprozess, der sich nonstop über anstrengende vier Wochen erstreckte, fand auf dem Portal vtaiwan.tw statt und machte auch nicht alle glücklich. Uber zeigte sich von den Regulierungsmaßnahmen überhaupt nicht begeistert, zog sich zunächst aus Taiwan zurück, um später dann doch zurückzukehren. Die taiwanesische Regierung entwickelte aus der Erfahrung mit Uber neue Richtlinien für die Plattform-Ökonomie und die Beförderungsbranche (Fahrerlizenzen, Tarife, Sozialversicherung), die anschließend zu Gesetzen gemacht wurden.

Nicht zerstören, sondern gemeinsame Wege finden, nicht polarisieren, sondern zusammenführen. An den extremen Polen einer Entwicklung entstehen immer nur Wahrheitsgehabe und Orthodoxie. An den radikalen Rändern formieren sich die Glaubenskrieger, bereit zum digitalen Gemetzel. Neues Vertrauen in das Internet lässt sich so nicht herstellen.

Doro Bär, die deutsche Digitalisierungsstaatsministerin, hat vor Kurzem in der „Wirtschaftswoche" eine „Bundeszentrale für digitale Aufklärung" gefordert. Doro Bär ist keine Audrey Tang. Doch von den Civic-Hackern in Taiwan können wir alle lernen, dass Offenheit, (Daten-)Transparenz und eine digitale Kultur des Konsenses das Vertrauen in die Gesellschaft und ihre Netze wiederherstellen können.
Mehr: Google, Amazon, Facebook: Die Techbranche hofft insgeheim auf Trump.

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Expertenrat - Eike Wenzel : So können wir das Internet retten

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Wie lässt sich das Internet aus der Umklammerung von Desinformation, Hass und Plattform-Monopolen befreien? Die digitale Demokratiebewegung in Taiwan zeigt, dass das Netz doch konsensfähig und progressiv sein kann (wenn es auch nicht jeden glücklich macht).

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How Taiwan became a lab for digital democracy

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How Taiwan became a lab for digital democracy

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2019/09/30

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The British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has recently called for Britain to entertain "a digital deliberation modelled on Taiwan". Corbyn has rightly noticed that there is no other place in the world where experiments with digital democracy are as rife as on this politically controversial island. But there is still a lot that could go wrong.
This content was published on September 30, 2019 - 09:00
Renat Kuenzi

Studied history and politics at University of Bern. Worked at Reuters, the newspapers Der Bund and Berner Zeitung, and the Förderband radio station. I am concerned with the Swiss practice of modern direct democracy in all its aspects and at all levels, my constant focus being the citizen.

More about the author | German Department

See in other languages: 2

2014 was the year of cultural change for Taiwan. The Sunflower student movement changed the political climate on the island. In protest against a trade agreement between the previous government of Taiwan and China, students launched a nationwide protest movement. The rally came to a head when young activists occupied the national parliament in Taipei.

Sympathisers defended the occupiers by forming a protective cordon around the parliament building. "For a whole month, there was a 24/7 protective human shield," says Jason Liu, who was part of the movement. "And everything that was happening inside was brought to the outside world via livestream."

Liu is one of two Taiwanese journalists who together with swissinfo journalists have reported on the topic of democracy in Switzerland over the past few weeks. The 32-year-old works for the online publication The Reporter. He has left his activist life behind, but still enjoys talking about this period which shaped him and Taiwan's society.

The "nerds" of gov zero

The successful occupation and the ensuing mass movement brought about a fundamental political change. Many people demanded more transparency from the administrative and executive authorities by introducing new forms of open government.

Around 2,000 people, many of whom were students and nerds from the software and IT development scene, were at the core of the new movement or rather community.

They called themselves GØVExternal link or gov zero. The O represents a figure and stands for a new beginning.

When the opposition won the elections and came into power in 2016, the movement became part of its platform. Today, the principles of these active civic-tech communities are embedded in the policies of Taiwan's government. They include more participation, inclusion, accountability and first and foremost transparency.

Digital political public

vTaiwan is probably the most famous project. It is a digital platform that offers people the opportunity to discuss political issues they care about without having to overcome high hurdles. Join is another platform for online participation.

If someone is upset about the poor infrastructure or dysfunctional schools, they can start an e-petition on vTaiwan. Once the initiators have found 5,000 people to support this petition, the responsible government authorities must comment on it. Corbyn's tweet was most probably inspired by vTaiwan.

Facts about Taiwan

The island calls itself Republic of China with a population of around 24 million.

The Chinese Nationalist' Party Kuomintang is defeated in the civil war and settles in Taiwan.

General Chiang Kai-shek governs the island under authoritarian rule until his death in 1975.

Marital law ends in 1987, democratisation begins in the 1990s.

Most nations, including Switzerland, follow the One-China policy that only recognises the People's Republic of China with Beijing as the capital. Taiwan is not recognised as an independent state, but as part of China. The island is Switzerland's fifth most important export market in Asia.

Switzerland supports the development of Taiwan's democracy with practical know-how, especially when it comes to civic rights.

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Other examples of Taiwan's digital democracy are: Taipei's and other cities' transparent budgets as well as the financial transparency of local governments. All citizens have the opportunity to examine the expenses of their local politicians. CoFactsExternal link , a web robot to identify fake news, is another exciting project.

"Nerds and the government"

Audrey TangExternal link is a central figure in this movement. This smart software specialist is a founding member of gov zero. Tang is now the first minister for digital democracy in the world. Officially, she is a cabinet member 'without portfolio'. Practically, it is Tang who pushes forward the implementation of the digital strategy on a government level. "The impact the digital democracy strategy has on everyday life is huge," says Jason Liu.

Neither the government nor private companies have come up with solutions, but gov zero has. The civic hackers' community acts as an incubator and puts out tenders for six-month software development projects.

In a short period of time, the developers create tools which are strictly based on open source programmes and are shared.

This means the source codes were not the creation of a private company like it was in the case of the now deceased e-voting system of the state-owned company, Swiss Post.

Under the Taiwanese system, everyone who knows about software can contribute to its improvement. Taiwan's civic tech community, which is still marginal or invisible in other countries, is an important democratic actor. The software developed by computer geeks today will be used by the people in Taipei or the government tomorrow.

Digital dangers on the horizon

Since Tsai Ing-wen, who is rather critical of China, became president in 2016, China has heightened its tone towards Taiwan, along with military threats. Against this background, Taiwan's democratic experiments can be viewed as a strategy in the face of the Chinese dominance.

On January 11 next year, the Taiwan's voters are due to elect their new president and parliament. This will put the digital experiments to the test. Have they really influenced the lives of Taiwan's voters? How convincing are these trials?

There is another danger which lies dormant. What to do if the digital discourse gets manipulated? Hedy Chiu, who reported with Liu and the swissinfo journalists in Switzerland in the summer, has reported on the open market of bots on Taiwan's social media. As she revealed at the Reportagen Festival in Bern, Taiwanese politicians have already bought their share of bots in the run-up of the elections to manipulate the debate in the digital media.

Since the Sunflower student movement was launched, the answer to such manipulation and fake news has been radical transparency. When I told Jason Lui that Minister Tang had agreed to do an interview with me, he beamed.

"You will find out what absolute transparency means. All her moves and decisions as minister will be made public. And this interview will not be different."

Digital democracy Switzerland and Taiwan

● The "old" democracy of Switzerland lags behind when it comes to digital democracy.

● The "young" democracy of Taiwan is at the forefront of digital democracy.

● Why is there such a difference?

● In Switzerland, it was the politicians who pushed digitalisation. The focus was on a) the government's virtual desk for Swiss citizensExternal link who want to get in touch with the authorities, and b) e-voting. After piloting e-voting for almost 20 years, the government put it on ice this summer, for the time being.

● In Taiwan, the incentive came from the Sunflower student movement. It laid the foundation for the civic hackers' community which calls for more participation, inclusion, accountability and more transparency.

● Today, the software specialists develop tools for the digital democratic debate. Once developed, the tools which are based on open source programmes are used by municipalities and the government.

● In the framework of the news coverage on the 2019 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, #DearDemocracy will run a comparison between the current state of digital democracy in Switzerland and Taiwan.

● The "old" democracy of Switzerland lags behind when it comes to digital democracy.

● The "young" democracy of Taiwan is at the forefront of digital democracy.

● Why is there such a difference?

● In Switzerland, it was the politicians who pushed digitalisation. The focus was on a) the government's virtual desk for Swiss citizens who want to get in touch with the authorities, and b) e-voting. After piloting e-voting for almost 20 years, the government put it on ice this summer, for the time being.

● In Taiwan, the incentive came from the Sunflower student movement. It laid the foundation for the civic hackers' community which calls for more participation, inclusion, accountability and more transparency.

● Today, the software specialists develop tools for the digital democratic debate. Once developed, the tools which are based on open source programmes are used by municipalities and the government.

● In the framework of the news coverage on the 2019 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, #DearDemocracy will run a comparison between the current state of digital democracy in Switzerland and Taiwan.

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This article was automatically imported from our old content management system. If you see any display errors, please let us know: community-feedback@swissinfo.ch

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<Renat Kuenzi>, Adapted from German by Billi Bierling/urs, , swissinfo.ch

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How Taiwan became a lab for digital democracy

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The British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has recently called for Britain to entertain "a digital deliberation modelled on Taiwan". Corbyn has rightly noticed that there is no other place in the world where experiments with digital democracy are as rife as on this politically controversial island.

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2020/04/28

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시민의 탄생 - 5부 연결자들

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미국 풀뿌리 활동가 화이트헤드 부부와 대만 천재 해커 출신의 장관 오드리 탕의 대비되는 시민적 실전을 조망...

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How Taiwan is leading a digital democracy movement

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How Taiwan is leading a digital democracy movement

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2018/10/08

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Taiwan's civic tech hackers have a vision: to reform the country's democratic process to be more citizen-centric.

"The citizens in Taiwan believe we should have a say where we go in society," said Shuyang Lin, co-founder of the Taiwan Government's Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) at the recent Innovation Labs World global summit. It is important to "work out our future democracy, really think about how we can reiterate our democracy better," she added.

And the country's civic tech community - g0v (read as 'gov zero') - is using data and tech tools to make that happen. "One of the mottos of g0v is really about 'to be nobody'," Lin said. "Instead of asking why nobody's doing this, we should be that 'nobody' and start doing this already."
Simplifying budgets
One task the g0v team has taken up is the redesigning of government websites, to help make public services more accessible for citizens. "We look at all the government websites that we don't like, and then we try to make a new website or new service that ends with g0v.tw," she shared. The team creates another version of an available public service that they find wanting, and then hosts this version on a separate domain.

For instance, the team found the annual national budget report unwieldy and difficult for citizens to read. "The annual budget report is often hundred pages long and is often a video file. So it's difficult to read for humans and for computers," Lin said. As a result, g0v created a website to visualise the annual national budget so citizens can easily understand budget allocations, be it at the city level or for specific sectors like education.

On the newly-designed budget website, citizens can simply click on a circle representing one sector to discover the exact amount allocated to that specific sector. "[In] the visualisation, you can really drill down to each block and find out which budget is spent by which ministries," she shared.

The website translates the annual budget into yardsticks that citizens can relate to. "For example, one ministry is spending $7.8 billion. That will mean 300,000 iPhones. So you get an idea of how much it is," said Lin.

Another function of the newly-designed budget website is as a "direct conversation platform" for citizens and civil servants, Lin noted. "As a citizen in a city, you can simply go on a map, find the type of city budget you care about and ask many questions. The civil servants actually come to the website and answer those questions," she added. The budget visualisation project has since been adopted by over seven city governments, including Taipei.

