Audrey Tang: We’ll send you a transcript, and everybody is free to edit for 10 days, then I publish it online.

Audrey Tang: This is the radical transparency principle that I am practicing for two years now.

Dar Vanderbeck: Really? You’re two years in?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Dar Vanderbeck: I want to hear.

Audrey Tang: Also, even for internal meetings that I’m a chair, I just publish everything after 10 working days of editing.

Dar Vanderbeck: We would very much like to start practicing this at CARE, but are technologically somehow not able to figure it out. Once we figure, we were like, “Oh, let’s do a C-SPAN thing, where we’re recording every meeting on video.”

Dar Vanderbeck: Then no one watched it, [laughs] so people stopped.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. You really need a way to present it as structural data for people to easily quote and make intertextual comparisons. This is like literally all my meetings, like everything.

Dar Vanderbeck: Wow, amazing.

Audrey Tang: Then for example, I went to New York, have a conversation with Mariéme, who runs iamtheCODE. Then you can see that every word that we said can be linked both in-context and shared on social media, and also as a link by itself.

Audrey Tang: This boosts the search engine optimization. It’s far more likely to be searched, to be indexed, cross-referenced, and things like that. If you’re interested, I’m happy to export this system. It’s called SayIt.

Dar Vanderbeck: Yeah, we would love to do that. Let’s do it. It’s so wonderful to meet you. I’ve heard so much amazing things about you. We’re very excited about this meeting.

Audrey Tang: Anything in particular you would like to explore?

Dar Vanderbeck: Yeah, I would just love to hear about your journey into this role, and what you’re excited about in terms of digital innovation, or innovation more broadly. Maybe for Taiwan, but for the world, also.

Dar Vanderbeck: Just really looking to learn. I can share about CARE, 75-year-old organization, work in 93 countries. We lead the innovation team. We’ve been at it for three years. We’re very focused on social justice. That’s our real mission.

Dar Vanderbeck: We do a lot of things. We do girls’ education. We do...

Grace Hsieh: Food and nutrition.

Dar Vanderbeck: Food and nutrition security, sexual reproductive health and rights, humanitarian assistance. The cross-cutting through line between all of our programs is gender justice. Really, how can we make everyone live in a life of dignity?

Audrey Tang: That sounds good, like all these goals together.

Dar Vanderbeck: Yeah, exactly, basically.

Dar Vanderbeck: Yep, that was the description.

Audrey Tang: We’re SDG indexing everything we do, and we’re making the CSR reports to also SDG index everything. We are asking social entrepreneurs to also SDG index their work, because it’s just so easily explainable.

Audrey Tang: When you ask me what kind of work I’m doing, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m working on 17.18, 17.17, 17.6,” that’s it.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally, yeah.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very good indexing system. More concretely, this is the boring office. I have a more exciting office.

Dar Vanderbeck: It is way more exciting.

Audrey Tang: It’s called the Social Innovation Lab.

Dar Vanderbeck: You could have a VR headset when people walk in here, and it’s just like this.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we should totally do that.

Audrey Tang: There’s actually a VR headset right there.

Dar Vanderbeck: You can actually...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but this place is unique, because it’s co-designed with more than 100 social innovators. These soccer fields are drawn by people with Down’s syndrome. It turns out they are brilliant artists. They see the world through a different lens.

Audrey Tang: We have a foundation that works with them for more than 20 years, the CAREUS (Children Are Us Foundation). I think one of the staple nonprofit here. We also do a lot of co-creation around, this is self-driving tricycle. Just get people in the mood of having a kitchen that opens until 11:00 PM every day, and have the minister to be available in office hour every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM.

Audrey Tang: Just generate creatives. Nothing is surprising, but everything is less fun attitude, and ask all the 12 ministries related to social innovation to just station there. Just by changing the engagement social infrastructure, we were able to basically meet people by having them come to us.

Audrey Tang: Also me touring around Taiwan to meet with local social innovators, with people dialing in from remote islands or indigenous nations, and then have the, as I mentioned, 12 ministries in the same room, sharing food or drink, and see through my eyes what the local regional innovation needs are.

Audrey Tang: Instead of shoving text, document, and whatever to each other, they develop a rapport over those virtual teamwork, collaborative work, and really see people, immersive re-presentation, not a representation, of their lives.

Audrey Tang: They were put in the mood of innovation. If things go wrong, it’s always me who absorb the risk. Because of radical transparency, if things go right, they take the credit. I share credit. It’s very much unlike previous century, where the minister takes all the credit, and blame gets spread around.

