Audrey Tang: We’ll make a transcript, and I’m sure ST has already...

Lucie Liu: Yeah, ST already told me.

Audrey Tang: All right, so let’s get started.

Lucie Liu: I would like to talk to you about my film. I made a film on the perception of homosexuality in Japanese society.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Lucie Liu: This is like basically the first film that has ever been made on the topic, and whether you can think of places or means or channels of communications where I can distribute it in terms of...Actually, reaches people that are interested and also more into like a grassroots level.

Lucie Liu: I’m not that much interested in big film festivals. It’s more like I would like university screenings and stuff like that. If you can think of any sources, that would be my first question. Then, the rest is about things I’m really interested in about you.

Audrey Tang: Sure. As for distribution partners, nowadays in Taiwan, lots of people just use what we call OTT platforms, Netflix being the larger one. Of course, there’s many domestic ones as well. HiNet has its own MOD and so on. Have you been in talk with any of the OTT?

Lucie Liu: I talked to Jay Lin. We haven’t decided whether to put it on GagaOOLala yet. He wanted to have a screen-over, that’s it.

Audrey Tang: It’s not an exclusive deal or is it?

Lucie Liu: There’s no deal been made yet. Before I put it on OTT platform, what I would really like to do is show it to people in universities. I feel like when I was a student that impressed me. Festivals are exclusive.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Lucie Liu: I would like to show it on a basic level. You can go to a lecture, see a film, and it might make some change.

Audrey Tang: May I ask if a not-for-profit organization want to show your film, for example, the marriage equality platform and so on, if they want to show the film do they pay specifically a fixed fee of license to you?

Lucie Liu: Usually the fees right now only apply to places outside of Taiwan. In Taiwan, I want to show it to people. The main means is I don’t want to make money off it in Taiwan. I want to show it to as many people as possible.

Audrey Tang: There’s something in YouTube that’s called geo-fencing. You can make it visible in Taiwan for free.

Lucie Liu: Yes?

Audrey Tang: That’s probably the easiest way. Then we would take the URL of that YouTube video and distribute it to a bunch of partners. The licensing deal takes time to negotiate. Not all MPOs or university for that matter have the capacity to negotiate licensing.

Audrey Tang: If it’s offered, for example, under a non-commercial-use license, meaning that people can’t use it to sell tickets, but they’re feel free to screen it anywhere physically in Taiwan. If you agree with such a term, you can say so on YouTube. Then, we would distribute it everywhere.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s by far, the easiest...

Lucie Liu: That’s the easiest way.

Audrey Tang: I’m happy to help promote it on social media and so on.

Lucie Liu: That’d definitely help. I’m happy to give you the sticker. I don’t have cards.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Lucie Liu: But I have stickers so here you go.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Lucie Liu: It has been shown in Berlin as well, and I don’t think it was a wide success, and in London as well so I would like to spread it as much as possible.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I something to give to you as well.

Lucie Liu: Oh, you’re welcome. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: ...the pin that we just printed.

Lucie Liu: Oh, cool.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s the sustainable development goals.

Lucie Liu: Oh, cool. Then, I would like to go into some other questions. I’m not that much into Taiwanese politics right now, but after the KMT candidate got recently elected, I wanted to know...

Lucie Liu: It’s like more of a personal question. How influential is China in terms of influencing the Taiwanese elections?

Audrey Tang: They’re always, of course, very interested in getting pro-PRC candidates elected. Last election we did observe people who claims to work at Tencent, doing social media management for a mayoral campaign. That’s a fact. Everybody knows there are already information operations ongoing.

Audrey Tang: They mostly, I think, do it in the information layer, not so much on the hard cybersecurity layer. That is to say we don’t see, for example, breaking into candidates’ emails or things like that. We don’t see that yet. It’s mostly on the information operation level.

Lucie Liu: I was thinking about the generational divide because what I observed is basically the elderly generation, they mostly get the information on TV or in their language. I was wondering how to reach a generation that’s not necessarily online in order to give them a notion of what electing a KMT candidate would cause. Do you know what I mean?

Audrey Tang: Well, they’re online. It’s just they’re on LINE, right?

Lucie Liu: That’s the thing. I’m really interested in how to reach them in terms of...Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Well, we have found the most effective is really just to make the clarifications as viral as the rumors, and then also distribute it very widely and very quickly after an hour at most of each campaign. We found that to be very useful because if you wait for a day, then it’s over, right? Everybody will have spread the rumor.