While these tools allow citizens to better understand government budgets, they are not yet able to have a say in how funds are used by the central government level. However, local governments are ahead on participatory budgeting schemes. In 2015, the capital Taipei set up an online voting platform - called i-Voting - and information desks in district offices, so citizens can propose policies for neighbourhood improvement projects, both online and offline. Since its launch, Taipei's local councils have approved over 100 policies proposed by citizens.
Prototyping future democracy
Meanwhile, the PDIS team, which is based in the central government, has set up vTaiwan, a set of public deliberation tools to crowdsource citizens' opinions on public policies. "It is a way to prototype how we can generate consensus from a large amount of people," shared Lin.

Civic hackers built vTaiwan in the aftermath of the Sunflower Movement in 2014, when Taiwan's ministers and citizens "shared a sense of need" for a platform where people could gather to deliberate over public policies. "Some civic hackers in g0v took the challenge and built vTaiwan," Lin noted.

Conversations on vTaiwan are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure that discussions are "rational" and unbiased, according to Lin. "The facilitator is actually a robot, so there's nowhere to be biased," she said.

vTaiwan's online platform is built to help thousands of people to reach consensus, rather than argue with one another. For instance, it does not let people reply to others' comments to create a more "peaceful" conversation. "Because people couldn't reply to each other, they're trying to rewrite each other's comments to be more constructive to the conversation," said Lin. "You actually see a migration from one end, which has more divisive statements, to the other end, which has more consensus statements," she added.

According to Lin, this same approach of co-creating policies can be used across different countries. "vTaiwan could look like an experiment for Taiwanese government to co-create meaningful policies with citizens, but I think this experiment is not limited to Taiwan, or any government," Lin added. "This adaptable and reproducible prototype of future democracy has started its new lives in different places like in New York, Toronto or Tokyo."

"This experiment is not limited to Taiwan, or any government."

The emergence of social innovation has allowed private businesses to play a greater part in the democratic process, according to Lin. "In conventional thinking, social benefits and business profits are two opposing values and are forcing the government to make trade offs in this paradox," she said. This could lead to new kinds of public-private partnerships to promote citizens' participation in government. "For people working on social innovation, their goals might be achieved by developing business models to address social issues or environmental issues." she added.

The next step for Taiwan's central government is to continue facilitating co-creation with civic hackers, citizens and the private sector, Lin said. "The key message here for us in experimenting is that even though we might be the most passionate person in our positions, there's still always someone who can do a good portion of our job better than us," she noted.

In just four years after the Sunflower movement, Taiwan has made great strides in its digital democracy movement. But more work remains to be done for its civic hackers to fulfill their vision.
Now read:

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How Taiwan is leading a digital democracy movement | GovInsider

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Taiwan's civic tech hackers have a vision: to reform the country's democratic process to be more citizen-centric. "The citizens in Taiwan believe we should have a say where we go in society," said Shuyang Lin, co-founder of the Taiwan Government's Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) at the recent Innovation Labs World global summit.

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Hacking the pandemic: How Taiwan’s digital democracy holds COVID-19 at bay

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Hacking the pandemic: How Taiwan’s digital democracy holds COVID-19 at bay

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2020/09/11

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Hacking the pandemic: How Taiwan's digital democracy holds COVID-19 at bay

Taiwan's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been among the world's best. With a population almost the size of Australia's, the island nation has reported only 496 confirmed cases of the disease and no locally acquired infections for months.

The unlikely heroes of Taiwan's success are "civic tech hacktivists": coders and activists who the country's celebrity digital minister Audrey Tang describes as the "nobodies" who "hack democracy."

What began with the hackers of the "open source, open government" movement g0v and student protesters has grown into an experiment in radical democracy that is yielding astonishing results.
'Fast, fair and fun'
While the notion of " digital democracy " is as old as the internet, few countries have really tried to find out how to practice democracy in digital spheres. In Taiwan, however, there is a strong collective narrative of digital democracy, and government and civil society work together in online spaces to build public trust.

The growth of civic hacking in Taiwan has its roots in the so-called Sunflower Movement, a stream of protests in 2014 against a trade agreement with China.

The pillars of Taiwan's approach to digital democracy are "fast, fair and fun."

Taiwan was among the first countries in the world to detect and respond to the virus, thanks to crowd-sourced, collective intelligence through online bulletin boards. Warnings of the virus were first noted in December 31, 2019, when a senior health official spotted a heavily "up-voted" post on the PTT bulletin board.

Before long, civic tech hackers were working on open data projects for citizens to interact with live maps, distributed ledger technology and chat bots to find the nearest pharmacy to claim free masks, with stock levels updated in real time to stop panic buying. Audrey Tang dubbed this rapid, iterative, bottom-up process - as opposed to a top-down government-led distribution system - " reverse procurement."

A "humour over rumour" strategy has also been very successful to combat misinformation, fake news and disinformation. Taiwan is engineering memes to spread public awareness of positive behaviours through the virality of social media algorithms.

Government departments are responsible for addressing disinformation by providing a "memetic" response according to the " 2-2-2 ": a response in 20 minutes, in 200 words or less, with 2 images.

Alongside dog memes and pink face masks, one of the most successful is a rapid response to halt runs on toilet paper. This featured a cartoon video of Taiwan Premier Su Tseng-chang shaking his backside with a caption saying "We only have one pair of buttocks."
How hacktivists reached the halls of power
How has the mindset and culture of hacktivism been cultivated to motivate civic hackers to participate in Taiwan's digital democracy?

First, a figurehead and a manifesto. Audrey Tang is the figurehead, and her manifesto On Utopia for Public Action espouses post-party politics, free speech and deliberation, all enabled through thoughtful and experimental application of digital infrastructure.

Second, a suite of smart digital tools enable discussion, surveys and online "telepresence." These include the vTaiwan and the Join platforms for public policy participation.

Third, inviting participation, listening to community voices, and taking action as a result. Taiwan's culture of civic participation follows the model of open source software communities. This means working from the bottom up, sharing information, improving on the work of others, mutual benefit and participatory collective action.

Underlying these initiatives and digital infrastructures is two-way trust. In the words of Yun Chen, a member of the "decentralized civic tech community" g0v: "The first key is trust ... it was the trust that made government officers take open data as performance instead of troubles, which led government to initiate open data and be willing to accept tech assistance from civic tech communities."

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Hacking the pandemic: How Taiwan's digital democracy holds COVID-19 at bay -- GCN

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Taiwan's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been among the world's best. With a population almost the size of Australia's, the island nation has reported only 496 confirmed cases of the disease and no locally acquired infections for months.

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Taiwan's leading 'civic hacker' helps fix cracks in democracy

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Taiwan's leading 'civic hacker' helps fix cracks in democracy

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2020/11/21

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TOKYO -- Taiwan's digital minister Audrey Tang is the face of civic hackers worldwide. While being lauded for developing a "mask map" app that shows stores stocked with face coverings, Tang's tech skills have always been overshadowed by her vision of using technology to advance benevolent democratic processes.

"I do not naively believe that the world will magically become a better place as long as everyone has good intentions," Tang said in a keynote at the virtual Code for Japan Summit 2020 on Oct. 17. But "digital spaces allow footprints of kindness to remain," she said, stressing that "trust will continue to accumulate" like a distributed "ledger" if people keep being kind on the internet.

Born in Taipei in 1981, Tang was a child prodigy. She started speaking at the age of eight months and subsequently scored off the charts in intelligence quotient tests.

She quit junior high school at the age of 14 after being hired by a leading Taiwanese IT company for her programming skills. A year later she opened a business before moving to Silicon Valley when she was still 19.

Identifying as "post-gender," Tang drew global attention for her programming skills by pioneering the practical use of next-generation Perl 6 through her Pugs project. Later, Tang joined Apple as an adviser.

After leaving the business world, Tang emerged as a force in the field of civic technology during Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Student Movement. While students occupied Taiwan's parliament building to protest a trade deal between Taiwan and mainland China, Tang helped spread awareness of their activities by creating a system to livestream the turmoil.

When Tang was 35, President Tsai Ing-wen made her minister without portfolio, the youngest person to fill such a post in Taiwanese history.

Under Tang's guidance, mask map was created, prompting other developers to use government data to release similar apps that showed real-time locations of masks for sale. The government had an existing prescription drug database, which formed the basis for tracking mask inventories. Because insurance cards in Taiwan have built-in IC chips, sales of masks could be easily recorded.

The system behind the mask map did not just suddenly appear after the coronavirus swept the word, but was a result of Taiwan's "digital democracy" established over many years by Tang and other civic hackers.

Creating a digital democracy depends on a government implementing an "open data" policy, which ensures the timely release of administrative information as processable data.

Regarding the mask map, the Taiwan government released inventory data in the universal comma-separated value format, or CSV, which allowed easy access to information. The map is now updated every 30 seconds compared with every 30 minutes when the system first kicked off.

Since the Sunflower Movement, the government has embraced the idea of transparency via easily accessible data. In 2014, the administration of then-President Ma Ying-jeou pushed through a trade pact with China, encouraging many students to storm the legislature building and occupy it for 23 days. The demonstrators demanded that information about the deal be disclosed.

The protests were not violent. During the occupation, students negotiated online with lawmakers and nongovernmental organizations, eventually submitting a list of demands, after which the occupation ended. Tang played a vital role in the event, as it was her livestream system that hosted negotiations.

The civic tech website g0v (pronounced gov-zero) in which she participated was initially launched in 2012. The site remains active today, providing the public with a live look at legislative procedures.

Since the site's inception, Taiwanese have drastically changed their views about the disclosure of information. According to Tang, in mayoral elections across Taiwan in 2014, candidates who supported "open government" were swept into office regardless of their political allegiance. Those who did not lost out.

Another feature of the civic tech culture is the concept of the electorate creating its own public services. Tang said that the belief that people "create administrative services ... by ourselves" has already taken hold in Taiwan.

When Taiwan's national health insurance authorities posted real-time information on the availability of masks, more than 100 apps were developed in less than a week, becoming crucial conduits that employed chatbots, voice assistants, maps and other tools, Tang said in her keynote.

The civic hacker-inspired g0v site still offers code for apps and systems concerning the availability of masks. As the apps become more mainstream, developers have made them more user-friendly and accurate. The open-source system is self-perpetuating, as developers build on the success of others.

The concept of "open data" is indispensable to civic tech and requires active participation by all members of the public.

One of Tang's political credos is "radical transparency," under which all information concerning government -- excluding diplomacy, defense and other confidential activities -- should be disclosed online so that citizens can engage with the government on an equal footing.

The results of this can be seen on g0v through its dynamic representation of public finances. Each government agency is displayed as a colored ball, which shows the percentage of the total budget. Placing a cursor over a ball brings up bar charts that display annual allocations, clearly showing how tax monies are being allocated.

For example, as the chart expands, budget appropriations for retired military veterans can be seen, potentially flagging larger-than-expected outlays. Information as far back as 2014 can be displayed, and moving the cursor over the different points reveals even more budget details.

The system provides an easy-to-grasp visualization of the government budget.

Tang has also established an interactive platform called v-Taiwan, on which government officials, citizens and experts discuss pending legislation. The platform has paved the way for such legislation as permitting online liquor sales and entry by Uber and Airbnb into the domestic market.

Taiwan was under martial law when Tang was born in 1981. The island's first presidential election was held in 1996.

