After over 45 days of no local COVID-19 cases in Taiwan, I’m writing this post to summarize and reflect on some of the civic engagement work that I did over the past two months with Taipei City Government. Around the end of March 2020, I started collaborating with Taipei City Government’s Kuan-Ting Chen on a few website projects related to COVID-19. While March seems like an eternity ago, that was the month that many people began to realize this virus would have a much larger global impact. After already seeing so many things change in Taiwan in February, I knew many folks back home in the U.S were going to be impacted more than they expected. I felt a sort of survivor’s guilt given the safe situation in Taiwan and knew I wanted to work on something meaningful to meet the need of this historic moment.
Mr. Chen is the Chief Research Officer and Deputy Spokesperson for Taipei City Government. He is well known among new residents in Taipei due to his openness to meetings and his bilingual posts on Facebook and LinkedIn. One of my first encounters with him was about a signup issue related to an update to Taipei’s public bike share system. The update locked out non-citizens from creating new accounts due to not accounting for the slight difference in ID number formats among residency ID cards and national ID cards. As someone who previously worked in the industry and still advocates for bike share, I wanted to learn more details about the issue. Mr. Chen was quick to respond to my message and set up a meeting to discuss the details. Within a week of this meeting, and with some help from reporters based in Taipei, the sign up issue for the bike share system was quickly fixed via mayoral directive.
After this interaction I stayed in touch and we planned to make a short video showcasing Taipei’s 112KM riverside cycle path. This was going to be a sequel to a previous video Mr. Chen helped share that I made about the recent demolition of the Chongqing South Road Viaduct. The video discussed the future plans for the corridor and garnered over 11,000 views on his Facebook fan page. However, as the COVID-19 situation began to worsen worldwide, the shooting date for the video understandably kept on getting pushed back (however, it did eventually happen in May!). After the third delay, Mr. Chen came back with an alternative proposal. What if we did a video about COVID-19 addressed to Taiwan’s foreign resident population instead?
Our first video together was published on March 21st and focused on offering words of comfort for foreign residents living in Taipei. We also made versions with Japanese and Indonesian subtitles. My friend David Putra, who works at the de-facto Indonesian embassy, helped record the Indonesian version and also provided subtitle translation help. One of the interns from Japan in Taipei City Government, Kana Makino, provided the Japanese captions. The videos were shared across Facebook and Twitter and were warmly received by Taiwan’s foreigner community with over 12,000 views across platforms.
This video was just the beginning of the work to be done on COVID-19 at Taipei City Government. One of the first projects I would propose was creating a resources page for English speaking residents. At the beginning of April, I noticed that the English and Chinese version of Taipei City Government’s website were completely different. The English version of the City Government website had zero mentions of COVID-19, while the Chinese version had a prominent banner going to a COVID-19 resources page.
Since Taipei has been working on promoting bilingual education and internationalization, I thought it was important for the city government website to live up to those values as well. In addition, I was noticing repeat questions on Facebook groups about basic issues related to COVID-19 in Taiwan. The current way to get information at the time was checking five different government websites for information on mask buying, public health guidelines, and other local issues. Based on this information, Mr. Chen was very supportive of the idea of creating an English-language resident resources page. I went ahead and created content for the website and on that same day Mr. Chen helped arrange meetings with Taipei City Government’s Information Technology Department. Just three days later, after several more meetings, the Taipei City Government English homepage was updated with a “COVID-19 Resources” banner that went to a one stop web page that answered a number of commonly asked questions English speaking residents in Taiwan had about COVID-19.
The website garnered positive reviews from residents and was shared by Taipei Mayor Ko wen-je on his Twitter account along with the resource being posted on various foreigner Facebook groups. Mr. Chen also promoted the website on his LinkedIn and Facebook pages. One resident shared that the website had the “best explainer” they’ve found for how to buy face masks with and without health insurance cards. Another resident expressed thanks for the English video on how to buy masks online via the government system.
With this resource taking care of our residents and the situation beginning to get under control in Taiwan—folks in Taipei City Government began to look outwards on how the city could start helping its sister cities. Tom Chou, the Taipei City Government spokesperson and a former ambassador for Taiwan, was already beginning to spearhead a new website that would share Taipei City Government’s best practices with the world. The first phase of this effort was translating SOP documents. These documents were translated for clarity by Taipei City Government Interns Adam Yi, Amber Flynn, Declan Greaves, Marcin Mateusz Jerzewski, and Tabitha Wilson. The work of these interns were critical because directly translated documents can often be difficult to read.
The next phase was presenting these SOPs on the Taipei City Government website. The initial approach was just to fully copy the documents into the webpage, but this didn’t work particularly well in web format. I offered to help in creating the website and integrating it with the existing resident resources page we created earlier. Thanks to existing relationships with the Information Technology department, getting involved in this project was fairly easy. Taipei City Government’s social media intern Adam Yi played a critical role in coordinating with Spokesperson Cho and Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang on reviewing all the content. Once approved the website was shared on the City Government home page and at events city government officials participated in such as forums and press conferences.
Later on that week Mayor Ko Wen-Je signed letters to Taipei’s sister cities sharing this new resource with them. Many officials thanked Taipei for these SOPs such as San Francisco’s director of transportation, Jeffrey Tumlin. Mr. Tumlin wrote that “Taipei offers SFMTA many useful lessons for San Francisco’s COVID recovery. Much gratitude to our sister city.” Mr. Tumlin would later go on to share lessons from the meeting with National Public Radio (NPR), a major media outlet in the United States.
After 45 days of no new local COVID-19 cases in Taiwan, I’m happy to report that life is almost completely normal again. It was wonderful working with such dedicated public servants and interns at Taipei City Government these past two months and I hope to keep contributing to my local community in any way possible. I’m grateful to be able to call Taipei home and the city serves as inspiration for many projects that I do at Taipei Urbanism. If anyone in my network is working on mobility, transportation, or planning projects don’t hesitate to reach out—I love hearing what folks are up to and how I can support their projects.