Audrey Tang: For example, I don’t know, the premier of the administration punishing people who dye and perm their hair twice in a week. That was a rumor, actually [laughs] .

Lucie Liu: Wow.

Audrey Tang: Right. Then, within just one hour, our Premier, Su Tseng-chang just basically created a very funny advertisement, a meme I would call it, that basically says there’s a popular rumor that says the Premier will punish people who perm their hair, it’s not true.

Audrey Tang: "I may be bald now but I would not punish people like that," says the Premier.

Audrey Tang: That’s a photo of him when he was young.

Lucie Liu: When he was younger, yeah.

Audrey Tang: What’s actually happening is that we’re requiring by 2021 all the perming products suppliers to start labeling their products. That’s a big difference. This part isn’t translated by it says, "However, if you keep perming or dyeing your hair multiple times a week, your hair may be damaged, and you may end up looking like me now." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This went viral by its own. What we have found is it’s like inoculation. If people who read this before they read the rumor, then they’re inoculated, and they can just compare the different narratives. What we’re doing is essentially not the same that we have to take down all the messages because it’s just not very possible.

Audrey Tang: We’re saying that we must let clarifications reach more people sooner than the disinformation. So far, it’s been really working, and I’m really happy that after two years of intensive training personnel and so on that each ministry can now clarify any training rumor within an hour or so.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we had help from Alliant, on Facebook, the usual suspects on that.

Lucie Liu: Does that reach elderly people as well?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Alliant agreed by this month, actually, they will very soon have two additional features. One is that in their closed room chats, anyone can...Just like flagging an email as spam, they can flag an incoming message as disinformation.

Lucie Liu: Oh.

Audrey Tang: It’s sent to fact checkers, and the fact checkers will prioritize based on...It’s just like fighting junk mail, right? After sufficient people flagging it as junk mail, it starts landing to your junk mailbox, not your inbox.

Lucie Liu: Immediately.

Audrey Tang: Right, and the virality is dialed down. This kind of clarification was posted online today because that’s a tab in the line called, I don’t know, trending, myth busters or whatever. Then, you can just look at this before entering private conversations that have this disinformation.

Audrey Tang: I think with both of these functions built into the Alliant software itself, it’s signing up on what we call an additional accountability plan. There’s a self-regulation, a counter disinformation self-regulation that’s signed by Facebook, Alliant, Google, PTT, the usual suspects.

Lucie Liu: Yeah. When was that information...

Audrey Tang: That was a couple of weeks ago.

Lucie Liu: Oh, wow, congratulations.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Lucie Liu: Yeah, that’s fantastic. There’s like another question I would generally like to ask because when I was researching for my film, I learned a part of the Taiwanese society is Christian, like two to four percent, even though they don’t have a major influence because they have a lot of money from foreign countries, foreign churches. Also, like, a small amount of the population identifies as even gay or lesbian.

Lucie Liu: What I’m wondering...All the activists I talked to told me the middle part, like 60 to 70 percent of the population, is not necessarily interested in the topic or is just like indifferent, like they don’t really care about it. That leads to my question whether you would say the Taiwanese society, especially youth, is political, if you would say they’re very political, like they’re really engaged or not because...

Audrey Tang: That’s an interesting question because what’s most distinguished between being political as in starting a trending meme like #LoveWins or #MeToo, that’s why it’s so political. It’s social activism. It’s not necessarily means that you have to enter the establishment or start a referendum or any of those formal institutionalized civic participations.

Audrey Tang: Basically, you can be socially active and exert political pressure but still remaining firmly on the social sector instead of engaging with the public sector. The social sector engagement, I think it’s very active but it’s a new trend. It only started, I think, around 2014. Before 2014, it’s not hip to talk about politics, to talk about party politics, I mean like marriage equality, human rights, refugees, I don’t know, plastic waste, climate change. It’s not considered hip. It’s considered niche.

Lucie Liu: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it really was. After 2014, especially after the occupy and then later on, the anti-curriculum change movement started by a bunch of senior high school people, it suddenly became very hip for senior high-schoolers and college students to talk about all the different social and environmental justice issues. Basically, there were over 20 NGOs orchestrated to occupy the Parliament.

