# Transcript for talk on citizen science and open science with Taiwan's public health experience

Pen-Yuan Hsing
11:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST)
11 September 2020
European Citizen Science Association 2020 Conference
https://www.ecsa-conference.eu/
Session on Global Perspectives on Citizen Science and Open Science

Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license: 
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Transcript begins:

Thank you so much for having me today.

I'm priviliged to be the co-founder of the MammalWeb project where we worked with citizen scientists over the past five years on wildlife monitoring. One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that citizen science is not just about citizens collecting data for scientists, it's also about how science can help all of us be more engaged citizens. This relationship between science and citizenship, and how open science enables that relationship is what I'm really interested in. But rather than talking about my example, I'm going to use one from my home country of Taiwan that is quite relevant to these times.

Like most countries in the world, Taiwan has been dealing with COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020. Because Taiwan has past experience with multiple respiratory diseases, there is wide public adoption of wearing facemasks. Wearing a mask is not to prevent others from giving you a disease, it's more importantly to protect other people in case you are infected. The challenge this year was that once it became clear COVID-19 was a problem, people started panicking. Social media was swamped with people frantically discussing where masks can still be bought.

This was noticed by members of a citizen science network called g0v, and they realised thought: Rather than keeping this on social media, let's build a mapping platform where everyone can report on which stores still had masks. This grassroots effort was wildly successful gaining millions of users practically overnight just on the crowdsourced data. In fact, the organisers had trouble sustaining momentum and paying all of the hosting costs.

So to scale this up, g0v reached out to Taiwan's digital minister who incorporated their mapping platform into a nation-wide mask-rationing system. This new system distributed facemasks exclusively through pharmacies, and that's because Taiwan's single-payer universal healthcare that has a database on what kind of products pharmacies have in stock. So as soon as someone swipes their health insurance card to buy a mask, that amount would be deducted from the database. And by combining the grassroots mapping platform with the national database, anyone can get near real time updates on where to buy masks. After the program began in the beginning of February, which was one month before COVID-19 was even declared a pandemic, Taiwan has moved from initial signs panic buying to having a stable supply of masks for everyone, to now having a surplus in production that more than 30 million masks have been donated globally as humanitarian aid to places such as the US or the EU. I am also relieved to report that as a result of the mask map, and other aggresive preventative measures, Taiwan has had zero confirmed local cases of COVID-19 since April.

I think this example demonstrates citizen science as a form of participatory democracy that directly influenced government policy. And the key to that success was a dedication to open science principles by the citizen scientists and Taiwan's government. The crowdsourced mask data, the national health database, and all of the software code underlying the mapping platform were released under open source licenses. These licenses were crucial because they give everyone the freedom to share, remix, and adapt the material to suit different needs. An example I really like is this really cool chatbot on social media where you can ask it your questions regarding the availability and the use of facemasks. In other words, I believe Taiwan's experience shows a virtuous cycle between citizen science, open science, and open governance that spurs further civic innovation.