Audrey Tang: I think that that’s my two cents of designing for innovation.

Dar Vanderbeck: Cool.

Audrey Tang: What are your tricks? [laughs]

Dar Vanderbeck: What are my tricks? Our approach to innovation, we always start with our North Star, which is, “People closest to the pain should be closest to the power,” which is a quote from Ayanna Pressley, who’s a friend of a lot of people on our team, but also was just elected to Congress, the first black woman elected to Congress in Massachusetts in the US.

Dar Vanderbeck: We just felt that that was a really important grounding principle, especially in a world where both innovation has made these huge promises to deliver the future, but also, from where I sit in California, I think, is in danger of replicating a lot of the same colonial mindsets that we create things elsewhere and scale them.

Dar Vanderbeck: Even more, I think, toxically, you create something elsewhere, and then profit from scaling them.

Audrey Tang: "Inappropriate technology."

Dar Vanderbeck: Exactly, exactly.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. There’s such gravitational pull towards that. CARE works all over the world. I think one of the most beautiful things about our organization is that we’ve just shown up. We’ve just been there for decades and decades.

Dar Vanderbeck: I had this really important trip to Gaza last year. It’s impossible to get into Gaza. It takes hours and hours. It’s a different definition of police state, or a different feeling. I was meeting with this family and talking to them about, “Why are you even meeting with me?” [laughs]

Dar Vanderbeck: I’m just coming here to visit projects and talk to our staff. It was really important for this family to meet with us as CARE, coming from at time in the US. She was like, “Because CARE has been with me before the crisis, during the crisis, after the crisis, during the crisis again, after the crisis, during.”

Dar Vanderbeck: That just type of solidarity, we don’t do it perfect everywhere, but when we do, there is just something about being shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity, and showing up over a long period of time that, in some ways, is antithetical to some people’s definition of innovation, which is saviorism embodied in a silver bullet.

Dar Vanderbeck: I think a lot of what we’re trying to do as a team is straddle that world of saying, everything has changed so dramatically. We have all of these different resources. Technology is not a sector. It is like a huge feature of the world that we need to know how to govern.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, a fabric.

Dar Vanderbeck: Exactly. Can we use this moment to center the people that are experiencing oppression and poverty, to be able to listen to them as people that, experiencing these problems, usually have the best solutions, or at least the best understanding of the problems? Then create innovation or innovative solutions from there.

Audrey Tang: That’s the whole point of me going to the indigenous or the rural places, because really, they are the most innovative. When we scale innovation this way, what we are actually scaling is the experience of listening, of being listened to. That traditionally doesn’t scale. [laughs]

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. Power holders don’t love to listen. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No, but they love to broadcast.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. That’s actually quite radical. We’re working on this project called Embark right now, which is a collective of advocates for gender justice. We’re trying to figure out, what’s our thing that we’re selling?

Dar Vanderbeck: At the end, we were like, “Oh, it’s actually justice-centered philanthropy, rather than charity.”

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Dar Vanderbeck: We’re not interested in giving things away. The whole idea of, what is it, "doing well while doing good"? It’s just such nonsense. Everyone does have to have skin in the game in order for us to move the needle.

Audrey Tang: This project, it was called The 22?

Dar Vanderbeck: It used to be called that, yeah. Now, it’s called Embark. We branded it, finally.

Audrey Tang: Well, better branding.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. Then it was called Prince briefly, because were saying the initiative formerly called The 22, which we started...

Dar Vanderbeck: It was just a symbol. We were like, “OK, we actually just need a brand. This is confusing everyone.”

Audrey Tang: I said it’s just recently renamed to Embark?

Dar Vanderbeck: Yes, exactly. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Cool. Any other interesting thing you are working on at the moment, maybe not necessarily around Asia?

Dar Vanderbeck: In general?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in general.

Dar Vanderbeck: Actually, Grace, I’m sure, and Bihar, Burundir, do you want to share anything, too? I can talk forever, but [laughs] I’m cognizant of that.

Grace Hsieh: One of our projects I’m working with the CARE India office, and also CARE Cambodia, Nepal, and Bangladesh. We are trying to replicate their innovation from the CARE Bihar team to their other near neighbor country office to share in what is a successor, to help the program, to boost and improve their sexual and reproductive health.

Grace Hsieh: Right now, we are in the second phase in trying to build their community, the practice, and then to help these four countries to share the learning and knowledge, and also to collectively do the problem solving, and to identify what’s the future of their health training system looks like in the Asian region.