Audrey Tang: When the Parliament was occupied for three weeks, each of them had a booth around the peripheral down by Parliament, each talking about one particular aspect that they care about traditionally for like three decades now. They were kind of having, just targeting a more aging population. That’s kind of the first time in ages that they really engaged with people who are teenagers or who are in their early 20s.

Audrey Tang: That led to a sea change, and after that, it’s considered very hip for teenagers and early 20s to start talking about social justice. Our most popular petitions for...For example, recently, just this month, we banned the use of plastic straws for indoor drinks, and we’re gradually banning it in take-outs and so on.

Audrey Tang: That was started by a petition a couple of years ago by a 16-year-old.

Lucie Liu: Really?

Audrey Tang: It is. They don’t have to go to the street to strike on Fridays [laughs] . They can orchestrate...I’m not dismissing that movement. It’s a great movement. What I mean is that the social solidarity is so strong, and the issue considered so legitimate that the EPA has to really meet the 15-year-old demand and just start ratifying what she had to say.

Lucie Liu: That’s really interesting to me because when I think about Germany, a lot of politicians were criticizing the Fridays of the Future movement you just mentioned. I was wondering if the government side is more interested in actually having a dialogue with the younger people, if it’s like on that pressure that they have to...

Audrey Tang: Right. I think a lot of challenge that representative democracies of the world now are struggling about is that these mechanisms are already designed with a fixed two-year or four-year pace. You’re only supposed to bring up your platform and campaign and deliver on your campaign promise every two to four years. That’s what everybody does in liberal democracies.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that things that are emergent like, I don’t know, four years ago, nobody cared about self-driving vehicles and integrating them into the society. Four years ago, people already cared about climate change but not perhaps about specific aspects of climate change. Basically, four years is too long for emergent issues.

Audrey Tang: What we have been developing as quickly as the one-hour response is also a quick response to, for example, e-petitions or other emergent social issues so that within two months, we can just do what we call sandbox experiments to do trials.

Audrey Tang: The civil society led our social innovation regulations so that everybody can see, as I mentioned, every Wednesday we can talk. How is it like to have self-driving tricycles roaming around the street and whether we can form a norm from the policy code, that is to say parameters to regulate them, and then, after that, into law finally.

Audrey Tang: If we have to only work at a law level instead of a norm setting level, this one moves too slow. It’s just four years a cycle, right? This one can change every couple of weeks, really. This fast iteration is how we’re meeting the emergent demands from the young people and of course, from also older generations because the other age group that are very active in our e-petition platform is 65 years old.

Audrey Tang: It’s not surprising because these two age groups care the most about the public affairs and less about private affairs and so they have more time honestly speaking. [laughs] We just meet them face to face in our collaborative meetings.

Lucie Liu: You just said we. I’m trying to meet the demands. Would you say that’s like generally speaking for the entire...

Audrey Tang: The entire administration, that’s right. In each and every ministry, there’s a team of participation officers just in charge of talking to people who have those emergent issues. It’s a little bit similar to parliamentary officers who talk to MPs or media officers that talk to the traditional journalists. The participation officers differs in the case that many of the participants, they don’t just want the government to fix things. They also want to fix things.

Audrey Tang: They just don’t want to be blocked by the government. The social sector, the private sector can also contribute and actually instead of just holding the public sector accountable, we can also hold them accountable if they express such a will to collaborate.

Audrey Tang: This kind of shape is very different versus just a media or the MPs because the media MPs are supposed to hold us accountable but not the other way around.

Lucie Liu: Is that a recent development or has that been in...

Audrey Tang: It’s been going on for a while. It’s proposed, again, on a national forum just after the 2014 Occupy. It’s also borne out of the Sunflower Movement.

Audrey Tang: It’s only institutionalized as a national regulation in late 2015. Then, after I become Digital Minister, I also added a PO network so it’s now mandatory, not opt-in in 2017.

Lucie Liu: Regarding the Sunflower Movement, what you said, like 2014, what other factors rather than Occupy actually led to this politicization, I don’t know, yeah, of the...

Audrey Tang: Of the young generation. Well, I think that’s also because at the end of that year, all the people who are more against Occupy basically lost mayoral elections and everybody who supported Occupy, sometimes to their surprise, won mayoral elections. Some didn’t even prepare an inauguration speech.