To Tang, democracy means technology, she said during a talk with Haruyuki Seki, founder and director of Code for Japan, a nonprofit organization aimed at helping local governments and communities address issues through IT. Tang said that democracy cannot be taken for granted, hence she considers it natural to improve and update it, like technology, through open-source technology.

The internet has recently been cast as a divider and destroyer of democracy. In reality, the internet is a border-free construct, but one that should not be left to anarchy. If seen as a place to record the kindness of people and accumulate trust as mentioned by Tang, the internet can be a tool to support democracy.

Will civic tech extend beyond Taiwan and help achieve social changes in Asia and the world?

Well-versed in philosophy and religion as well, Tang referred Japanese civic hackers to a Buddhist proverb: The darkness in a 1,000-year-old room can be eliminated by a single lantern."

The live broadcasting of activities in the legislative chamber, made possible by Tang during the Sunflower Movement, continues to serve as a lantern to eliminate darkness in Taiwan. What kind of beacon will be created by the rest of Asia?
Additional reporting by Kensaku Ihara.

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Taiwan's leading 'civic hacker' helps fix cracks in democracy

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TOKYO -- Taiwan's digital minister Audrey Tang is the face of civic hackers worldwide. While being lauded for developing a "mask map" app that shows stores stocked with face coverings, Tang's tech skills have always been overshadowed by her vision of using technology to advance benevolent democratic processes.

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How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic

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How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic

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2020/03/20

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The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful test of social and governance systems. Neither of the world's two leading powers, China and the United States, has been particularly distinguished in responding. In China, an initial bout of political denial allowed the virus to spread for weeks, first domestically and then globally, before a set of forceful measures proved reasonably effective. (The Chinese government also should have been better prepared, given that viruses have jumped from animal hosts to humans within its territory on multiple occasions in the past.) The United States underwent its own bout of political denial before adopting social-distancing policies; even now, its lack of investment in public health leaves it ill-equipped for this sort of emergency.

The response of the bureaucratic and often technophobic European Union may prove even worse: Italy, although far from the epicenter of the outbreak, has four times the per capita rate of cases as China does, and even famously orderly Germany is already at half China's rate. Nations in other parts of the world, such as information-manipulating Iran, provide worse examples yet.

Focusing on the countries that have done worst, however, may be less useful at this point than considering which country has so far done best: Taiwan. Despite being treated by the World Health Organization as part of China, and despite having done far broader testing than the United States (meaning the true rate of infection is far less hidden), Taiwan has only one-fifth the rate of known cases in the United States and less than one-tenth the rate in widely praised Singapore. Infections could yet spike again, especially with the global spread making visitors from around the world vectors of the virus. Yet the story of Taiwan's initial success is worth sharing not just because of its lessons for containing the present pandemic but also because of its broader lessons about navigating pressing challenges around technology and democracy.

Taiwan's success has rested on a fusion of technology, activism, and civic participation. A small but technologically cutting-edge democracy, living in the shadow of the superpower across the strait, Taiwan has in recent years developed one of the world's most vibrant political cultures by making technology work to democracy's advantage rather than detriment. This culture of civic technology has proved to be the country's strongest immune response to the new coronavirus.

TECH FOR DEMOCRACY

The value of Taiwan's tech-enabled civic culture has become abundantly clear in the current crisis. Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, "hacktivism" (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country's success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus. A recent report from the Stanford University School of Medicine documents 124 distinct interventions that Taiwan implemented with remarkable speed. Many of these interventions bubbled into the public sector through community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation on the vTaiwan digital democracy platform, on which almost half the country's population participates. (The platform enables large-scale hacktivism, civic deliberation, and scaling up of initiatives in an orderly and largely consensual manner.) A decentralized community of participants used tools such as Slack and HackMD to refine successful projects. (Much of our analysis is based on open interviews through these tools with leaders in the g0v community of civic hackers.)

One of the most celebrated examples is the Face Mask Map, a collaboration initiated by an entrepreneur working with g0v. To prevent the panicked buying of facemasks, which hindered Taiwan's response to SARS in 2003, the government instituted a national rationing scheme of two facemasks per week per citizen. Anticipating that this national policy would be insufficient to avoid local runs on pharmacies, the government (via its prestigious digital ministry) released an application programming interface (API) that provided real-time, location-specific data to the public on mask availability.

Digital Minister Audrey Tang then proceeded to work closely with entrepreneurs and g0v hacktivists in a digital chatroom to rapidly produce a range of maps and applications. These tools showed where masks were available, but they did more than that. Citizens were able to reallocate rations through intertemporal trades and donations to those who most needed them, which helped prevent the rise of a black market. As often happens in the world of hacking, the initial deployment crashed after being overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries in the first hours of operation, but the effort was not wasted. The broad interest stimulated the government to provide the necessary computational resources and bandwidth to allow a version of this service that could serve the whole population. The result has not just facilitated a more effective distribution of masks but also reduced panic and generated widespread, and justified, pride.

Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, "hacktivism," and participatory collective action have been central to the country's success.

A second example is a platform that helps citizens work together to reduce exposure to the virus. The work on this platform (which again grew out of a collaboration between a group of entrepreneurs, the digital ministry, and the g0v movement) was motivated in part by the arrival of passengers from a cruise ship with a high rate of infection. Individuals used the platform to share reports, voluntarily and in real time, about symptoms using a variety of media (such as a call-in line and smartphones); this information was quickly verified and collated. The result was then combined with more community-created apps that allowed users to download their smartphone location history to determine if they may have been exposed. It was a common-sense design that encouraged proactive behavior. Users who worried about exposure limited their subsequent interactions to protect others.

The guiding principle was not top-down control but mutual respect and cooperation. Privacy was carefully protected, and the movements of an individual were not visible to others. This approach supported an astonishing degree of social coordination, which reduced transmission. And despite being an open, participatory system, the platform did not spur the spread of disinformation or panic. By ensuring reported histories of movement corresponded to plausible patterns, without recording their details, trolls were excluded, thereby avoiding the dysfunctions that degrade commercial social media in times of crisis. The availability of this information dramatically reduced the economic burden of achieving containment by avoiding uniform and extreme social-distancing policies. Instead, citizens were able to avoid or disinfect compromised locations; those who had visited them could self-quarantine.

These are only two examples. Dozens of community-created apps helped reduce the intensity of government-enforced interventions and at the same time supported the world's best response to the pandemic. They allowed Taiwan to avoid the lack of coordination and the misallocation of supplies and tests that have characterized the U.S. and European responses, as well as the secretive, hierarchical approach of centralized Chinese planning. By making the health-crisis response extremely transparent-Digital Minister Tang livestreams all her meetings-Taiwan built public confidence. By communicating challenges faced by the government, rather than projecting an aura of invincibility, it encouraged a range of decentralized actors to contribute to solutions and build on official information. And by tightly targeting responses to locations and types of activities that posed a threat, made visible by data from the community, it was able to act early without paralyzing economic activity, causing political division, or stoking fear.

THE POWER OF PARTICIPATION

Why has Taiwan succeeded where others have faltered? It is too early to claim either definitive success in or a thorough understanding of a still unfolding crisis. But it is clear that the Taiwanese approach has, in the early stages of the pandemic, proved more effective than those in China, elsewhere in Asia, Europe, or the United States.

In theory, China and the United States-" AI superpowers," as the Taiwanese-born industrial maven Kai-Fu Lee has put it-ought to have better capacity to deal with complex, rapidly evolving problems, given that they have the biggest computers running the most advanced artificial intelligence programs. Yet tiny Taiwan did better than either of them by emphasizing the social inputs to coordination instead of machine learning alone.

It is possible that the AI prowess of China and the United States in fact stood in their way. Both have a technocratic, top-down vision of the future of AI, in which a small digital elite, concentrated in a few tech hubs and largely separated from the concerns of the rest of the population, produces tools meant to be used by the rest of the population. While the locus of this elite is the Communist Party in one case and West Coast tech hubs in the other, the logic is similar.

The Taiwanese response was fast, precise, and democratic.

One problem with technocracies of this sort is that although they are good at crunching and propagating data, they tend to be myopic when it comes to context and motivation. Tech elites in both China and the United States were at first slow to perceive the importance of events in a somewhat removed field of knowledge-medicine. Even once the issue was on their radar screens, the narrowness of the elites led to an initial blindness to the world beyond their immediate experience.

The most striking example was the Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, one of the first to perceive the danger of the virus, who was reprimanded by the police and then, after he died, became a national martyr. The shortsightedness of the elites is also evident in the United States, in the botched rollout of the COVID-19 triage app by Alphabet's Verily: its capabilities were initially oversold, it is distrusted by many as a data grab, and it turns out to cover only the Bay Area.

In contrast, the Taiwanese response, based on an ethos of broad digital participation and community-driven tool development, was fast, precise, and democratic. By spreading participation in digital development broadly through society, Taiwan avoided both technocracy and technophobia, maintaining trust and the two-way flow of information in the face of a crisis.

THE TAIWAN MODEL

Taiwan's success has precedents. One example comes from the United States: the rapid mobilization after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The country turned on a dime and outstripped the more centrally directed efforts of Germany, Japan, and later, the Soviet Union, through a range of government and citizen-driven industrial and technological innovations. The key, for both the United States then and Taiwan now, was catalyzing the widespread desire among citizens to be useful producers, and not just consumers, of the tools needed for victory over an enemy-whether a foreign military or a lethal virus. Societies that fail to do so in a time of crisis are wasting their most critical resource.

Taiwan has demonstrated the same capacity when confronted with other challenges. Its recent presidential election, for example, might represent the democratic world's greatest victory yet over digital disinformation. Facing the world's highest volume of disinformation (flowing mostly from mainland China), Taiwan harnessed citizen-built and operated platforms, powered by voluntary reporting, to check and rebut false claims. The citizenry also collaboratively designed and quickly deployed a new media-literacy curriculum ahead of the election. A populist, Beijing-backed candidate lost the election by 20 points.

Taiwan has achieved similar successes in a range of other policy areas, including in striking a balance between protecting privacy and enabling citizen-organized "data collaboratives"; achieving exceptional environmental standards and climate emission abatement; protecting workers in the "gig economy" without preventing the rise of innovative digital services; and fostering civic participation with creative engagement and voting tools.

This emerging Taiwanese model holds powerful promise beyond the current crisis. Debates about technological development tend to focus on the leading competitors in the race for global prestige, holding the Chinese technocratic-authoritarian surveillance state up against the corporate-capitalist approach in the United States. Taiwan offers another path-one that should hold appeal across ideological lines in democratic societies, including the United States. The left will appreciate that the g0v civic-hacker movement grew out of work with the Sunflower Movement, Taiwan's answer to Occupy Wall Street. (In contrast to Occupy, g0v ended up giving Taiwan's Sunflower Movement the tools to gain a lasting institutional foothold in the digital ministry.) At the same time, by showing how a small, young, and scrappy democracy can thrive in the shadow of Beijing's growing authoritarianism, Taiwan provides an example that should appeal to China hawks on the right.

Taiwan offers an alternative to both the top-down surveillance of the Chinese state and the advertising-driven Western tech giants. It has harnessed technology as a tool of democratic creativity (rather than, like Europe, focusing just on limiting the frightening harms of surveillance). And by doing so, Taiwan has created a model that holds great promise in the ongoing fight not only against the coronavirus but also against menacing dystopian technological futures.

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How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic

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The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful test of social and governance systems. Neither of the world's two leading powers, China and the United States, has been particularly distinguished in responding.