Grace Hsieh: We want to create there the sub-region of their health training system. That is their ongoing process right now. I’m always curious what that looks like, if we can collaborate with their technology people, or to bring in more technical support to our country office.

Grace Hsieh: As we mentioned about before, we worked closely with their front line worker, and then their local people, we understand the problem. However, sometimes we need more experts to guiding the local people, or how can they implementing the ICT to the assistant, or how they build in the cloud, something like that?

Grace Hsieh: That’s their thing. I was thinking it would be exciting to, connecting with you, and seeing what’s the opportunity there. Another thing, I’m going to our Philippine office next week. Then talks about to do a spring workshop, and guiding them to do some exercise ideation about one of the agriculture, the package, the toolkit.

Grace Hsieh: They are talking about how can we build out that toolkit to response or emergency? I saw your website, you have a disaster prevention system, the dashboard.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the Civil IoT system, yes.

Grace Hsieh: Also, the dashboard integration, the dashboard, I was like, “Wow, that’s a pretty awesome,” the structure, to provide the transparent information to everyone, so that they will be able to rapidly respond, like how should they react to the disaster?

Grace Hsieh: Maybe there’s the following question, like Earth, or like the governments and minister, how would you see the governments of Earth to collaborate with another country, and how we see to share in this experience and knowledge to the other countries.

Audrey Tang: Sure. First off, I am working with the cabinet. I am not working for the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: I’m kind of the midway, the lagrange point between the civil society, the social sector, and the public sector. That’s my working condition. If I start taking or giving orders, this whole notion of collaborative horizontal power just dissipates.

Audrey Tang: The very first utterances of me commanding another ministry would be the time when the ministry lose this peer-to-peer, innovative relationship with me. I always maintain that I do this in a very Taoist fashion.

Audrey Tang: To take a concrete example, we have this thing called the Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: Where every year, the president’s office selects among maybe, this year, it’s 100 and so teams. They have no monetary reward — there’s no "doing well" [laughs] part of the hackathon.

Audrey Tang: We call it a hackathon, but it’s actually three months of intense collaboration across sectors.

Audrey Tang: Anyone can propose anything to improve on the presidential promise during her campaign that they think the public sector is not doing well. We have journalists asking for better data from the government, so they can do more analysis on flood control.

Audrey Tang: We have Taiwan Water Corporation saying, “We are willing to share our pressure or measurement data, but we really want people who know machine learning to save our time in detecting leakage,” because climate change, water shortage is a real problem, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Of the 100 or so cases, we find maybe 70, 80 percent is actually written by public servants, but they didn’t have the budget. They work in silos and things like that. Then they were afraid of innovating, because various conditions.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s meant to be cross-sectoral, they just find an NPO or a social sector partner to submit their admission for them. They are like, “Oh, we were just working with our NPO partners,” but they actually really proposed it themselves.

Audrey Tang: The prize for those five winners every year is the president’s office will oversee that it’s merged into public service next year with proper budget, proper support. This is really impact as the prize.

Audrey Tang: For the Water Corporation thing, the machine learning water shortage detection, because we SDG-indexed all this work, New Zealand discovered it. Just like you mentioned, and you see on the website, they also say on the website.

Audrey Tang: Say, “Hey, we’re running into a water shortage for the first time because of climate change.” Their choice is either buy a proprietary solution for it as well, that may or may not work, or co-create with those hackathoners from Taiwan Water Corporation, so on.

Audrey Tang: Our modus operandi is not to work as a state government, but rather with a social sector intermediary, or at least through the Taiwan Water Corporation, who is a state-owned enterprise. Always not as the Ministry of Economy, or the president’s office.

Audrey Tang: Then we work closely together with people on the front line who are closest to the pain, and put our field people and their field people together on an incubation period that’s maybe another three months, so that we don’t rush to deliver solutions.

Audrey Tang: Personally, I don’t believe in any solution that’s not co-created by people. It’s basically maybe three months of fact-finding and collective interest-finding process, after which then we start an official partnership.

Audrey Tang: This is the modus operandi for most of our international collaboration around digital technology. If you are interested, I’m very happy to put you in contact with the actual people. It’s actually an NPO that is traditionally sponsored only by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Audrey Tang: Just this year, they are also looking for impact grants from overseas as well. They really want to make more friends outside of the traditional Ministry of Foreign Affairs system. If you have a description of a proposal or whatever, I can just send it to them to read next Monday, where we have a special meeting.