Audrey Tang: Right. It shows a collective political will. Even after that, you can see in the DPP primary and also in the KMT primary, all the different parties, all the different people who want to run for mayorship and now president all willing to add to the open government mandate. They cannot really subtract from it.

Audrey Tang: Everybody says they’re transparent, that they want use engagement participation, and this I like. If you don’t say this, you’d expect to lose the election.

Lucie Liu: This is like a common set rule.

Audrey Tang: Right.

Lucie Liu: You want to do like...

Audrey Tang: But that wasn’t the case before the Occupy.

Lucie Liu: The full-on public, the government transparency...

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Lucie Liu: On the other hand, what about the citizen, like full-on protection of the data?

Audrey Tang: Of course, of course. Yeah, the open data, of course, is only concerning statistics you need to aggregate. You wouldn’t call the Census Bureau and say, "Oh, take me out of the previous year’s census," if that makes sense [laughs] . If they’re published statistics, of course, that’s protected by the Privacy Act.

Audrey Tang: If they’re personal identifiable, of course, then we, of course, don’t see that as part of open government because essentially government is only the fiduciary of your data and is beginning of a trust relationship.

Audrey Tang: You wouldn’t trust a lawyer, or accountant, or a psychiatrist, if they are not acting in your best interests. This best interests’ doctrine is what we’re seeing when it comes to private data. We’re always publishing as much as possible the statistics for academic use and for analysis.

Lucie Liu: That was a provocative question, because in the social credit system in China, they also, they propagated some sort of trust mechanism.

Audrey Tang: Sure. While we are making the state radically transparent to the citizens, through visualization of budgets, regulations, and everything...

Lucie Liu: Zero Gov, as well, right?

Audrey Tang: Right, g0v, as well.

Lucie Liu: g0v.

Audrey Tang: The PRC are also working on so-called transparency, but they are working on making the citizens much more transparent to the state. You don’t see the algorithm, the code, the accountability mechanism controlling the use of this data in the state.

Audrey Tang: Basically, the state can hold all the citizens accountable. That’s what accountability means in the first place, right? That they can count the citizens.

Audrey Tang: The citizens cannot hold the state accountable, whereas here, as open government, what we’re making sure is that citizens can all hold the government accountable, but it doesn’t make the state bypass privacy concerns when using citizen data.

Audrey Tang: These are, you can see, like completely mirror images at each other. As I mentioned, the regulatory co-creation, using sandbox and experimental regulation, this, basically, is admitting that our regulation may be out-of-date.

Audrey Tang: We don’t have first-hand experience of, for example, self-driving vehicles, so we can’t meaningfully regulate them. What we’re saying is that within a year, let’s establish a norm through experiment and have the social innovators who lead the regulation.

Audrey Tang: In PRC, they’re doing, again, the reverse. They’re mandating that all the different enterprises must have party branches of the CCP in them so that the state, again, can exercise advanced control on the agenda of each private enterprise. Again, it’s literally mirror images.

Lucie Liu: I would like to go back to what you said before then. I think it’s incredibly impressive, how progressive Taiwan is in terms of that. I was wondering if you can think of a recipe to get people more interested in radical transparency of the state and asking for it.

Lucie Liu: In Germany, at least in my generation, it’s data. Of course, people care about it, but it’s not that big of a deal to actually talk about it and demand it from the government.

Audrey Tang: I think, one of the cases where we’re really spreading this idea is called the Presidential Hackathon. It actually has a lineage that can be traced back to Germany. Germany has this Code for Germany that they propose a prototype...

Lucie Liu: Sorry, the what?

Audrey Tang: Code for Germany, and they proposed a prototype fund. That’s a thing in Germany, right? Anyone who just agree to participate in open innovation get, essentially, a grant from the federal government to build, basically, whatever. Even failures are celebrated, because they just write postmortems for other people to use.

Audrey Tang: The thing is not about failure, the thing is about winning. Even if you get the grant, you prototype, and it worked really well, there’s still no guarantee that it will enter the political system, that it will become public policy. Essentially, there is no political mandate to adopt the prototypes.

Audrey Tang: I think that puts a ceiling to people’s engagement with open data, because it’s not guaranteed that you will be part of the democratic institution. Again, you have to go through representative democracy for that.

Audrey Tang: What I am seeing in Taiwan is that first, g0v grant took the prototype grant model, and then we also look at g0v grant, and lifted it into the presidential level. Now, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, every year, looks at many, many different teams.