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Taiwan’s Tech-savvy Citizens Helped Flatten Its COVID-19 Curve

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Taiwan’s Tech-savvy Citizens Helped Flatten Its COVID-19 Curve

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2020/07/27

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Taiwan's government cannot take sole credit for flattening that country's curve during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The work was supported by an extraordinary collaboration of tech-savvy citizens who used their expertise to help spread valuable information to the public, according to a case study by Steven O. Kimbrough, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and Christine Chou, business professor at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. In this opinion piece, Kimbrough and Chou explain how this grassroots effort coalesced and what it signals for Taiwan's future.
When the novel coronavirus and its disease, COVID-19, first spread in China, Taiwan was regarded as the next country most likely to be affected, due to its close geographic and economic ties with China. However, by mid-July 2020, after more than six months of rapidly growing COVID-19 cases around the world, Taiwan still counted substantially fewer cases than most countries. The worldwide news media have noted Taiwan's initial success story, attributing it to Taiwan's resilience, pervasive national health system, central command structure, rapid medical equipment build up, early prevention and transparent information sharing, as well as other factors. While these factors surely have played important roles in contributing to this initial success, it is too soon to tell whether that success will continue.

The purpose of our case study is to describe the work by a special group of people to assist in the pandemic response in Taiwan. That work has culminated, so its story can now be told. Our case study is based on 3,060 online community messages, 32 online shared interviews and information from several personal contacts. See "Not All Heroes Wear Capes: The Contributors Behind the Battle Against the Coronavirus Outbreak in Taiwan" for a fuller version of the study, including a detailed timeline.

The basic facts of the case are the following: Rationing of face masks began in Taiwan on January 28, shortly after the coronavirus appeared. This was partly in response to panic buying, but problems persisted, with long lines at all convenience stores that were originally designated to sell masks. There was also much agitation and anxiety among the public. At this point the idea of a name-based rationing system - tied to the national health system records - for buying face masks in the pharmacies was proposed. Under the system, each citizen or foreigner with a valid alien resident certificate could purchase two masks within a 7-day period using their identification cards as of February 6.

Once news of the forthcoming arrangement was released on February 4, a novel collaboration among the public, private and civic sectors began to emerge spontaneously. More than 1,000 software developers joined in the task of providing apps and other tools to identify in real time where face masks were available, sparing the public wasted time and anxiety. By the beginning of March, 59 map systems, 21 line applications, three chat bots, 23 mask sales location search systems, 22 apps, five audio systems, two information sharing systems, and one online mask reservation system were launched. Several applications have attracted more than 2 million users. The tools have been very effective, easing public anxiety and preventing a black market from emerging. As Microsoft executives Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl wrote, "These tools showed where masks were available, but they did more than that. Citizens were able to reallocate rations through intertemporal trades and donations to those who most needed them, which helped prevent the rise of a black market." In the end, democracy and social capital in Taiwan were strengthened.

"In the end, democracy and social capital in Taiwan were strengthened."

The rationing system and the searching tools fully met their expectations until late April when the government was able to produce ample numbers of masks domestically. The government began to donate masks to various countries in need beginning in early April and was able to accumulate uncollected masks to donate more to other countries in late April. There are several important lessons to be learned from this case:

The software community coalesced on the g0v.tw platform, which is "an online community that pushes for greater information transparency [and] that focuses on developing an information platform and effective related tools for citizens to participate in society." This platform was first set up in 2012 when a group of engineers was not satisfied with the government's stance towards data availability.

The channels used by the g0v community (#general and then #covid19) had persistent, attentive members. In the development of the mask-searching system, several leaders responded to the community multiple times every day. The top three members' IDs were kiang, minexo79 and tnstiger, all of whom steadfastly replied to channel members' messages, and continue to do so.

Thanks to the universal national health system, the Ministry of Health and Welfare had complete data available on pharmacies around the country. That data included pharmacists' store codes, locations, business hours, mask inventory, and ways of issuing numbers to distribute the masks. This data was made available to the g0v developers after they requested it.

The g0v community shared frustrations among its members as the project got underway and elation as successes were achieved. Emotion sharing was a key element in binding the community together and serving its higher purposes.

Stepping back, we should see the generous behavior of the g0v community in a larger context. It is an example of people spontaneously coming together in the spirit of community service during a public disaster. Rebecca Solnit documented multiple such examples in her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell. Her chronicle begins with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the acute firsthand observations of the philosopher William James, who noted the initial effective and peaceable self-organization of response by the diverse citizenry. Sadly, that period of comity and effectiveness soon ended because authorities imposed force where it was hardly needed and, in fact, detrimental. Solnit found this to be a recurring pattern up to the present day.

"In a time of immense challenge, each contributor became a hero in his or her own way."

Happily, Taiwan so far has been an exception. In this case, the government responded with welcome and alacrity to the pro-social impulses of the g0v community. Audrey Tang, the government's digital minister, has been a linchpin. With expert skills and knowledge in information technology, and the political skills that come with holding an important position in the government - a rare combination - she actively supported the projects and served as a crucial go-between for the multiple stakeholders present. An exceptional talent, she is also openly a transgender woman who, remarkably for Taiwan's historical culture, has achieved the highest levels of access and influence in government and society. Her voice is eagerly sought and listened to. See "How digital innovation can fight pandemics and strengthen democracy" for Tang's broader take on the situation.

The success of the name-based mask projects was enabled by an unusual combination of elements including: outstanding leadership and commitment (the digital minister, the leaders of the g0v collective); trust and residual goodwill (among the g0v community, and between the citizens generally and the government, which had recently obtained a very strong electoral mandate); deep preparation and steady, highly competent, informed leadership by the government that welcomed the g0v contributions; a well-educated, highly skilled group of techies with the freedom and capacity to contribute without being paid for their services; and a general, creative openness to diverse people and ways of thinking (including enlisting volunteers to visit pharmacies in person and collect additional data).

Above all, the success of this case relied on many volunteers willing to contribute large amounts of their time and effort. As writer Andrea Randall put it so well, "Heroes don't always wear capes, badges or uniforms. Sometimes, they support those who do." In a time of immense challenge, each contributor became a hero in his or her own way. Not only did they help solve the problem, but they also warmed everyone's hearts with their effort and generosity. The gratitude they merit is perhaps even more for the lasting value and example they created for the future, and what this means for Taiwan's social capital, than for their fine achievement of the day.
*The authors acknowledge the help and authorization from CC BY 4.0 by g0v Contributors and helpful comments from Finjon Kiang.

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Taiwan's Tech-savvy Citizens Helped Flatten Its COVID-19 Curve - Knowledge@Wharton

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Taiwan's government cannot take sole credit for flattening that country's curve during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The work was supported by an extraordinary collaboration of tech-savvy citizens who used their expertise to help spread valuable information to the public, according to a case study by Steven O.

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Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

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Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

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2019/11/26

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On March 18, 2014, a large crowd seethed around Taiwan's parliament. Protestors fought off guards and kicked the doors of the building open, streaming onto the parliamentary floor. Thousands more surrounded the building as an occupation began - one that stretched from hours into days, then weeks.

That moment, when the power of the parliament was pitted against mobilised crowds willing to risk arrest or violence, would later be known as the Sunflower Student Movement. Yet for the citizens not only of Taiwan, but of polarised and weakened democracies everywhere, what happened next might be more important. In the wake of the movement, an experiment began. It was an attempt to better unite parliament and crowd, changing how government listens to its citizens, and makes decisions. An attempt to reinvent democracy itself.

One of the people in the crowd that evening was Audrey Tang. She had begun coding at the age of eight by typing on a keyboard drawn on a piece of paper. At 14, she had dropped out of school to learn about technology, and then spent time in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur before returning to her native Taiwan in her thirties. Joining a collective called G0v - "gov zero" - she'd become an activist whose worldview was interwoven with technology. For most of her life, Tang had been active in a global community of engineers, tech workers, officials and NGOs that had formed to work out rules to govern the internet. Owned both by everyone and no one at the same time, the internet needed a new politics, and this community called it "multistakeholderism". The idea was that anyone could have a seat at the table as long as they were animated by transparency, willingness to listen and consensus-finding, in order to bring together the different tribes of the internet.

These people called themselves "civic hackers" and, from 2012 onwards, they'd moved from the politics of the internet itself to using the internet to open up mainstream politics. Yet as G0v started grappling with Taiwan's politics, they found that it was opaque, fractious and deaf to civic society - the opposite of multistakeholderism.

The spark for the Sunflower Student Movement was a trade bill that was seen by protestors as a step towards uniting Taiwan with China. The movement eventually derailed the bill but, to the civic hackers, it was only the symptom of a deeper malaise: there had been no consensus, no listening. The ruling party had tried forcing the bill into law simply because it had the votes to do so. That opened up questions that had nothing to do with trade. Why hadn't the government listened? Was there a better way of doing things?

After the Sunflower Student Movement, something astounding happened. A government representative asked G0v for help. The government wanted to listen, and stop anything like the Sunflower Revolution from happening again. Civic hackers were asked to step into power. Members of G0v joined the government to form a new team, called the Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS). Tang went from civic hacker to Digital Minister of Taiwan.

Civic hackers thought that elections were simply not enough. Two-way votes held years apart didn't allow information to flow easily from citizens to government. Likewise, not enough information flowed out of government about what they actually were doing and why. Direct democracy didn't work either: referendums often split society, and simply showed a government that the country was divided. Something different was needed.

Civic hackers thought the internet could be part of the solution, but in Taiwan - like everywhere else - it seemed to be part of the problem. Online politics was polarised. It made people angry and bombarded political leaders with lobbying and abuse. The internet created only heat and noise, and gave citizens no way to express preferences the government could act on.

Their answer to the government's request was to create a new kind of political process. They wanted to allow citizens to not only vote on questions posed by the government, but also control what questions were asked in the first place. And they wanted these questions to be based on attitudes held in common across Taiwanese society rather than on its divisions. They called the process vTaiwan.

It came out of the G0v hackathons, developed by volunteers, but attended and listened to by government officials. Through constant tweaking, they worked out a set process, partly technological, partly face-to-face, that could be started by government on a specific question. It had to be open for anyone to join, and could only work if people were involved with skin in the game from all sides of any particular question. But it also had to create concrete outputs that the government could turn into new laws.

They knew that online discussions would most likely attract the younger, digitally savvy crowds first, so vTaiwan was at first mostly used to debate questions of technology regulation: "should Uber be allowed?", or "should alcohol be available to buy online?" Whatever the question, vTaiwan sought to design away the incentives for trolling and abuse and move political debate closer to internet-powered governance: transparent, inclusive and, above all, consensus-seeking.

One evening in mid-July 2019, I saw vTaiwan in action. Citizens gathered around tables in a softly lit room, together with officials from the Ministry of Transport. The issue was electric vehicle regulation. Many had arrived on Segways and e-scooters - vehicles that the government deems illegal - but there wasn't any shouting. Everyone - government, riders, e-vehicle sellers, pedestrians - had come to talk about what they had in common with each other. This debate was face-to-face, but the people in it had already been drawn closer to each other: vTaiwan had already used an online debate to identify what G0v call "consensus items" - statements many people across most groups broadly agreed with.

On any usual social media platform, the opposite would more likely be true. Those platforms are engineered to keep you on the site, and this usually means serving up content that provokes the strongest emotions - either zealous agreement or spluttering outrage. People would focus on the most polarising statements. Using the Internet to pull people together rather than split them apart requires designing an environment very different from the usual online forums for political debate, such as Twitter or Facebook.