Dar Vanderbeck: That’s cool. You were talking about the collaborative horizontal power. Can you tell me more about your theory of...

Audrey Tang: Change?

Dar Vanderbeck: ...change, yeah.

Audrey Tang: We’re totally using the social vocabulary in government work. [laughs]

Dar Vanderbeck: I know. I worked in the government. I worked in the Obama administration before I came to CARE. I’ve also been playing back and forth. We’ve been on many different iterations of our team structure, landing around the snowflake structure.

Dar Vanderbeck: It’s the same as a community organizing structure of interdependent nodes, where you all commit to each other’s leadership. It’s imperfect in practice, but it’s more of a North Star. Anyway, I’d be curious.

Audrey Tang: It’s really the only thing that works nowadays. People form horizontal connections, anyway. You might as well leverage that. Otherwise, it’s just a cacophony, and nothing good comes out of that.

Dar Vanderbeck: I think CARE thinks of itself as, we have a hierarchy that’s drawn out of our org chart. It’s completely not accurate in how decisions are made, power flows, or anything. It’s just like, “Oh, that’s a nice, comforting thing for the C suite to think about.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I like this Buckminster Fuller saying, that, “If the old system’s broken, don’t fix, patch, or fight with it. Just build a new system that renders the old one obsolete.”

Dar Vanderbeck: Render it obsolete, yeah.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly what I’m doing.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, it all starts with radical transparency. This is David Plouffe, speaking for Uber at the time.

Audrey Tang: He’s not just on the record, he is actually on 360 record, as we mentioned, Oculus or something. You actually see us chatting.

Dar Vanderbeck: That’s amazing.

Audrey Tang: I think this really shifts the perspective of, say, the unions and the people who are running co-ops and things like that. Suddenly, they are seeing Uber as something that they can also repurpose to, like becoming a platform co-op to reuse the technologies, and enabling regulations, but also help Uber to account, to a sense, then, as taxi drivers.

Audrey Tang: Around that time, our first try is through this AI-moderated conversation thing, which is an open source tool called Pol.is. What we did was we essentially asked all the drivers and passengers of Uber and taxi what they feel about the same fact, which we crowdsource.

Audrey Tang: People can agree or disagree on each other sentiments. As you click agree or disagree, your avatar moves among the people who are your Facebook and Twitter friends. It’s just that you didn’t talk about this over dinner, but they are our friends. They are not nameless enemies.

Audrey Tang: In siloed organizations, it’s very easy for people to, even if you have the OKRs, to think each other as nameless, faceless. Now, with this kind of structure, you can see that people have different values, but they are still your friends. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is, because unlike traditional social media, there’s no reply button, so you cannot troll someone. You cannot make personal attacks. The only thing you can do after clicking agree or disagree for a while is to share your own authentic feeling for other people to resonate or not.

Audrey Tang: Every time we run this thing, and we partner with, for example, people in Seattle, in Bowling Green, and so on, we always find the same shape. I think this is the Bowling Green experiment. People agree to disagree on a few things, like their ideologies.

Audrey Tang: They don’t spend calories on it. They just focus on convincing people across the board, and being more and more resonant over time. The system will reward you if you can propose something that is more resonating with everybody.

Audrey Tang: By the end of three week or so, we always get the rough consensus from the crowd, which we then bind ourselves to use only the consensus, and nothing else as the agenda for face-to-face stakeholder conversation with Uber, taxi unions, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This is how we live consult with everybody, using as agenda the crowdsourced feelings. There’s a methodology. This is standard focused conversation method, where you have first the facts, then feeling about the facts.

Audrey Tang: Then ideation around the feelings, then the best ideas are the one that takes care of the most people’s feelings. This kind of feeling first horizontalism, I think, really captures people’s attention. Then people are not stuck in just throwing out ideas after another.

Audrey Tang: It really costs a lot of mental cognitive power to sort through ideas. If it’s each other’s feelings, authentic feelings, people really are very engaged with other’s feelings, and try to resonate into something.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main way of me, through radical transparency and asking how people feel about it, generally build a culture of what we call participation officers in every ministry. Every ministry, there’s a team. It’s very snowflake.

Audrey Tang: My own office is, at most, one person poached from each ministry. Each ministry still pays for their salary. I don’t rank or rate them, and they have to brainstorm to build something that’s a Pareto improvement for all the ministries involved.