Audrey Tang: This year, alone, it’s 110, or a similar amount of teams. It’s a huge number, and we also use a new voting system called quadratic voting and asking everyone to select the cases they want to see online.

Audrey Tang: Basically, starting with 100 or so teams, everybody gets 99 points. With the 99 points you can vote any of the teams, but one point gets you one vote on a team. If you want to add to that team, for two votes, then two votes is actually four points, and three votes, nine points, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This actually ensures that nobody will just dump all of your points on a single issue, because it’s not technically possible. 99 is just 9 votes for 81 points, and you still have 18 left. You have to think of another one to have four votes, at most, and so on. It’s called quadratic voting.

Audrey Tang: This results in a very balanced -- because people look at the synergies between projects -- a very balanced cohort of 20, and each of them, we coach them with mentors and so on, to make sure each of them become trilingual, that, say, each team has a policy expert, a technology expert, and a domain expert.

Audrey Tang: After that, the president gives a winning trophy to the top five data collaboratives born out of these 20 teams. The five teams basically get a trophy, that there’s no prize money. The trophy is a projector that, if you turn it on, it shows the president handing the trophy to you, which is very meta.

Lucie Liu: [laughs] I love it.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a public servant, you participate into a team, it’s just a hackathon, right? It’s three months, just weekends, so there’s nothing to lose, there’s no risk. If it only gets people’s attention and it finally gets people’s contribution -- I can tell about some specific cases -- then the president may see that as one of final five teams and hand you a trophy.

Audrey Tang: After that, if your director-general doesn’t like your idea, you your project your president, and he, or she, must say yes. It signals the presidential promise that the five teams, after three months of prototype, within the next year, we will adopt them into public policy.

Audrey Tang: We may change 12 regulations for it. We may allocate millions of euros for it. We may do personnel change because of it, but whatever you do, we will do whatever we can to make sure that the top five teams become public policy, starting next year.

Audrey Tang: We delivered on all five of the last year’s Presidential Hackathon. We now have a lot of street credibility, and people are very eager to participate.

Lucie Liu: Everybody’s allowed to participate?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Lucie Liu: Wow, that’s incredible.

Audrey Tang: This year, we also have an international track. We got requests from, I don’t know, 16 countries, or something, and now they are in the final seven teams. Next week, actually, I’ll be meeting them tomorrow.

Audrey Tang: The presidential award will be next week, so we will have two winners from the international team, and five from the domestic.

Lucie Liu: What project, like for example, that really impressed you or that won?

Audrey Tang: Right. Last year, a winning team is called Water Savior, because they save water, you see. The solution that they developed is basically to solve water leakage. In Taiwan, the Taiwan Water Corporation maintains one of the longest plastic pipes anywhere in the world.

Audrey Tang: They employ people who are very skilled to listen to the pipes to discover whether they are leaking. It takes, on average, two months to discover a new leaking point, because most of their time is just squandered by listening to things that are not leaking. It’s not a very fruitful job.

Lucie Liu: What a method. OK. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Right. Basically, the machine learning tech experts, as well as policy experts, look at the water flow and pressure data that’s already installed all along the pipeline, and then they just did a machine learning model to detect unlikely new spikes in water use.

Audrey Tang: They build a chat bot online, actually, so that masters, the skilled craft person, can wake up and see a robot apprentice who will report every day to them what are the three or four most likely leaking points near them.

Audrey Tang: They just go to those places, and it has more than 70 percent chance of getting it right. It’s now reduced to a couple of days to discover the leaking point. It’s very useful for machine learning, and it doesn’t have any privacy impact. It’s a really good model.

Audrey Tang: It’s so good that New Zealand, Wellington, discovered this team right after last year’s Presidential Hackathon and invited them to Wellington for another three months.

Audrey Tang: It really is very significant diplomatically, because unless we trust another country, you wouldn’t hand your water pressure and water flow data to that country’s Presidential Hackathon team. The New Zealand people really trusted us, and it is a very fruitful collaboration.

Audrey Tang: This year, there’s a very similar, also water-related, where people use very cheap, inexpensive, boxes to build what they call WaterBox. Every part of it is made in Taiwan. What it does is that they can be placed into the rivers, into waterways, into all the different places, and measure automatically the water quality against the common pollutants.

