Indra de Lanerolle: Can you hear us?

Audrey Tang: Hello, everyone. Hello.

Indra de Lanerolle: Fantastic. Let me just...There we go. Great, we can see you. We also have the Slido up, and we have a few questions already, Audrey.

Indra de Lanerolle: Thank you very much for your talk, and thank you for joining us all the way from Taiwan. We just heard your short talk, which set out some of the things you’ve been doing in government, which is very, very interesting, I think.

Indra de Lanerolle: We have people here in the room from government watchers, civil society organizations. Especially we’ve been talking a lot about accountability, about new technology and about the transparency and the data.

Indra de Lanerolle: I’d like to start off maybe asking you a question about, having been on both sides now, as an activist, holding governments and parliaments to account on one side of new technology, and then in government. What do you know, after that change of sector that now you wish you’d known when you were on the other side?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. It’s, in fact, one of the question in Slido, also. I’m highlighting that question. I hope you can see the question from the other projector. Feel free to like each other’s question on Slido so that I know. If five people prefer me to answer the next question, then I will move on to the one with the most number of likes.

Audrey Tang: This is a great question. I always emphasize that I work with the cabinet, not for the cabinet. I work with the people, not for the people. This is very important. I’m at the Lagrange point between the movement on one side and the government on the other side.

Audrey Tang: As you know, between any two planet or celestial bodies, there is this triangle point called the Lagrange point where the gravity is stable. That’s where all our satellites, space missions, and so is located because you can spend least amount of effort, but can still be in that triangular position compared to those two celestial bodies.

Audrey Tang: My role, through radical transparency, through voluntary association, whether it’s from the movement side as I did during the Occupy, facilitating the 20 different NGOs to understand what each other have to say, or now within the cabinet, getting the 34 ministries understanding each other’s values in the map of the sustainable development goals, it is the same work that I’m performing, basically by facilitating the different interests.

Audrey Tang: There is one thing that I didn’t know before I joined the cabinet as a minister with the government. The public service, I thought that they were not innovative, that they’re afraid of change by nature. That is a myth that is not true.

Audrey Tang: What I have discovered after setting up radical transparency is that they only appear to be not innovative because the ministers took all the credit of innovation, and they took all the blame for not executing well.

Audrey Tang: Through radical transparency, we create a environment where the civil servants can be seen by the citizens, either online through teleconference or offline, on how innovative they really are and share the credit. If things go wrong, I can take the blame. I can take the risk.

Audrey Tang: In this kind of environment, the public service is just as innovative as the activists. That is the main surprising thing that I discovered that I wish I had known earlier before joining the civil service.

Indra de Lanerolle: That’s very interesting. I think maybe it’d be interesting to hear a bit more about radical transparency. I’m thinking particularly how do different people who you’re engaging with respond to this idea. The question is a radical idea, as you say.

Indra de Lanerolle: How do your colleagues, how do some of the civil servants you work with respond to do it? When they respond negatively or with fear, how do you use that?

Audrey Tang: By radical transparency, I mean radical as in root, like transparency at the root. In the Freedom of Information Act, in the FOIA Act in Taiwan, which is the base act for open data also, I’m sure it’s the same in many other jurisdiction, the freedom of information applies only after the public service makes a decision.

Audrey Tang: You can get all the data, but it’s only after a policy is being made. The discussion before making a discussion, the context, the draft, is exempted from the freedom of information. The end result is that people can know what of the policy, but they cannot know the why of policymaking.

Audrey Tang: This creates a tension because then the people in the various activism works, they can only work with what is already there. They cannot work with the intention of the public service. Radical transparency, to me, means that, as my working condition, all the meetings, internal meetings that I chair, after editing for two weeks, everybody publish whatever everybody said to the public.

Audrey Tang: This is not live streaming. People can still edit to correct typos, to increase professionalism, and things like that. The effect is twofold. The first is that people learned that the people outside the government are just as creative as the people inside the government.

Audrey Tang: If you let them know the context, the solution will appear from the people who protest the most. The people closest to the pain actually has the best ideas, and that is the thing that the public service has discovered through radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, of course, there is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the transparency of just opening up our work. I mitigate it by doing two things. First, I don’t touch any state secret. If they have a military drill, I just take a day off. I don’t know where the bunkers are. I don’t touch state secret.