Audrey Tang: Then back in every ministry, there’s a team of people who talk with e-petitioners, people about to go to the street, and so on, and invite them into co-creation meetings. That’s the snowflake idea, an NPO in every ministry. Now, it’s spreading to the Tainan municipal city and so on.

Audrey Tang: Whenever we see anyone complaining about anything, like the tax filing system and so on, we just invite anyone who complains, either online, through live stream, or face-to-face through co-creation meetings, and through these co-creative workshops, we can get everybody’s standpoints together, find common values, and deliver innovations that satisfy everybody.

Audrey Tang: This is literally co-created by hundreds of people, the new tax filing system of this year. 96 percent of people loves it. The other four percent know that their ideas and their feelings will be taken into account the next year. This really builds radical trust among people. They know they get invitation just by complaining.

Dar Vanderbeck: What kind of complaints do you see?

Audrey Tang: Very interestingly, just in the initial e-petition for the tax filing system, it’s usually very broad. The initial one was just called "it’s explosively hostile." That’s not very useful.

Audrey Tang: Then 80 percent of the people who leave a comment, it’s just calling for the Minister of Finance to resign or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Only maybe 20 percent of people say, “Oh, it works pretty well for me on Windows.” It’s not useful at all. The participation officers are meant to be there so that they can pose an e-petition and say, “Anyone who propose anything that is substantial, that get the attention that they crave...”

Audrey Tang: The trolls basically craves attention because their relationships are transactional. By developing long-term relationships by only rewarding authentic expressions, we can say, “OK, so now, people actually proposed something interesting about a tax filing solution,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: We use standard user journey and other mechanisms, and broadcast everybody’s attentions and their feelings. Basically, if 5,000 people propose the same feeling, it’s just one Post-It note. This is, again, an overview effect on the entire journey.

Audrey Tang: Then that really calms people down. Once we post the invitation, 80 percent of them just switch into contributing their expertise. The initial petitioner was so angry, because he’s a professional user experience designer. People who care...

Audrey Tang: ...take it upon themselves to act.

Dar Vanderbeck: Yep. We believe the same thing at CARE.

Audrey Tang: Then people who know many things about cloud, elastic computing, and whatever start chiming in. The entire project is of negative budget, because of all their suggestions. We save money, and we just use a small fraction of it to run co-creation workshops.

Audrey Tang: That’s the experience we’re hearing. Initially, just the feelings, but once you let the feelings have its own room, its own space, and rewarding only the ones who authentically share their expertise, it’s transformative for them. The face-to-face, food, and drink, it’s all very important.

Dar Vanderbeck: [laughs] Bring food, people will come. That’s “Field of Dreams.” That’s so cool. Can I ask? I’m taking up all the airtime, I’m sorry. I know you guys have a lot of questions.

Audrey Tang: They come in with me every Wednesday.

Dar Vanderbeck: OK. How did you get to this role, or as you think about...I guess there are two questions. One is just your personal story, in terms of how this role is living out your mission. Then the second one just being that good governance is an important battle to be fighting right now in the world.

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Dar Vanderbeck: How you place that in the broader sociopolitical, global context.

Audrey Tang: My personal story, I’ve told many times...

Audrey Tang: I will be very brief and say, I am like one petal in the Sunflower movement, when people occupied the parliament, and demonstrated that it’s possible to listen at scale, basically. I think it really shifts the political landscape.

Audrey Tang: The young people, before Sunflower, I think they seldom talked about politics publicly, with family, or on social media. It was seen as fringe, like social justice. Not very cool.

Audrey Tang: After Sunflower, which is a collaboration with more than 20 nonprofits, and each working on a different aspect of the sustainable development goals, they collectively re-looked into the trade service agreement, which was at that time a very linear GDP-oriented thinking.

Audrey Tang: I think it collaboratively brought people into this post-GDP world, because we see that with the right statistical finesse, you can make GDP arbitrarily high. We have some neighbors who are very good at that.

Audrey Tang: It’s maybe not a model worth emulating. We’re much more proud. Like just today, the World Economic Forum says Taiwan is one of the four super innovators in the world. That’s more likely what the teenagers and the young people would be taking pride in... because GDP is strictly linear.

Dar Vanderbeck: It has no correlation, really, to good governance, strong democracy, or anything.

Audrey Tang: To anything. [laughs] Right. I think that is part of what Sunflower has brought, a sea-change, to where people feel it’s cool to talk about social injustice, about marriage inequality, about pretty much everything.