To do that, vTaiwan used a platform called Polis, the creation of a team of technologists and former activists based in Seattle who aim at turning online debating on its head. "We wanted a comment system to be able to handle large populations and stay coherent," says Polis co-founder Colin Megill, "to make it easier to successfully decentralise power in organisations of all kinds." Like any social media, it allows participants to share their feelings and to agree or disagree with others. But as they do so, the platform draws a map of the debate, and shows everyone where they are in it. In the case of the debate on electric vehicles, for instance, two knots of people with similar views had emerged: one that wanted e-vehicles legalised today, another worried about safety.

"When people started using Polis, we found that it became a consensus-generating mechanism," Megill says. To bring the groups closer together, Polis has reengineered many of the features we take for granted on social media. No reply button - hence no trolling. No echo-chambers, replaced by an attitudes map showing you where you are in relation to everyone else. The platform does not highlight the most divisive statements, but gives more visibility to the most consensual ones. The ones that get attention are those that find support not only in one cluster, but across other groups, too.

"People compete to bring up the most nuanced statements that can win most people across. Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements," Tang says. "People spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue."

This technological change exposes a deeper human truth: on most issues, there might be half a dozen points of bitter division, but 20 or 30 of broad unity. The trick is to make these more visible.

"[Social media] mostly divides people. But the same technology can also be designed in a way that allows people to converge and form a polity," Tang says. vTaiwan has allowed citizens to sidestep the gruelling divisions that define online politics. vTaiwan didn't necessarily try to resolve the areas of bitter disagreement, but instead to forge a way forward based on the numerous areas most people agreed on.

Since 2014, the government has repeatedly asked for vTaiwan to be used to find consensus where none seemed to exist. Groups both supported and rejected caning for drunk drivers, but - rejecting the government's phrasing of the question - eventually united around how to prevent drunk driving in the first place. In another instance, vTaiwan found that both groups in favour of and against changing Taiwan's timezone were keen for Taiwan to be seen as more unique - the disagreement was about whether changing time zone would be an effective way of doing this. In its most famous case, the regulation of cab-hailing app Uber, vTaiwan initially found hardened factions set around either its convenience or illegality. Yet the debate ended with a series of practical points of agreement: Uber could operate, but only with licenced drivers.

One precious thing about consensus is that it can actually be acted upon. By clearing away the noise and division, the government was able to connect debates with decisions. The outcomes of the vTaiwan have been put in front of Parliament, by government, to form the core of 11 pieces of laws and regulation, with eight more waiting to go on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation.

This was only the beginning. The vTaiwan process itself has remained outside of government, run by G0v volunteers - even though the government uses the results. For Tang and PDIS, the next step was to move the same principles and thinking into government itself. Later that week in July, I see the same process playing out in the chilled, echoing marble corridors of a government building. A civil servant with rolled-up sleeves leans on a table looking down at a giant sheet of paper, next to a young man wearing a backpack. Both are part of a vTaiwan-inspired process called "co-gov", that brings citizens into government ministries. The issue at hand is that there are too many empty houses in Taipei at the same time as skyrocketing rent.

Co-gov is designed to map out the issue, understand the stakeholders involved, and then find the areas of consensus. Tang and PDIS train civil servants to run "vTaiwan-inspired" processes of their own, using Polis whenever they need to listen to large groups of people. All government drafts of law are now subject to 60 days of public commentary which - although the details are still being worked out - is set to be similar to vTaiwan. The next step is to use this kind of deliberation to shape what people are asked in referendums. "We're making hacker culture part of public service culture. We're not bringing the hackers in, we're turning government into hackers," Tang says.

This experiment has as many challenges in front of it as achievements behind. So far, it has only focused on emerging digital issues, unlikely to affect people who don't use technology. Some in G0v feel that it has still to face its acid test: a national issue riven with entrenched polarisation. On the streets of Taipei, few people have heard of it: only 200,000 people have so far been through the process.

If you're cynical about politics, you're just likely to be cynical about digital democracy too - just another way for politicians to get what they want. Cynicism aside, deliberation of any kind is always time-consuming and tiring, and a struggle for people to fit into their busy lives. It has also been slotted into a system of representative democracy which, in a sense, it both challenges and relies upon. "Citizens can really make some change through this digital platform. But those digital democracy platforms don't have any kind of real authority," says Taiwanese parliamentarian Karen Yu. "Legislators still have more power for legislative change."

It is ironic that a project aimed at spreading power outwards is so dependent on a small number of individuals, including Tang. If the ruling Democratic Progressive Party loses power in 2020, the experiment might vanish overnight. It remains to be seen whether the Sunflower legacy will be enduring.

But Taiwan has lessons for democracies all over the world, proving that the character of political debate is partly down to platform engineering. Polarised and angry content keeps us engaged, and that is exactly what platforms have been designed to show us. Design a platform to find consensus, and you see it arise in the debate.

Tang thinks that vTaiwan might become a power that could exist quite apart from representatives or ministers. "Once people get the idea that you don't need a government to do governance, then people get into the true spirit of collaborative governance," she says. "It may take a generation or more for people to see the state as a useful illusion and only use that illusion whenever convenient."

In countries such as the UK, democracy has fossilised in a particular form. In Taiwan, a young democracy that doesn't carry the same weighty legacy, it is being upgraded. It might stand a better chance of adapting.

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Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

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On March 18, 2014, a large crowd seethed around Taiwan's parliament. Protestors fought off guards and kicked the doors of the building open, streaming onto the parliamentary floor. Thousands more surrounded the building as an occupation began - one that stretched from hours into days, then weeks.

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g0v NYC Hackathon: Tech Solution Workshop or Social Meetup?

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g0v NYC Hackathon: Tech Solution Workshop or Social Meetup?

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2016/11/18

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I spent the first weekend of November at the first ever g0v hackathon in New York City, not as a hacker, but an observer of the event. Already confused with the format of the event, I found myself asking the question beforehand, "What is the purpose of a g0v hackathon?"

A traditional hackathon is a competition in which a problem is presented by the host or sponsor and participants work in separate teams to create a solution that they present to a panel of judges after a short amount of time (usually a weekend or 24 hours). This type of event uses competition to push teams to create a feasible solution within the time frame. This requires not just deep knowledge of technical skills, but also an understanding of the product and planning so a proper demo can be presented at the end of the event.

A g0v hackathon is a very different story; at a g0v hackathon, participants present an idea or proposal. In their terms, "digging a hole," and then asking other participants to "jump in the hole" to "fill the hole" (create a solution).

The first time I heard of g0v was after the Sunflower Movement when people were praising the g0v community's ability to create an Internet platform for what was one of the largest civil movements by Taiwan's youth since the 1990 White Lily Movement. With this in mind, I envisioned the NYC event to be akin to a workshop where civic tech solutions are produced after 24 hours. However, I wanted to see how a g0v hackathon - with its different format - operated compared to a traditional hackathon.

At the beginning of the event, a video from one of the g0v co-founders and now Taiwan's "digital" Cabinet Minister Audrey Tang (唐鳳) was played to explain how g0v works. Something I heard that stood out to me was g0v's concept of decentralization and that everyone represented g0v. Anyone could define what g0v is. Tang explains in the video, "Whether g0v is like this or like that, there's no definite answer, ever. Everyone when participating has a copy of g0v in their own mind." This reminded me of an episode of "The Newsroom" in which the concept of a flat structure was criticized due to its inability to drive a specific solution for a specific issue.

Next came the presentation of projects, which varied from data scraping of the U.S. national archives for stories of Taiwan to a bot for answering Taiwanese student's visa questions. These projects presented the same problem: these products were solutions without a problem.

I spent the two days looking at projects, talking to people in an attempt to support my doubt or dispel my misconception. Instead, it transformed how I looked at the event. From conversations with participants, I heard one common perception of the event: despite individuals not having experience in tech, they were able to contribute to certain projects. "G0v is about empowering people," one participant said, and I think that goes a long way.

As the event rolled to an end and groups were presenting their project progress, each group talked of the next steps for their project. Granted, many of them might never revisit their projects, but their brains now have a positive experience of working on a project to help Taiwan in some way, shape or form.

G0v encourages participants to step further into the space of civic tech because it has created a safe space where any idea can be heard and any contribution to a project is considered progress. Some, if not most, of the projects were started by people who had no civic or tech experience, but ended the weekend saying, "I feel like this is a start."

From what I saw and what I heard this weekend, g0v is a community and their big hackathons are community building events. However, these hackathons are not building solutions for active issues. What these events lack are product managers who can take a certain issue, distil it down to its root cause, and create a project plan for sustainable development. A key point to developing technology are the stakeholders.

If g0v hackathons are to remain a community-building event, giving an everyday person the experience to explore a hackathon-esque environment and leave them with a memory of meeting like-minded people, it is well-suited.

However, if g0v hackathons want to truly solve issues and be a continued effort to understand issues, captivate the user's needs and advocate the use of a technology, they must utilize product management to get these tools in the hands of those who can best use the technology.

As event speaker Andrew Nicklin said, "People think that a group of white males in Silicon Valley will change the world. No. Ask yourself the question, 'Are you really connecting with the people who are using it. Understand where they're coming from?"'

As a person who works as a product manager, one concept I am constantly reminded of and constantly reminding others is: technology is but a tool. It is up to the people who use it that determine how good the tool is.

Photo Credit: Eric Tsai

There is a follow-up event on Dec. 10 in NYC.
First Editor: Olivia Yang
Second Editor: Edward White

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g0v NYC Hackathon: Tech Solution Workshop or Social Meetup? - The News Lens International Edition

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'If g0v hackathons want to truly solve issues and be a continued effort to understand issues, captivate the user's needs and advocate the use of a technology, they must utilize product management to get these tools in the hands of those who can best use the technology.'

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Taiwanese Cofacts fact-checks information on LINE

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Taiwanese Cofacts fact-checks information on LINE

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2018/08/29

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There are already numerous fact-checking initiatives across Asia that comb through news articles and public social media posts, but instant messaging poses a unique challenge in the fight against misinformation.

It's difficult to deal with "fake news" circulating in chat groups, when most of us cannot see it.

And it's a problem that Taiwan - where LINE is hugely popular - is currently grappling with. Messages on the chat app are convenient to forward, but not always easy to rebut.

This is especially so in family chat groups, where young Taiwanese often find it difficult or awkward to confront older relatives who forward false or heavily skewed messages.

Enter Cofacts, an open, collaborative platform by Taiwanese civic tech community g0v (pronounced "gov-zero").

The basic system is simple. Users who receive dubious messages on LINE can forward them to the Cofacts chatbot. The messages are then added to a database, where they're fact-checked by volunteer editors before the response is sent back to the LINE user.

If the editors don't agree with one another's fact-checking, they can send multiple messages to the user, who then has the opportunity to independently evaluate the information provided.

Based on Cofacts' data, the misinformation debunked on their platform can range from fake promotional messages and medical misinformation to false claims about government policies.

Time-saving chatbot

Johnson Liang, a creator of the Cofacts Line bot, says he was convinced that a chatbot was the right approach after getting a peek at the admin panel of MyGoPen, another fact-checking account on LINE.

MyGoPen was being flooded with messages, but most of them were duplicates - identical or very similar messages from different users. The administrators were overwhelmed by the need to respond to each person individually.

MyGoPen's struggles gave Liang the idea for the chatbot, linked to a database. Once a message is sent to Cofacts, it is stored on the database. The next time someone forwards the same message, the database can retrieve existing fact-checks and send it right back.

Over the past three months, Cofacts received more than 46,000 messages - and the chatbot was able to automatically answer 35,180 of them.

Like the rest of g0v, openness and decentralisation is key to Cofacts' operations. Their datasets, analytics and meeting notes are all open access, so anyone (as long as you can read Traditional Chinese, that is) can look at their discussions and design decisions.