Audrey Tang: Second, it’s by voluntary association. People who are not comfortable, they can still speak, but they say they are the Ministry of Finance representative. They don’t have to put their real names on it. These two compromises, so to speak, makes it possible to create a radically transparent environment that is still comfortable with the public service.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, if I’m sharing my screen now, this tracks basically everything that I have spoken with. I have spoken with 3,000 people in more than 150,000 speeches.

Audrey Tang: These are all the sections. Everything that I have ever said to lobbyists, to media, to anything, including this particular talk with you, will be posted in its entirety here. This basically creates a condition of what we call open by default.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just me. If I set this example, all the different ministries, all the 34 ministries are now comfortable to publish their entire budget, more than 1,300 ongoing projects, their KPIs, their spendings, their monthly procurements, everything basically, for everybody to see.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just for everybody to see about the budget, about the spending and procurement, but it’s also for everybody to comment. The responsible authority don’t have to answer 50 phone calls from different media, different councilors. They can just reply once, publicly, and then everybody else can very easily find it through search engines.

Audrey Tang: Our auditing agency can also use this way to crowdsource people’s fears, uncertainty, and doubts around new administrative functions. What I’m saying is that it’s not just me doing this, but it’s actually the entire auditing agency and all the 34 ministries putting up their work for everybody to participate. This is a very significant change in Taiwan’s way of governance.

Indra de Lanerolle: You may see some of the questions on Slido. There’s a couple of concerns or maybe reasons for concern that are being asked about. One is we were having, in the previous keynotes, the issue of as this space opens up, on the one hand, there’s also concern about privacy on the other. The panopticon is what Mandela referred to.

Indra de Lanerolle: We have, in Africa, a number of states that are, in a way, embracing technology and in some ways, opening up, but also, at the same time, watching us much more. Do you think there are any tensions there for you in these processes?

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t think there is a tension here. I think cybersecurity and privacy are the foundation stones on which participation is made. If you don’t have cybersecurity and trust of the cyber system, that is to say the protection of privacy, it is impossible actually to do genuine participation.

Audrey Tang: We believe in it very, very strongly in Taiwan. If you look at not just the participation platform that I talk about, which is the radically transparent numbers, procurements, budget, and these are not people. These are not private. This has nothing private in it.

Audrey Tang: If we talk about the regional speech, like the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of organization, freedom of expression, and so on, if you look at the CIVICUS Monitor, in our region, we are the only one that is fully open.

Audrey Tang: We are, in fact, still expanding in civil society space in the protection of privacy, with the freedom of speech and assembly, every day, while jurisdictions around us are perhaps shrinking, sometimes very quickly. I show you this map because this is very pertinent of the way we view data.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we don’t think data as oil or resource or mining. We don’t use any noun to describe data. Data actually has nothing in common with oil, mining, or any natural resources. 10 years ago, when somebody said data is like oil, they only mean that it’s very expensive to refine. That’s the only similarity.

Audrey Tang: Now, with machine learning and faster computers, even that similarity goes away because everybody can produce and analyze data now. There is absolutely nothing in common with oil.

Audrey Tang: What we view data is a relation. In Taiwan, we care very much about people’s relationship with each other. If I have some personal data that I entrust you with, that means that we start a relationship, and you are held accountable to keep the data up-to-date for our mutual benefit. I, because of my relation, can decide to trust you more or less based on the way you treat my data.

Audrey Tang: This is why always in e-participation, like in Slido, you can participate as an anonymous person, as a pseudonym, or anything in between. We’re not asking anyone to disclose their real name or identity. It’s just a consistent handle that we can have a back-and-forth conversation on. That’s all we ask. This has nothing to do with surveillance and has everything to do with building trust over time.

Indra de Lanerolle: Before we run out of time, Audrey, because you kindly gave us your time, but I know we’re going to run out in a few minutes, I’m looking at Slido, which we’ve never used before. Thank you for introducing us to it.

Indra de Lanerolle: The two most popular questions concern how inclusive these processes are on their digital platforms. Do most people in Taiwan, including older people, including people who are marginalized, do they know about them?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Indra de Lanerolle: Are they able to connect?

Audrey Tang: I understand we are quite out of time so I will answer each question very quickly. In Taiwan, broadband is a human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, indigenous, rural, remote islands, if you don’t have 10 megabits per second, it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: Broadband is a human right, and everything builds on the broadband as human right. Yes, we have a lot of people participating that are young people, but we also have a lot of retired people participating. The e-participation platform, five million active users out of 23 million people in Taiwan. It’s a significant chunk of population.