Audrey Tang: I think personally, it really rides on the wave of people gradually realizing that in this corner in the world — according to the CIVICUS monitor — when the civil society is shrinking everywhere, Taiwan is expanding. This is abnormal. [laughs]

Dar Vanderbeck: Yes, totally, or a beacon of hope, really.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Before Sunflower, I don’t think people are generally cognizant of the fact that Hong Kong is losing press freedom, everywhere is losing freedom of assembly, freedom of speech is being curtailed, and so on.

Dar Vanderbeck: In the US, certainly.

Audrey Tang: Well I think we just collectively woke up to the fact in 2014. That’s the personal story.

Audrey Tang: That’s why I keep giving those talks, like just this morning, about media literacy, about why working on misinformation, we should see them as an invitation of conversation, and not infringing on freedom of speech.

Audrey Tang: That’s precisely what people who sow discord want, and things like that. I think I see myself, again, using those pretty icons.

Audrey Tang: Complementing, but not reinforcing, the institutions that implements open government.

Audrey Tang: Through the OGP partnership, we invite the civil society to collectively write a shadow report, enhance our transparency, so that when misinformation comes, it’s seen collectively as an invitation for more dialogue.

Audrey Tang: I think that that’s really the root of how to solve this disinformation problem. It’s not to have it in the room of the government, keeping the people in the dark, not sharing the context of policymaking. Of course, that makes the disinformation a fertile ground to grow.

Audrey Tang: If, on the other hand, everybody can meet me every Wednesday, all the contextual information of policymaking is published online. We got literally all the 1,300 annual, monthly, and quarterly reportings of all our budget items published on the e-participation platform.

Audrey Tang: You can see all our ministries, all their budgets, all 1,300 of them, and how exactly they’re carrying out the work, how the procurement and spending is done. If you comment on it, a public servant actually comes forward, and have a real conversation in public around those social object that is the budget, regulations, and petitions.

Audrey Tang: With about five million people active on this platform, out of about 23 million people in Taiwan, I think we have a new fabric upon which that a real collaborative governance can grow, just by people sharing objects that are factual, and also backed by people’s own measurements, not just the government’s measurements.

Audrey Tang: For example, I will just use one last example. This is AirBox, people donating their balconies, schools, and so on to measure air quality. It’s all voluntary, grassroot. There is nothing in it that’s state-sponsored.

Audrey Tang: It’s a completely open source community, more than 2,000 participants. In any other place in East Asia, this would be seen as a threat to the legitimacy of central government.

Audrey Tang: If you measure something in your home, even with an imprecise sensor, but compared to the Environmental Protection Agency sensor half a kilometer away, of course, people are going to believe the ones that they set up themselves.

Audrey Tang: Very uniquely in Taiwan, instead of poaching or imprisoning the people who start this movement, we just say, “We can’t beat you. We just join you.” [laughs] We just allocate funds to manufacture more precise, lower cost detectors.

Audrey Tang: This is like the map of digital gap in Taiwan. Setting up the place where it’s too high in the mountains, or people are just not that well-connected. Even in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, where no citizen scientists will go, but we will go because of the wind turbines.

Audrey Tang: We will actually set up those offshore wind turbines for carbon-neutral energy. Then we can also put air quality detectors on it.

Audrey Tang: We developed technologies, such as distributed ledgers, with the community so that they can snapshot and store their numbers on a public chain, before absorbing into the national high computing center, so people can know we will not change the number the day before the election or things like that.

Audrey Tang: Everybody can then do science together. The AirBox, I think, it just really epitomized the idea of we’re solving our local environmental issue, sharing it as open innovation, and people just download it on GitHub, and starting their own AirBoxes. They don’t have to ask for a patent or a license.

Audrey Tang: Then really spread the word about, it’s not just Internet of Things. It’s Internet of Beings. It’s people connecting together. I think that’s the main narrative of collaborative governance. I don’t want it to be just a Taiwan thing, but be seen as a valid model of any other considered to be more authoritarian countries to see maybe there’s light in democracy.

Dar Vanderbeck: Definitely. It’s interesting, in 2007 and ’08, I was on the Obama campaign. I worked in the field, just knocking doors all day long for a year.

Audrey Tang: Deep canvassing?

Dar Vanderbeck: Deep canvassing. I was a huge and early proponent of deep canvass.

Audrey Tang: Oh, awesome.

