Taiwan has been a success story during this current Covid-19 outbreak. When the epidemic first started, Taiwan had the foresight to order a bunch of face mask making machines from Germany, beating everyone else to the head of the line. As a result they were able to set up 60 face masks production lines in 25 days, to produce up to 10 million masks a day for their own people. On the consumer side, Taiwan set up a system whereby everyone is entitled to buy 10 masks a week. No hoarding is allowed, nor is there any need to hoard. The government created an online map which shows you exactly which pharmacy has how many masks on hand — so you don’t have to line up or fight other shoppers over the masks. This system of buying face masks, was the brainchild of Taiwan’s self-taught ‘hacktivist’ Minister of Digital Technology, Audrey Tang.
I only just became aware of Minister Tang from following Covid-19 news, but apparently Tang is a cause celebre in Taiwan and in Tech/Internet circles. She quit high school and became a self taught computer expert, and founded several start-ups and created multiple open-source projects. She was later appointed by Taiwan’s President Tsai to be a Cabinet ‘Minister without a portfolio’ — Minister of Digital Technology, where she more or less created her position and role out of thin air. Here she is talking about government transparency, her ‘office hours’ (Every Wednesday where she meets with all comers in public), decision-making through consensus, democracy in the digital age, governing through small scale trials, open-sourced projects for self- governance, and a lot more:
A true visionary. After watching this TED talk, I am suddenly very aware that here in the US, our political dialogue and our policy prescriptions, are all stuck in a rut. We have been discussing the same things for the last 30-40 years ago, going around in circles without much progress. Hopefully more Americans will learn from Audrey Tang and break out of the box we’ve locked ourselves in.