Audrey Tang: They automatically report it to the Internet. This team also did the AirBox, which is very successful here, to measure air pollution. I talk about it at Republica, and they use distributed ledger to make sure nobody can change each other’s numbers, as a way for social solidarity and trust.

Audrey Tang: Now WaterBox is particularly useful in Taiwan, because what Taiwan has is a lot of industries really close to farmlands. Now, if they pollute the farm waterway, we just passed a law that can just unplug their electricity and water.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t actually pollute the water, then they are very eager to prove that they are not polluting the water. Again, the farmers really want to prove that which upstreams are responsible for the chemicals in their farmland.

Audrey Tang: Everybody has the motivation to install the WaterBoxes. The Presidential Hackathon is, essentially, providing the blessing from the public sector to identify the most hotspots of such contentions, have people just deploy those WaterBoxes by themselves, and have a way to view a dashboard.

Audrey Tang: Now, New Zealand’s also very interested, because they have dairy farming, and who both require clean water from upstream and often get complaint from people downstream. [laughs] They really wanted WaterBox to help them measure E. coli or other common pollutants.

Audrey Tang: They are very eager to invite the team after the Presidential Hackathon to them as well. These are 20 very good stories, but I just mentioned two that work.

Lucie Liu: How is that perceived in society? Do a lot of people know about it?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Yes, the quadratic voting gets a lot of people’s attention, because you don’t have to propose a new project. You can just go online and distribute your votes, right? Also, we have what we call a wishing well, a wishing pool, so that people can just write their wishes and see if any of the teams are eager to take it up.

Lucie Liu: It’s like a greater good for society?

Audrey Tang: Right, exactly.

Lucie Liu: Something like environmental issues, and...

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I’ll just introduce them in turn, I guess. This one is about a unified way, across different cities and counties, for people to report illegal parking and so on, using their phone.

Audrey Tang: This one is using climate change data to analyze when it is better to plant cabbages and things like that, to ensure a fair flow of information to the farmers.

Audrey Tang: This one used machine learning to build a model to detect illicit financial flow for people who, for example, set up three shell companies to do business with each other, but actually are doing and using that credit history to get a large loan from the bank and then abandoning the company altogether and fly to some other country.

Audrey Tang: It turns out they can detect it very early on using machine learning. It’s another very interesting one. This one is essentially making sure that people who care for the elderly can, in the hospice level, get real-time help from the different psychiatrists, from different medical doctors, and so on, so that people feel supported.

Audrey Tang: 80 percent of Taiwanese elders prefer to hospice at home, but 80 percent actually do this in the hospital. It’s a very large disconnect, mostly motivated by lack of communication between the primary caretakers and a special professioner.

Audrey Tang: It is a way to connect people. This one is very interesting. They used machine learning again to explain the public prosecution, because every branch of the government now adopt radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the parliament, people live stream their negotiation between parties. In the Traditional Yuan, they publish all the prosecutions, but the prosecution text, aside from ones that are confidential...In any case, the prosecution text is legalese.

Audrey Tang: People don’t easily understand that. They crowdsourced a dictionary to translate them into laypeople’s terms. That’s especially important, because we’re starting to introduce a jury system for the first time. It’s for the jury to understand.

Audrey Tang: Then, for very mechanical sentencing -- for example, drunk driving -- drunk driving is essentially a formula. Whatever evidence you have, what measurement of alcohol in the blood or whatever, it automatically calculates the sentence level.

Audrey Tang: It’s very, very mechanical, so no prosecutor feel a lot of...It’s just like the water hearing, skill masters. They don’t feel a lot of fun listening to the pipes that are not leaking. Neither do the prosecutor feel a lot of personal enjoyment when they just do those very formulaic sentencing.

Audrey Tang: Now, this system does a machine learning and just automatically tell you what the sentence should be, based on the factors from the fact-finding alone. It saves a lot of time, and a lot of chores, from the judiciary and so on, and so forth.

Lucie Liu: I wanted to ask if it’s also implemented in other cases, or just like when it comes to drunk driving, because drunk driving has very clear factors?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It doesn’t require any value judgment from the judges. Of course, it’s limited only to the...Because then the judges find personal enjoyment when they can apply their personal value judgment to a case.

Lucie Liu: That’s what judges should do.