Audrey Tang: We’re from very similar backgrounds.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. It was funny, because everyone afterwards was like, “Oh, it was because of technology that we did it.” I was like, “Oh, no.” That helped me figure out which houses to go to, but it didn’t replace the interaction or the relations.

Dar Vanderbeck: Technology can accelerate that, but it won’t build it for you. I feel like some of the fervor around fake news in the United States right now is really more of an outcome of disintegrating communities and diverse disintegrating communities, that then, we’re so much more susceptible to disinformation.

Dar Vanderbeck: We don’t have the ability and the relationships to triangulate, to develop a new narrative, to toss it out, to do all the other things you do when information comes to you. I think that that’s such an interesting, how you framed it made me just remember all of that time.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. We’re working on the Regional Revitalization Plan at the moment, because everything I talk about is municipal or national. Truth to be told, in many places in Taiwan where it’s 50k people, 100k people, they are really suffering from the young people just going to the municipal and cities, and then not coming back.

Audrey Tang: Just to reverse that trend, we need to work with the local people to reestablish trust in the community. One of the, I think, very powerful ways is just to enable the local not-for-profit, like co-op or community-owned media and production.

Audrey Tang: Production, not just with agriculture or whatever -- those are important -- but of meaning. I think that’s the next step. We’re working with all the college and universities on what we call university social responsibility, or USR.

Audrey Tang: They get free money from the Ministry of Education if they can do capstone curriculum that runs for two-plus, three years with the community to enhance the community’s meaning-making process. That’s, I think, very important toward solving the issue that you just talked about, which is disintegrating trust on local communities.

Dar Vanderbeck: It doesn’t end up feeling like you’re campaigning for anyone when you do it right. It ends up just being about really rebuilding, or doing things for your friends. It ends up being fun by the end of it. It’s not about the hard moments of voting.

Dar Vanderbeck: At the end of 2008, it wasn’t even about electing Barack Obama to anyone that I worked with. It was about this important idea of reimagining what our national community could be.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we are working with a lab called The GovLab. They are applying these ideas, I think, to the state level now. Beth Noveck is now Chief Innovation Officer also of New Jersey.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. I’m from New Jersey, and I know Beth, and all those things. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Dar Vanderbeck: One other question I have for you is around Sunflower, about the days before it, and what you think, looking back, the elements were that made the Sunflower movement so effective or lasting?

Audrey Tang: I think there was a rehearsal of Sunflower about a year before that. Actually, half a year before that. Sunflower got maybe half a million people on the street, but the Citizen 1985 movement, the White Cross Military Secrecy Parade brought half that number.

Audrey Tang: It’s still a very large protest, and it’s also a flashmob. Like the Sunflower, people have no idea that this many people will come. They just randomly met on the bulletin board system, a kind of local Reddit, and just flashmobbed its way to quarter million people on the street.

Audrey Tang: Around that time, I think what really works is that the people who organize it, because they are not traditional unionist or traditional movement mobilizers, they were literally just flashmob.

Audrey Tang: That is something that people seldom have done, if you work in organized protesting, is that they open source everything, including how to apply for network, how to apply for the permit, and how to negotiate. This is just like Occupy.

Audrey Tang: You have liaisons with other Occupies who share the protocol, people’s microphone, and everything like that. They document everything in a Google doc, and invited everybody who work on civic tech, on social innovation, on civic media, to brainstorm how exactly can we make technology more of a fabric?

Audrey Tang: If we have a quarter million people on the street, and nobody can connect to the Internet, because it’s super full. It’s an interesting research problem for many people, including me, the civic hackers. We put ourselves to task and worked for a half a year of how to improve the human experience of mass protesting.

Audrey Tang: That become, I think, the core of the network topology team, because we had a rehearsal of that 10 days before Sunflower in the anti-fourth nuclear power plant parade, which is not quite a parade because of typhoon.

Audrey Tang: That also means that people really want to attend, but cannot. Live stream and everything plays a large role, larger than we anticipated. Because we have the equipment ready, the programs, and all the what Clay Shirky would call "situational applications" ready.

Audrey Tang: By the time of Sunflower, it doesn’t take any coordinated action. People just took whatever they learned during the previous rehearsals, and just like that.

Dar Vanderbeck: That’s so interesting. I don’t know if you’ve met DeRay Mckesson at all?

Audrey Tang: No.

Dar Vanderbeck: I worked with him in Ferguson during the protest there. He started an organization called Stay Woke. The idea was to also improve the experience of protesting. This was a sanctified role that we play in humanity. I just feel like he would be...