It's a practice that even extends to the way they deal with media queries: instead of one-on-one interviews or emails, the Cofacts team requested that this interview be conducted via shared documents accessible by the entire team, allowing people with different roles and perspectives to contribute (or at least be aware of what others were saying).

This model was at first born from practical concerns. "Distinguishing users or adding mechanisms like screening the editors takes time," says Liang. "It takes time to design the rules of background checks. It also takes time to implement them to the system. It takes more time to justify (or modify) the screening rules if there are people challenging these rules. Since we don't want to waste time on these rules, we just make it available to all people-if anyone is not happy with any reply on the platform, just directly contribute."

Gatekeepers of rumor

But Cofacts acknowledges that this system isn't foolproof: while it's built on openness and trust, there's always the possibility of the platform being hijacked by rogue editors.

And Liang freely admits that the team might not figure out the best method forward until they achieve a critical mass, where the likelihood of getting hacked or hijacked becomes more tangible.

Still, he keeps an open mind, preferring to think of tools that communities can use, rather than measures to pre-empt and block threats that may or may not yet exist.

"A more constructive perspective to look at the risk of the platform being flooded with rogue editors is to rephrase it to questions like 'How we can improve quality of the editor's replies?'" he says. "This opens up much more rooms for discussions and possible solutions."

He cites other platforms, such as Wikipedia and Quora, as possible models to learn from.

Despite the support of its growing database, fighting hoaxes and misinformation is still an uphill battle for Cofacts.

The team receives about 250 new messages a week, but has less than 12 active editors combing through them, meaning that users don't always receive quick responses to the messages they want fact-checked. They also have no way to figure out what and how rumors are spreading among LINE users who don't use Cofacts.

But Liang points out the "bright side": every user who does get an answer to their query now has the ability to become rumour-quashers themselves.

"Although the rumours still spread after we reply, at least we stopped these many users (or chatrooms) from further forwarding such messages every day. It empowers [these] users to be gatekeepers on their own."
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean freelance journalist and writer. She's also the editor-in-chief of New Naratif. This post originally appeared on Splice. It was republished on IJNet with permission. Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via Bhupinder Nayyar.

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Taiwanese Cofacts fact-checks information on LINE

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There are already numerous fact-checking initiatives across Asia that comb through news articles and public social media posts, but instant messaging poses a unique challenge in the fight against misinformation.It's difficult to deal with "fake news" circulating in chat groups, when most of us cannot see it.And it's a problem that Taiwan - where LINE is hugely popular - is currently grappling with.

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Taiwan’s revolutionary hackers are forking the government

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Taiwan’s revolutionary hackers are forking the government

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2018/05/04

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News of the protests broke on a spring day in the middle of March 2014, when transgender civic hacker Audrey Tang was working at Socialtext in Silicon Valley. Finally, the revolution in her home country was gaining pace and she yearned to be part of it.

There was a knot in Tang's stomach as she hurriedly opened the staff internal chat tool, writing: "I have to leave immediately because democracy needs me."

As she ran to the parliament building, the streets of Taipei were bursting with protesters. Mostly college students, they waved placards reading "Taiwan is not for sale" - a reference to the government's trade deal with China, which they feared would irreparably damage the economy, democratic system and national security. Many wore yellow headbands and clutched sunflowers, a symbol of hope.

Taiwan had already seen uprisings against government decisions, but this one was different. During the days that followed, unrest built, provoking violent clashes between protesters and police, who fired water cannons in an attempt to disperse the crowds. Police, journalists and protesters were injured. Students emerged from the crowd with bloodied faces and broken bones.

Then, on March 18 at around 9:00 pm 300 protesters climbed over the fence at the legislature and entered the building. Once inside, the students took over the congress chamber, hanging banners over the rostrum and declaring their occupation a success.

They occupied the legislative floor overnight, resisting multiple attempts to expel them. Over the next few days, they continued to camp both outside and in the legislature. But the government refused to concede to their demands, so on March 23 2014 at 7:30 pm, several hundred stormed the nearby Executive Yuan.

Dodging police shields and truncheons, they forced their way through security barricades and razor wire and vaulted the barriers at the three main entrances of the government building. During the chaos, some students fainted and others were injured by glass from the windows. But they were determined - and it worked. After about half an hour, the police were outnumbered and the complex was almost entirely occupied.

The Sunflower Movement had begun.

By the time Tang arrived at the protests, it was dark. She rushed to help protesters and the civic media set up broadband connections to broadcast their message. "We had to improvise practically everything. There was no internet connection, so to begin with, we had to bootstrap ourselves. I remember getting 350 metres of Ethernet cable to connect through the parliament building to the street outside."

During the carnage that followed, Tang recalls a young person lending her his laptop. "We needed a stable connection between my Wi-Fi and through an Ethernet bridge to the camera person who was taking footage of the protests outside the parliament. He was like, 'this is my administrator password', saying, 'you can have the laptop all night if you want'. How is a 20-something ok with leaving this expensive-looking laptop with a complete stranger for the entire night?"

Little did she know, he belonged to the Black Island Youth, the group that was to later break into parliament. He had no desire to carry heavy equipment, he was just grateful for someone to look after it. "The laptop was going to be a burden," she says, laughing.

During three weeks of sometimes violent and frightening clashes, police made several attempts to forcefully evict students from the government building. But finally, the occupation came to an end after Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng visited the parliament chamber and agreed to oversight of trade deals with China - including the one that had sparked the protest.

Incredibly, the students had won their first battle: Taiwan's central government had lost all legitimacy. But this was not the end of the Sunflower Movement: Once they left the occupied buildings, the protesters vowed to continue to spread their message across Taiwan. The government was defeated in the next election in 2016 with the Democratic Progressive Party's Tsai Ing-wen becoming the first female president in the nation's history, taking 56 per cent of the vote.

Soon after, the Sunflower Movement's young revolutionaries were to become part of a digital project aiming to crowdsource opinion to inform government policy. The protests marked the first time they had been given a say in decision-making. They had won the campaign; now they needed to learn how to govern.

To understand how Taiwan got to this point, we have to go back to 2012. Chia-Liang "CL" Kao was recovering at home after a paragliding accident when he saw the Taiwanese government's TV advert aiming to inspire confidence in the struggling economy.

Its unsettling message, "trust in us", angered Kao. He was not alone: the commercial caused fury among Taiwan's growing community of young, politically-aware citizens. From his bed, Kao watched online as others reported the government's official YouTube channel in protest. At one point, YouTube even took the video offline. Kao didn't agree with that. "Reporting it as abuse was a kind of censorship," he concedes.

It was then, two years before the Sunflower Movement, that Kao started to create tools along with other programmers, forming the hacker group that was later to be called g0v (pronounced gov dot zero). Its aim: to "fork the government."

"Fork" is used in open source communities to describe the process of creating another version of the working software. And that's exactly what Kao wanted to do: An early tool to show how, exactly, the government spends public money was a logical first step towards achieving that.

At this time, the group had no name. "It was just a bunch of people thinking about what they can do," says Kao. "Open data was just taking off. We thought, how about using open data to improve the quality of policy making in general?"

It was the largest social movement the country had ever seen, and when the Sunflower Movement started, it highlighted a growing public appetite for transparency in government policy making. Even before the revolution, this was the foundation for g0v tools, aiming to help citizens get a clear idea of how policies would impact them. Kao describes an online calculator to help users understand how labour reforms would affect them. "This makes a policy personal."

Kao and Tang know each other well. Both now 36 years old, the pair met in 1999 when they co-founded a startup and worked together on an open source advocacy community.

Tang says Kao's 2012 paragliding accident - after which he was online even from his hospital bed, laptop suspended above so he could code - was the foundation of the g0v movement. "He was paralysed in bed and couldn't do anything other than try to organise people."

At the inception of g0v, and during the two years leading up to the Sunflower Movement, Tang worked on the infrastructure the community uses to communicate. Kao says Tang spent a lot of the time "just patching things on people's projects". It was not uncommon for g0v members to go to bed knowing there were issues in a programme, only to log in the following morning and find Tang had fixed them overnight.

When they both took part in the Sunflower Movement, g0v had already started to host hackathons - group get-togethers guided by an open source mentality. It was in late 2014, after the protests had come to an end that the country's digital minister at the time, Jaclyn Tsai, attended a g0v hackathon.

Impressed by the group's work, she asked contributors to build a platform to discuss public matters rationally, employing Tang as her main assistant. The result: what is known today as virtual Taiwan ( vTaiwan) - a vehicle, working independently of g0v but utilising Kao's team of talented programmers to inform its tools. Their collective aim: to 'fork' the government and push for the citizen participation and collective decision-making that had begun with the Sunflower Movement.

China's children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race

By the time Tsai left with the outgoing government following the 2016 elections, Taiwanese officials were looking for someone with a background in the digital and start up world, to help boost the country's economy through an 'Asia Silicon Valley' project. Tang's name had come up during the hand-over from the old to new government, so she was invited to a meeting to help position the plan.

They were so impressed by the results, Tang was then tasked with finding a minister without portfolio to discuss policy issues with citizens. After asking around, she eventually decided to do it herself, but crowdsourcing opinion so all decisions could be made collectively.

That was how in late 2016, Tang became the country's youngest minister without portfolio and the first transgender official in the top executive cabinet. The revolution had begun with the Sunflower protests, and it was now Tang's job to lead the hackers who were helping to decide government policies within vTaiwan through the crowd-sourced and transparent agenda she had helped create.

So, how does this work in reality? I ask Tang. "As a ministry without portfolio and therefore not partial to any ministry, the idea is that I lead this peer network in a service-based leadership, in the sense that I don't command it do anything. If they need a facilitator, we provide the facilitator. If they need us to handhold them through talks with angry stakeholders, we do that, too. The idea is that we lower their fear, uncertainty and doubt."

Tang describes herself somewhat paradoxically as a conservative anarchist. "An anarchist is, to me someone who does not give or take commands, who doesn't coerce other people into doing things. Conservative means I respect the traditions, the way people's lives are."

Today, Kao's g0v continues to work alongside, but is not directly inside, the wider vTaiwan project. The vTaiwan process starts online to set the agenda and Tang also meets citizens face-to-face, touring the country and hosting workshops, including town hall meetings and broadcasting conversations in real-time. Every vTaiwan process is structured around the "focused conversation method" developed by Canadian academics to guide large groups through high-quality deliberation.

It is enabled by a platform called Pol.is, run by a Seattle-based programmer with an international relations background, Colin Megill, alongside co-founders Michael Bjorkegren and Christopher Small. Megill was inspired to start the business because, he says, collective decision-making is "really hard for humans".

VTaiwan is going some way towards achieving this, but it's currently restricted to the digital policies that affect younger generations more likely to participate in online debates. So far, successes include a crowd sourced bill that passed through parliament on Closely Held Company Law after going through the vTaiwan process. The community has also used this crowd-sourced deliberation method to resolve a disagreement on internet alcohol sales; and ratified several items on ridesharing (Uber) regulations.

VTaiwan has also garnered interest around the world, including in the UK. Theo Bass has researched the project through his work on the government innovation team at charity organisation Nesta. He sees vTaiwan as "very process oriented".

That's not to say the community aren't technically accomplished: 'Genius' is a word Tang is uncomfortable with, but one of vTaiwan's contributors, Shuyang Lin, says Tang can skim read and correct documents in seconds. Programmers come to her with technical issues.

Tang recruited Lin, who had just returned from Amsterdam where she worked as a designer, on Facebook. "Audrey said she wanted a Jony Ive for her team," she says. Lin decided her own job title: 're-architect', "because we are re-architecting the government".