Audrey Tang: That’s what judges should do, but most of their days are actually consumed by lots of chores, which they may get ridiculed if they miss one of the evidences. There is no personal attainment at all if they do the sentencing right, because anybody would have done it right.

Audrey Tang: For these cases specifically, we use machine learning. There are many cases.

Lucie Liu: Fantastic. Then because you just said psychiatrists, in the top thing, that’s one question that I’ve been wondering about a long time. How psychologists and psychiatrists are perceived in Taiwan, if there’s a stigma to it, and if there’s any -- not ways, but -- ideas to offer some sort of online counseling or something?

Audrey Tang: Counseling is recognized as a certified profession, but it’s a recent thing. It wasn’t there 10 years ago. In this decade, people started recognizing the importance of professional counseling. I think the public TV film, "The Worlds Between Us," 我們與惡的距離, is really helpful in making that point across the whole society.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s one of the best film, TV series that I have seen when it comes to talking about media literacy and things like that. It’s really good. In any case, yes, online counseling is now through the sandbox method.

Audrey Tang: We are in the one-year experimentation now. There is a thing called Ming-Yi that’s the company doing e-consultation. They want to prove to the society that it is actually as -- with the proper care taken, of course, on cyber security and so on -- that it is as effective, even more effective for people, as compared to onsite counseling.

Audrey Tang: Many people who are suffering from mild depression or so on are socially excluded already. They are not motivated to walk out. It’s a lot of help if, when they are in that stage, they can still keep the connection with their counselors online, and the counselor can still be recognized as a professional counselor and be paid accordingly.

Audrey Tang: We are now in the beginning of the one-year sandbox application. Ming-yi is preparing the public experimentation plan as we speak. I think, started next month or next week, maybe, you will see the first cases that are legally recognized as part of the sandbox.

Lucie Liu: Has that also been paid by the healthcare system, or would people have to pay out of their own pocket?

Audrey Tang: On the experimentation part, I think people have to pay out of pocket. After people see the efficacy of this, then, of course, we can...Just like nutritionists, that’s another topic. A nutritionist during, I don’t know, post-ICU care and so on was not traditionally recognized by the Medicare system.

Audrey Tang: Again, because of g0v participation officers, they brought this to our participation officer network. We did a full, radically transparent transcript of the three meetings to re-include that into the healthcare system.

Audrey Tang: I think that will conclude, again, in a month or so, so that when people see as evidence what nutritionists have contributed to the post-ICU work, they are now almost ready to include it into next year’s healthcare payment.

Audrey Tang: Along each part of social progress, we have the g0v teams to support them along the way.

Lucie Liu: Basically, you have those sandboxes, and then you try to show people the positive effects in order to make...

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Also, the negative effects, right? If it’s not a good idea, we thank the investors and the people who paid, to paying the tuition for everybody, and we learn to not to do that.

Lucie Liu: I have one last question, regarding the elder needs, which I started at the beginning with. Because there’s some, I don’t know, mistrust towards media, in terms of media is trying to control, or the media is trying to censor stuff. They are afraid of that as well, right?

Audrey Tang: They do watch a lot of live streaming.

Lucie Liu: They do?

Audrey Tang: They do.

Lucie Liu: I just met a friend, and he told me his wife’s parents, basically, they just watch CTITV. Whatever they say, when they watch Taiwanese TV, they just realize, they say it’s like censorship. They censor speech, whatever.

Lucie Liu: I wonder how they perceive the positive and progressive influence that you are making. That’s what I’m...

Audrey Tang: Usually, I travel to them. I don’t just ask them to come to my platform.

Lucie Liu: Do you go to rural areas?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. That’s one of this place specialty is that when I tour around Taiwan and go directly to the most rural or indigenous areas, the ministries in charge of related matters, they don’t have to travel with me.

Audrey Tang: They can just remain here in the Social Innovation Lab. We use two-way video conference. In Taiwan, we say 見面三分情 -- there is 30 percent of trust which is by meeting face-to-face.

Lucie Liu: Is that a saying?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it is a saying. It is a saying. Just meeting face-to-face builds 30 percent towards trust. Through high-definition video conference, maybe 20 percent toward trust. [laughs] It’s real, because in these kind of town halls, we are not taking the town halls away.

Audrey Tang: What we are doing is adding to the town hall an amplification layer that lets their voice reach directly, and their nonverbal expressions, directly to the ministries in charge. After seeing the ministries in charge across the Internet, many of them realize that it’s not out of malice.