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Dar Vanderbeck: If it’s OK, can I have you...

Audrey Tang: He’s the podcast guy?

Dar Vanderbeck: Yes, he was.

Dar Vanderbeck: Yes, he has a podcast now. You should be on his podcast.

Audrey Tang: I’m happy to, happy to. Happy to connect with this. Anything else...

Audrey Tang: Really, we can talk for hours...

Audrey Tang: Is there anything I should know when recording for the event tomorrow?

Maya Kao: Probably, Jimmy will send a document about...

Audrey Tang: There is a script. Is there last minute additions or things, keywords you really want me to mention?

Maya Kao: "Scaling innovation."

Audrey Tang: Scaling innovation, OK.

Sara Yeh: NPOst.

Audrey Tang: NPOst. OK, I’ll make sure that I repeat these things three times, because...

Dar Vanderbeck: Triplets.

Maya Kao: We invited Audrey to come to our forum as well, but Andre is not in Taipei tomorrow.

Audrey Tang: I have to be in Changhua, it’s one of those regional visits.

Audrey Tang: I try to be in Taipei as little as possible of my time, because most innovations doesn’t happen in large cities, and certainly not in the capital. [laughs]

Dar Vanderbeck: Yeah, certainly not. What is it, “The future of tomorrow’s not going to come from the main stage”?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, but OK, I will be telepresent.

Dar Vanderbeck: That would be perfect. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I wish you a great event.

Dar Vanderbeck: Totally. Thank you so much for, I would love keep in touch on a bunch of different fronts.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Dar Vanderbeck: The radical transparency technology, I would love to adapt that. We should use that as our team.

Grace Hsieh: I know.

Audrey Tang: Everything I mentioned is free and open source. Just put the right technical people in contact with our people, and you will be set.

Dar Vanderbeck: We’re also at the very beginning of building more of a...I actually don’t like this terminology of ICT4D, but how to think about technology in a more integrated way for our aims of social justice. I think in our sector, it becomes very efficiencies-focused, rather than who has access, access and justice-focused.

Dar Vanderbeck: We’re probably a year away from really doing that in earnest, but I would love your sage counsel. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m very much willing to help. My three mandates are open government, youth empowerment, and social innovation. Your topic is like in the cross section of the three. Of course I will help.

Dar Vanderbeck: Awesome. Also, anything, any time you’re back in the United States, let me know. I also have an aversion to anything HQ, so I bounce around a lot. Any time, and actually, any US major city, we have a team member there. I would love to welcome you there. Also, anything for care that we do to amplify your message and your work, definitely let me know.

Audrey Tang: Cool. The foreign collaboration arm, the ICDF -- the International Cooperation and Development Fund.

Dar Vanderbeck: We just met them..

Audrey Tang: You just did. Did they mention that they are also looking to work with oversea impact investment?

Dar Vanderbeck: Not quite on the nose like that, but we have that.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. I think, just like you, they have a history that goes way back -- 107 years. [laughs] It’s part of the government, but then it’s also wanted its own identity. Especially now, because if it’s just with the people who recognize diplomatically, then it tend to be developing and least developed places.

Audrey Tang: Where they have a very good working methodology already, but they really want to work with other, more highly developing, or even equally developed countries, building on the success of our digital opportunity centers, which Taiwan does really, really well.

Audrey Tang: And is, I think, uniquely well because of our geography. We totally want to take that idea into, I don’t know, Manila or whatever, which is outside their comfort zone.

Dar Vanderbeck: Just do it in the United States.

Audrey Tang: Which is outside their comfort zone, though I really want them to talk more with people on that front.

Dar Vanderbeck: One of the things that our team, and Kara’s been taking on, is there’s been an implicit belief, I think, in the United States that we don’t have much to learn from the rest of the world. International development is very much like, “Here’s things we know. Let’s scale the things we know.”

Dar Vanderbeck: For obvious reasons, that is clearly not the case. I’ve been interested in thinking about, there’s Ghana think tank and some others, of how we can identify challenges in the US, of which we have zillions, and bring in other partners from around the world to build our capacity to show. I think that could be a really...

Audrey Tang: That would be lovely.

Dar Vanderbeck: Come to Georgia. That’d be great.

Audrey Tang: That would be great.

Dar Vanderbeck: Cool. Can we take a picture?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Dar Vanderbeck: Continuing our tradition of every meeting gets a picture, which I love.

Audrey Tang: Let’s take the picutre outside that wall of Post-It Notes.