A self-critical group, the revolutionaries re-architecting Taiwan's democratic system accept that it isn't perfect. And despite detailed processes, there is also concern that vTaiwan is open to tampering. Daniel Faraci, a director at Grassroots Political Consulting, points out the threat from hackers and bots. "My fear is that these tools can be easily manipulated."

But the young hackers who want to fork their government think the revolution is at least starting to fulfil its promise. "The government isn't even at arm's length," says Tang. "We've now totally given up control on vTaiwan, just as Minister Jaclyn Tsai gave up control when she turned up at a g0v hackathon and said: 'The government doesn't know how to do this. You guys figure it out'."
CORRECTION (9 May 18): This piece has been corrected to reflect the fact that Audrey Tang was telecommunicating to Socialtext, not working there as the original piece suggested.

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Taiwan's revolutionary hackers are forking the government

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News of the protests broke on a spring day in the middle of March 2014, when transgender civic hacker Audrey Tang was working at Socialtext in Silicon Valley. Finally, the revolution in her home country was gaining pace and she yearned to be part of it.

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The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws

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The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws

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2018/08/21

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Within a matter of weeks, they had formulated a set of recommendations. Online alcohol sales would be limited to a handful of e-commerce platforms and distributors; transactions would be by credit card only; and purchases would be collected at convenience stores, making it nearly impossible for a child to surreptitiously get hold of booze. By late April the government had incorporated the suggestions into a draft bill that it sent to parliament.

Wu Min Hsuan, an activist in the Sunflower Movement, says the government has missed out on chances to test vTaiwan on larger, non-digital issues such as pension reform. For vTaiwan to work, he says, "it needs real power."

The deadlock "resolved itself almost immediately," says Colin Megill, the CEO and cofounder of Pol.is, one of the digital platforms vTaiwan uses to host discussion. "The opposing sides had never had a chance to actually interact with each other's ideas. When they did, it became apparent that both sides were basically willing to give the opposing side what it wanted."

Three years after its founding, vTaiwan hasn't exactly taken Taiwanese politics by storm. It has been used to debate only a couple of dozen bills, and the government isn't required to heed the outcomes of those debates (though it may be if a new law passes later this year). But the system has proved useful in finding consensus on deadlocked issues such as the alcohol sales law, and its methods are now being applied to a larger consultation platform, called Join, that's being tried out in some local government settings. The question now is whether it can be used to settle bigger policy questions at a national level-and whether it could be a model for other countries.

Taiwan might not seem like the most obvious place for a pioneering exercise in digital democracy. The island held its first direct presidential election only in 1996, after a century marked first by Japanese colonial rule and then by Chinese nationalist martial law. But that oppressive past has also meant that Taiwanese have a history of taking to the streets to push back against heavy-handed government. In Taiwan's democratic era, it was a protest four years ago that planted the seed for this innovative political experiment.

The 2014 Sunflower Movement, led by students and activists, derailed an attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou's government to ram through a trade agreement between Taiwan, which has been locally ruled since 1949, and China, which claims Taiwan as its territory. For more than three weeks the protesters occupied government buildings over the deal, which they felt would give China too much leverage over the Taiwanese economy.

In the aftermath, the Ma government invited Sunflower activists to create a platform through which it might better communicate with Taiwan's youth. A Taiwanese civic tech community known as g0v (pronounced "Gov Zero"), which had played a leading role in the Sunflower protests, built vTaiwan in 2015 and still runs it. The platform enables citizens, civil-society organizations, experts, and elected representatives to discuss proposed laws via its website as well as in face-to-face meetings and hackathons. Its goal is to help policymakers make decisions that gain legitimacy through consultation.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister, was a leading hacker and Sunflower activist. She says senior public servants need to see that people who comment online are "not protesters or mobs, but actually people with distinct expertise."

"I would say vTaiwan is about civil society learning the functions of the government and, to a degree, collaborating," Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tang, told me during a visit to her office. Tang, a famed hacker who helped the thousands of Sunflower protesters build and maintain their internal communications network, was appointed by the current president, Tsai Ing-wen, who won the 2016 election on a pledge of government transparency.

vTaiwan relies on a hodgepodge of open-source tools for soliciting proposals, sharing information, and holding polls, but one of the key parts is Pol.is, created by Megill and a couple of friends in Seattle after the events of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011. On Pol.is, a topic is put up for debate. Anyone who creates an account can post comments on the topic, and can also upvote or downvote other people's comments.

That may sound much like any other online forum, but two things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. "If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll," Tang says.

"The opposing sides had never had a chance to actually interact with each other's ideas."

The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.

"The visualization is very, very helpful," Tang says. "If you show people the face of the crowd, and if you take away the reply button, then people stop wasting time on the divisive statements."

In one of the platform's early successes, for example, the topic at issue was how to regulate the ride-hailing company Uber, which had-as in many places around the world-run into fierce opposition from local taxi drivers. As new people joined the online debate, they were shown and asked to vote on comments that ranged from calls to ban Uber or subject it to strict regulation, to calls to let the market decide, to more general statements such as "I think that Uber is a business model that can create flexible jobs."

Within a few days, the voting had coalesced to define two groups, one pro-Uber and one, about twice as large, anti-Uber. But then the magic happened: as the groups sought to attract more supporters, their members started posting comments on matters that everyone could agree were important, such as rider safety and liability insurance. Gradually, they refined them to garner more votes. The end result was a set of seven comments that enjoyed almost universal approval, containing such recommendations as "The government should set up a fair regulatory regime," "Private passenger vehicles should be registered," and "It should be permissible for a for-hire driver to join multiple fleets and platforms." The divide between pro- and anti-Uber camps had been replaced by consensus on how to create a level playing field for Uber and the taxi firms, protect consumers, and create more competition. Tang herself took those suggestions into face-to-face talks with Uber, the taxi drivers, and experts, which led the government to adopt new regulations along the lines vTaiwan had produced.

Jason Hsu, a former activist, and now an opposition legislator, helped bring the vTaiwan platform into being. He says its big flaw is that the government is not required to heed the discussions taking place there.

vTaiwan's website boasts that as of August 2018, it had been used in 26 cases, with 80 percent resulting in "decisive government action." As well as inspiring regulations for Uber and for online alcohol sales, it has led to an act that creates a "fintech sandbox," a space for small-scale technological experiments within Taiwan's otherwise tightly regulated financial system.

"It's all solving the same problem: essentially saying, 'What if we're talking about things that are emergent, [for which] there are only a handful of early adopters?'" Tang says. "That's the basic problem we were solving at the very beginning with vTaiwan."

But while vTaiwan can bridge gulfs in public opinion, what it can't always overcome is politics. After the Tsai administration took office in 2016, it withdrew all bills awaiting legislative approval. Observers chalked that up to the new president's desire to differentiate her agenda from her predecessor's. The online alcohol sales bill that the Ma government had drafted from the vTaiwan suggestions never saw the light of day.

If vTaiwan's recommendations are ignored, the process runs the risk of being viewed as "openwashing."

That the government isn't required to heed discussions on vTaiwan is the system's biggest shortcoming. Jason Hsu, a former activist and now opposition legislator who helped bring vTaiwan into being during the Ma administration, calls it "a tiger without teeth."

Moreover, the Tsai administration has chosen to use it only for issues, such as regulating Uber, that have to do with the digital economy. That's because people who care about such issues are the ones most likely to be comfortable using a digital discussion platform. But some think it won't get serious traction with the public unless it is put to use on non-digital issues that matter to more people. C.L. Kao, one of the cofounders of g0v, argues that the government could have applied vTaiwan to two contentious recent issues, pension reform and labor reform, as a way to build its credibility.

In any case, Kao says, if vTaiwan's recommendations are ultimately ignored, as they were with the alcohol sales law, then the whole process runs the risk of being viewed as "openwashing"-something that creates the pretense of transparency. "The end goal is legislation," he says.

vTaiwan is one of dozens of participatory governance projects around the world listed on CrowdLaw, a site run by the Governance Lab at New York University. Most of them, says Beth Noveck, the lab's director, suffer from the same problem: they're not binding on governments, which means it's also hard for them to gain credibility with citizens. Still, she says, Taiwan's experiment is "a step in the right direction." It's "far more institutionalized" than what's been seen elsewhere, she adds.

The platform may be about to get a little more clout. This autumn legislators will debate and vote on a digital communications bill that, among other things, says that "digital-economy issues are to be deliberated in an open, multistakeholder process that the government has the duty to support," in Tang's words. But what "support" means-how much weight lawmakers or the government will have to give to vTaiwan's deliberations-is still up in the air.

Taiwan does have a newer participatory governance system that is getting more traction. Join, also overseen by Audrey Tang, is a platform for hosting and debating online petitions, again using Pol.is to create consensus. She describes it as a vTaiwan within the government-"basically the same ... process, but with senior career public servants instead of g0v volunteers" at the heart of the platform.

Karen Yu, a lawmaker for the ruling party, says that vTaiwan is "not a huge priority" for the government and has come "close to death" at times.

Although petitions on Join still aren't legally binding, any government agency that agrees to participate in a deliberation must, if the petition gets more than 5,000 signatures, give a point-by-point response explaining why it agreed to or rejected the proposal. Five of Taiwan's cities or counties are testing Join; the aim is ultimately to roll it out nationwide, Tang says.

Join tends to attract a broader, older, and less tech-savvy range of users than vTaiwan. The advantage of this, says Tang, is that it doesn't tackle only digital-economy issues, as vTaiwan does, but a wide variety of questions, "like whether we should build a hospital in the southmost part of Taiwan, in Hengchun, or whether the first publicly open marine national park should ban fishing." The downside is that there's more resistance from the government bureaucracy. Senior public servants "need some hand-holding," she says, to be able to see people who comment online as "not protesters or mobs, but actually people with distinct expertise."

While only 200,000 people have so far taken part in a vTaiwan discussion, nearly five million of the country's 23 million inhabitants are already on Join. More than 10,000 voted on a recent proposal that advocated caning as a punishment for drunk driving, sexual assault, and child abuse.

Here too, the consensus-building tendencies of Pol.is can lead the discussion in unexpected directions. Initially, opinion on the caning issue was divided into three camps: besides the people who were for and against caning, a third group argued that it was too light a punishment for such offenses.

Eventually, however, the consensus opinions that emerged had nothing to do with caning at all, but were more focused on methods of preventing those crimes. At the time of this writing, proposals being considered for legislation included alcohol locks and confiscating drunk drivers' cars.

This suggests people had concluded that, in fact, "To cane or not to cane?" was the wrong question to ask. That kind of realization, and solution, wouldn't have emerged from a traditional online petition that only gives people the option of voting yes or no.

Karen Yu, a legislator in President Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party, says vTaiwan is "not a huge priority" for the administration and has come "close to death" at times. Join, she points out, at least benefits from the legitimacy of being managed by the government. Wu Min Hsuan, an activist who occupied Taiwan's Legislative Yuan during the Sunflower Movement protests, says Join has already proved itself much more productive than vTaiwan. The obstacle, he believes, is political will. "The experiment is important and has value," he says. "But the platform has its limits. It needs real power."

Chris Horton is a journalist based in Taipei. An Rong Xu is a photojournalist in New York City.

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The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws

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It was late in 2015, and things were at an impasse. Some four years earlier, Taiwan's finance ministry had decided to legalize online sales of alcohol. To help it shape the new rules, the ministry had kicked off talks with alcohol merchants, e-commerce platforms, and social groups worried that online sales would make it easy...

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2020/02/06

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Taiwan's Disinformation Solution - The American Interest

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In the face of relentless pressure from China, Taiwan may have figured out how to combat disinformation without undermining free speech.