Audrey Tang: It is mostly out of not knowing that there are existing issues in the rural areas, in the different areas. There’s also a chance for the central government to demonstrate innovation, because previously, they see those local issues only as reports from the city government, from the township, from the district.

Lucie Liu: They didn’t have any idea that they can influence something themselves.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, because previously, they can only do national policies, which are all very broad brushes. It actually is because many of the public servants are also coming from rural areas and from the other non-municipalities.

Audrey Tang: They can also relate their own experience, when they were young, or when they studied, and so on, and relate to the local people’s need, and so on. This report that we build now almost every week, every couple weeks, is very important.

Audrey Tang: Then the people will go back to their community and say that, "Oh, I attended a town hall, and it turns out it’s not like that," and things like that. This kind of clarification, although not as fast as the one-hour clarification by the public Internet, social media, it did reach people who don’t use social media.

Audrey Tang: That is what we call a social technology that brings the governance to the people, not asking people to come to governance spaces.

Lucie Liu: Wow, incredible. That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much. Great questions.

Lucie Liu: That’s really incredible, wow. Wow, impressive. I hope the German digital minister can learn something from this at some point.

Audrey Tang: I would be happy to. I would be happy to.

Lucie Liu: Oh, yeah, I do have one last question. How is this internationally recognized? What you’re doing is incredibly important, not just in terms of Taiwan’s role to protect same-sex marriage legalization, but I mean in general.

Lucie Liu: This must have an impact, because a community who is impressed by that and who wants to implement similar things in their own countries must be huge.

Audrey Tang: We found that our natural allies are actually not countries but municipalities, because they’re the right level of homogeneity, as well as Internet connection. This whole method works in Taiwan partly because Taiwan has broadband as human right.

Audrey Tang: No matter how remote is the place that I’m convening, I’m guaranteed to have 10 Megabits per second to Taipei, to Taichung, to Kaohsiung, and to every other place.

Lucie Liu: Also, incredible. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right, and very affordable. It’s less than 15 euros per month for unlimited 4G. You don’t find it elsewhere. This, I think, is the backbone of such innovations.

Audrey Tang: In any other larger country, using this method will necessarily mean that you exclude part of the people who don’t quite have the same Internet infrastructure or broadband as human right there. I think it’s very good that it works in Taiwan, but we do realize the limitation of this methodology.

Audrey Tang: Which is why our allies are mostly municipalities. Within a municipal rule level, especially in a federal system like Canada that has really good devolution to the local municipal government, then they are very interested, because within a municipality, they can do broadband as human right.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is really just a large municipality geographically. From Taipei to Kaohsiung by high-speed rails is, what, one hour and a half? [laughs]

Lucie Liu: Fair enough, yeah.

Audrey Tang: We just have more people, more dense. In any case, what I’m getting at is that these different municipalities all have long-term relationships. We have actually two people in London right now so that they can support the European segment of this civic tech movement.

Audrey Tang: I would say research-wise, it’s still an open question of how to spread it into a federal level, with a lot of different cultures and different populations. We haven’t seen it working very well yet, but Canada is making great strides in at least offering such consultations in automatically bilingual frame, like English, French.

Audrey Tang: Beyond English, French, I don’t think anyone have seriously worked, for example, indigenous English, French, like three or more parties setting. It’s going to be a challenge, but we’re figuring it out with our allies.

Audrey Tang: If you know people who are in somewhere in Germany that are interested in joining this experiment...

Lucie Liu: Oh, I know plenty.

Audrey Tang: ...or taking the Presidential Hackathon contribution back to Code for Germany’s Prototype fund, I’m happy to share.

Audrey Tang: Presidential Hackathon, does that need to be a topic that is just focused on Taiwan itself?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. The international track focus on whatever they want to focus on. They don’t have to contribute to Taiwan. What we are asking is just identify the SDG that’s working, any of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we don’t welcome teams that work for private profit at a cost of next generation. No, that’s not going to happen, right? [laughs] As long as you can code your contribution in any of the 169 SDG targets, then everything is fair game.

Lucie Liu: Wow. I would love to spread that, absolutely. I could just find it online?

Audrey Tang: Sure. If you google "presidential hackathon," you can find all this.

Lucie Liu: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Do you think we can take a picture?

Audrey Tang: Of course.