Audrey Tang: Our numbers say that they have no difference between the age groups. There are some difference between the indigenous nations and the more ethnic kind of places, I think mostly because of the language problem. We’re fixing that using artificial intelligence.

Audrey Tang: I will not read out question. I’ll just answer quickly. I think we should bring technology to people instead of asking people to technology. The new experiment I’m doing this year is me, personally, going to indigenous places, translating our open government material into indigenous languages like Amis.

Audrey Tang: Working with their elders and ambassadors to basically have them set a agenda, we commit ourself into participating in their inclusive process so it’s turned the other way around.

Audrey Tang: From being inside the government, it’s easy if it saves everybody work. Previous, when the public service want to say save the people two hours of work, somebody, somewhere has to work three hours more. Now, with digital technology, for the first time, we say, "If you are being fully accountable, it actually saves you time, over time." That has been the winning argument so far.

Audrey Tang: There is no tyranny of structurelessness because there is just feelings and statements. It is not about, in the original tyranny paper, a few people dominating the discussion because these are individual sentiment that resonate or not with people.

Audrey Tang: This is how pol.is deal with this, by having no oppressive power in the space. Instead, people can just build friendships. There’s a paper called "The Tyranny of Tyranny" that talks about how we anarchists think about how to overcome the tyranny of structurelessness.

Audrey Tang: Feel free to follow the g0v news, g0v.news, that reports all the civic tech things. I think they still relate me very positively because I get more people who are in the public service to join the civic tech movement wearing two hats, sometimes pseudonymously, sometimes -- they don’t care -- in their real name.

Audrey Tang: I’ve been very able to reverse recruit public service into the g0v movement. This idea is a policy. It is a regulation, a procurement framework, and also a national Participation Officer Network directive. It is all three sides.

Audrey Tang: Finally, collective intelligence, how do we do in Africa? For example, you can use the tool that we use, like Sandstorm. The Sandstorm tool that we use is cybersecurity audited, entirely open source, and you can rest ensure that when you’re using Sandstorm, whatever app you’re running in it, even though it may contain backdoors or whatever, it is still secure.

Audrey Tang: Sandstorm has been one of our core tools to operate within intranets, where the Internet connection and intranet exchange points has been closely watched, and BGP, hijacking, or SSL forgery is rampant. You can still run, essentially, intranet using Sandstorm tools. That has been very useful in occupies.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the cultural/political advantage of Taiwan is that we’re really new in this. When I was six years old, Taiwan was still under Martial law and dictatorship. We’re really the first generation [laughs] that can do democracy, and that coincides with the arrival of the Worldwide Web.

Audrey Tang: We don’t have 200 year of proud, Republican tradition. It’s all new to us so it’s easier for us to mix and match things together. The name is Sandstorm, sand as in the sandbox, and storm as in taking something by storm. If you go to sandstorm.io, which I’m sharing with you now, you see the digital tools, which is open source platform, self-hosting Web apps.

Audrey Tang: It’s audited by Taiwan’s cybersecurity department, as well as by various other white hat hackers. Feel free to use that. If you put a app on the Sandstorm app marketplace, I thank you on behalf of the Taiwan public service because we’re going to use the app that you design.

Audrey Tang: Thank you very much for joining in this Q&A session.

Indra de Lanerolle: Audrey, thank you so much. A very good use of your time. That was a really, really civic engagement. Thank you.

Indra de Lanerolle: Thank you, everybody. I think we are on time. I really thought that was a fascinating range of issues and challenging items for us. I think about new places of possibilities now.

Indra de Lanerolle: It’s a really extraordinary thing. Taiwan is a small country and, as Audrey said, a new democracy. I think Audrey seems to take all of these as positives, as opportunities. Sometimes, we describe landscapes where we only see obstacles.

Indra de Lanerolle: It’s interesting what they have done and the borders that she is crossing. That also I think is really interesting when we think about our discussions yesterday of national treasury, local government. These are really, really inspiring and interesting engagements in many ways.

Indra de Lanerolle: Thank you, Audrey. That was a really, really interesting talk. We look forward to hearing more about what you’re doing in the future. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, and have a good local time. Thank you for the questions. Great questions.

Indra de Lanerolle: Thank you.