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There is not enough control over the digital world

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There is not enough control over the digital world

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2018/09/24

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In 1919, as the British empire lost its grip on Ireland and the old rules of imperialism faded into irrelevance, the poet W.B.Yeats wrote that "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Almost 100 years later, our post-war institutions are being undermined by technological innovation and changing attitudes of the public. As ever, centres of power are constantly shifting and many of those who seek to influence the world find themselves playing by an outdated set of rules. "Power has gone wild," says Carl Miller. "We desperately need to build new cages for power." Mr Miller is a research director in online technology at Demos, a British think-tank, and author of "The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab." In it, he tracks how the internet and social media is enabling new groups to wield influence in new ways, yet how authority is also becoming more concentrated among a handful of dominant players. We asked Mr Miller five questions for him to answer in fewer than 100 words. Below that is an excerpt from his book.
* * *

The Economist: You've written about the ways technology is transforming power. What's the biggest difference between our perception of where power is and where it's actually going?
Carl Miller: We think we live in a society shaped by rules and law. But we're living through the worst law enforcement crisis in the history of modern policing. Hackers-on all sides of the law-have risen to become a new power elite. Professional media is collapsing but civic journalists are breaking huge stories. Software companies are exploding to the top of industry after industry, largely unencumbered by the anti-monopoly laws of the past. As power flows through the technology, it has broken out of all the cages-regulation, professional standards, the law, public scrutiny-that used to contain it. Power has gone wild.
The Economist: How can we hold these emerging centres of power to account?
Mr Miller: We desperately need to build new cages for power. A Royal Society of Technologists. Ethics-by-design coded into every platform. Digital citizenship taught in schools. A major digital literacy programme available in libraries. The whole fabric of rules, norms and laws needs to be updated.

Calling for new laws and regulations is easy. The difficulty is to know how to do it quickly enough. The way power works is changing as quickly as the technology that it flows through. To work out how to get rules, laws and norms have to move just as fast; that is one of the main challenges of our generation.
The Economist: In the last two years, many have started to believe that social media is leading to greater levels of polarisation. Are they right, and if so, why should we be optimistic about digital media?
Mr Miller: Polarisation, especially in America, had been happening for decades before social media arrived. I see the role of digital media a little differently. It's letting groups-all groups-act on whatever beliefs they hold. Political mobilisation used to be expensive and difficult. Now it is free and easy. Mobilisations and counter-mobilisations have erupted across the far reaches of the political spectrum.

Feminists, meninists, anti-corruption activists, ultra-nationalists, #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter: there seems to be no one particular political direction that has benefited more from the internet. But the money, experience and machinery of the political mainstream matter a lot less than they used to. And that has ripped politics wide open. The mainstream is being challenged by everything that isn't itself.
The Economist: Most people are incapable of reading and understanding algorithms. In the years ahead, will the ability to read code determine our ability to comprehend power structures?
Mr Miller: To almost all of us, the things we carry in our pockets might as well be small black-boxes of magic. But there is a community united by a mindset dedicated to knowing how technology works. I found them in the police, and as criminals, in GCHQ, in radical technology co-operatives and in their thousands at their largest annual gathering, DEFCON in Las Vegas. They are hackers.

Hackers have a completely different relationship to the world around them from the rest of us. They understand how technology works, so they understand how the world works. And that has meant they don't only understand power, but they also have it. They, or certainly the most capable and successful of their number, are a strange new kind of ruling class, often able to shape and influence the world around them in breathtaking ways.
The Economist: You've written that power is now more accessible to each of us, but around the world, populists seem to be winning elections by appealing to a perceived lack of agency among electorates. Are individuals more powerful than they realise, and if so how should they exercise it?
Mr Miller: "The Death of the Gods" is full of the stories of people who realised that amazing opportunities were at their fingertips. The details-obsessed citizen journalist who'd begun arguing in the comment threads of The Guardian and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. The high-school drop-out and civic hacker who became the Digital Minister of Taiwan. The systems administrator who comes home from work every day and becomes a kind of cyber-batman, plunging into the scariest parts of the internet to try to save people from the dangers lurking there.

Power is more available, but that doesn't mean it's more equal. They did what hardly any of us actually do: not only see an opportunity, but act decisively and with vision. They are brave enough, really, to change their lives to embrace it.

* * *

From "The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab," by Carl Miller (Penguin RandomHouse, 2018):
Audrey had dropped out of school at fourteen, and had her own technology start-up at fifteen. She had been a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and by thirty a civic hacker. But then, in 2016, to bring this new politics into being, she was appointed by the new incoming government first as a minister without portfolio, and then, in October, as the Digital Minister of Taiwan. She was the youngest minister in the cabinet, and the first transgender politician ever to hold office in Taiwan. But the thing that set Audrey apart most was that she was a completely new kind of politician. One who wanted to change not only what government did, but what government actually was.

Audrey and the civic hackers saw the challenge of democracy as a problem of information. Voting was a single opportunity for a citizen to give off a political signal. But it was an incredibly weak signal. It wasn't enough to let the government know what citizens felt about any issue, and it wasn't enough for citizens to feel that they were being involved in the outcome. During an election, the choice facing the voter was already framed. The agenda already set. And the vote itself, in any given electoral system, might matter little to the outcome and therefore little to the candidates.

Audrey brought G0v into government. They called their new organisation the Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS). Their values were the same as the open source community: participation, accountability and transparency.

The changes were tangible and wide-ranging. They worked on increasing the information flowing out of government. They made government data 'open by default'. They created a dashboard to share government information to allow everyone to track fluctuations in vegetable prices during the typhoon season. They constructed a portal to share real-time information about disasters and emergencies. They built a working forum system to bridge the gap between officials and civil society, where ministries are required to respond to questions within seven days. They created participation officers - volunteers across the government who regularly meet to learn the ways of open government.

As important as it was to increase the flow of information going from the government to citizens, they also needed to deal with the thorniest question of all. 'Democracy', said PDIS, 'is defined as government by the people, but it is also the active participation of the people, as citizens in politics and civic life.'

They needed to find a way for Taiwanese citizens to give off more political signals back to the government. They need to collect the beliefs of the Taiwanese public on the issues that mattered to them. But beyond simply sharing their beliefs, the process needed to allow them to deliberate with each other constructively. And beyond even that, they needed to find a way for citizens to find what they had in common: to build consensus, a bedrock on which decisions could be based.
VTaiwan
[...]

G0v began working with the team around a platform to help groups reach a consensus called pol.is, as a new way to make political decisions. As they would with any piece of software, they edged it forwards, constantly tweaking the process, constantly evaluating it and acting on feedback. They glued together the workings of government, the media and civic technology, especially pol.is into a process called vTaiwan. Before long, it faced a difficult test. The twelfth topic it was directed towards was a political controversy that Audrey called 'an epidemic of the mind'. The issue was Uber.

As PDIS got going, Uber had recently opened in Taiwan. Within the usual chorus of conflict and division, it was the job of vTaiwan to resolve how it should be regulated. G0v knew that direct democracy didn't work if people didn't agree on the basic facts. All sides needed to start deliberating based on a shared grounding of evidence. Under the vTaiwan process, the first stage was 'objective', with the aim of simply laying out the basic facts of what was known. Important articles and facts were put onto a Wikipedia timeline, and validated independently.

The next stage was the most difficult: 'reflection'. People from all sides came to share their feelings. Taipei taxi drivers, representatives of Uber, members of the government, business leaders, trade unions, taxi users, Uber services, all came to share their views.

It was here that vTaiwan used pol.is. People with opinions across the Uber divide were asked to log on to the site. As they did so, a white screen appeared, and a single statement: 'I think passenger liability insurance should be mandatory for riders on UberX private vehicles.' No one could give an individualised response to this - you had to simply agree, disagree or pass.

As people responded to the statement, pol.is showed them a map. On it were small circular avatars for each of the people that had answered the question. The people that agreed with you appeared in one group and people that disagreed in another. Then people were asked to draft their own statements, beginning with 'My feeling is . . .' [...]

Over the first few days, pol.is kept visualising how opinions emerged, clustered, responded, divided and recombined. At first people shared strong feelings that appealed to other groups close by. Four broad groups of people soon emerged: taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers, and other passengers.

Eventually, those four groups turned into two. Group One clustered around a statement that wanted to flatly ban Uber. Seventy-five per cent agreed with: 'Since the Ministry has already rejected Uber's administrative appeal, I think Taipei city government should cancel the company registration of Taiwan Uber Inc.' Group Two had clustered around another, completely different view: 'When I am not in a hurry, I prefer to call Uber even if there are plenty of taxis in the street' (77 per cent of Group Two thought this).

This is the opposite of a consensus. This is polarisation. And if this was Twitter or Facebook, we'd see echo chambers, spats, competing online petitions and massively contradictory information flowing into politicians. We'd be getting nowhere.

But pol.is produced something more useful than just feedback. 'When people started using pol.is, we found that it became a consensus-generating mechanism,' said Colin Megill, who worked on the project.

People were asked to continue to draft statements, but the ones that were given visibility were those that found support not only from the drafter's group, but the other groups as well. The process encouraged people to start posting more consensual, more nuanced statements. 'Change the information structure,' said Colin, 'and you can tweak power.' Group One toned down their original statement: 'I think it is the responsibility of the Ministry to actively outlaw unlicensed passenger vehicles' (87 per cent agreed).

[...]

Those consensus items fed into the next stage of vTaiwan: 'interpretation'. The authors of the consensus statements joined other representatives and stakeholders who met face-to-face - livestreamed, published in open structured data, all fully transparent. They went through the facts and the consensus items shared on the pol.is platform, and tried to agree recommendations to be passed over to the government.

Finally, the outcomes were coded into legalese. On May 23rd 2016, the Taiwanese government pledged to ratify all the pol.is consensus items: taxis no longer needed to be painted yellow; app-based taxis were free to operate as long as they didn't undercut existing meters and so on. This was the 'decisional' part of the vTaiwan process.

***

The process didn't only give everyone a chance to speak. It also created empathy between the groups. When the Taipei High Administrative Court rejected Uber's appeal on one of the finer points of the ruling, the Ministry's press release stated: 'We are grieved for and pity them; we do not feel joy at our own ability.'

On July 26th 2016, Taiwan's new premier declared that 'all substantial national issues should go through a vTaiwan-like process'. VTaiwan's success over Uber was followed by another shortly after. It broke a six-year deadlock over the sale of alcohol online. It has been used to conclude about twenty disputes now, involving around 50,000 stakeholders, experts and members of the public. Five new cases, PDIS tell me, are on the way; two are under discussion. Eight times it has changed the law, and seven times it has changed regulation. So far, the issues have been primarily digital, affecting least the people least likely to use it. Baby steps? Perhaps.

Technology has opened up new possibilities for how to answer that same basic question that Henry Parker struggled with almost four centuries ago: how do you put the people in charge? How can democracy practically work? Sometimes triggered by crisis, sometimes by generalised democratic discontent, groups of people around the world have begun to experiment with new systems. The philosophy of open source, joined with the technology that can make it happen, has begun to slowly shift the practices of governments around the world.

______________
Excerpted from "The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab". Copyright © 2018 by Carl Miller. Used with permission of Penguin RandomHouse. All rights reserved.

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There is not enough control over the digital world

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In 1919, as the British empire lost its grip on Ireland and the old rules of imperialism faded into irrelevance, the poet W.B.Yeats wrote that "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Almost 100 years later, our post-war institutions are being undermined by technological innovation and changing attitudes of the public.