Audrey Tang: Let’s get started. What would you like to know? Anything and everything.

Visitor: Maybe you wanted to start the things about your work.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Visitor: Bridging the growing gap between citizens and politics.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Visitor: Involving people with politics, and we see change. People no longer work traditionally for the party they traditionally vote. On the other hand, they don’t want to tie up for life to become a member of the party.

Visitor: How to help create new ideas to involve people, and how did you see our development in this way that you’ve been to Germany, and you know that we also have this discussion about both parties, and so on.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I can give a 10-minute presentation on that very subject. Then we see where we go from there if that’s OK with you.

Audrey Tang: This is the same information that I gave in Berlin earlier. I will focus more on the participatory part. This is Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. She said on her inauguration three and a half years ago, “Before, we think of democracy, we think of show-down between opposing values. Now, democracy must become a conversation between diverse values.”

Audrey Tang: Traditionally, each large party represent one aspect of what society’s concerned about. You may have people representing development of economy and people representing environmental sustainability. Or people representing innovation and science, and people who represent social justice and redistribution. You’re all familiar with this.

Audrey Tang: The role here, which is the part that I’m working on, is the career public service that absorb all the tensions but have no visibility, normally [laughs] until it breaks, which it has a lot of visibility like Parliament gets occupied and things like that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This is the main area that I work on. The main change in the past couple decades is the advent of the World Wide Web and eventually a social technology called the hashtag, which is a signature of the social media that allows for people to mobilize half a million people without having a clear leader.

Audrey Tang: They’re just people who identify with #ClimateStrike, a simple hashtag, and then you have half a million people. Because they don’t have traditional identified communication in the political representatives, it’s impossible for the traditional public service to work. It’s striking a tradeoff between competing interests in a proportional way.

Audrey Tang: Rather, there has to be a way to not only speak to these people because they’re already speaking to one other, but rather listen to millions of people and facilitate a mutual listening between millions of people. We have to ask a different set of questions.

Audrey Tang: Instead of asking the representative about how we strike a tradeoff, we must ask people holding different positions to co-create. How may we create a safe space so that different positions can co-create a new value? The common value that everybody agrees on are the innovations that can satisfy those values without leaving any of the positions behind.

Audrey Tang: That is the kind of governance that the UN this year is now calling collaborative governance or co-gov. This kind of governance came from, of course, the Internet governance tradition, but also from indigenous nations’ tradition. There’s many other traditions that emphasize this kind of co-gov.

Audrey Tang: Very practically, you’re in the Social Innovation Lab. This is the playground for co-gov. A lot of public art is from people with Down Syndrome. They see the world through the geometric or topological lens as we see through text or through numbers. They provide also their viewpoint.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that this space is co-created by hundreds of social innovators to facilitate this kind of lateral representing. Everybody can visit me here every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to well into the evening and talk to me about anything at all.

Audrey Tang: The only thing that I ask is that it must be aligned with the value system, which allows people to say whatever they want to say but keeping a completely radically transparent record of pretty much anything. Everybody can very easily see that, after I become the digital minister, I talk with 4,000 people, over 200,000 speeches, on over 1,000 meetings. Our meeting will be another one posted.

Audrey Tang: This is not just visitors, but lobbyists, journalists, and internal meetings that I chair. Everything, even at the drafting stage, is radically transparent here. The “Deutsche Welle” interview, for example, is right here. [laughs] It also links to multimedia here.

Audrey Tang: The end results of this is that whenever people come here to talk to me about things – for example, this was David Plouffe talking about Uber – very interestingly, if people speak to me in a closed-room, off-the-record setting, people tend to argue for things that may be good for them but tend to be bad for everybody else.

Audrey Tang: On this on-the-record, public conversation, you will see that each argument that he raises is actually for the environmental sustainability, for the social progress, and things like that. It’s all based on the argument based on public good. This very simple mechanism design flips around the policy discussions so that people would try to reach across the aisle, so to speak, in their ideas of lobbying.

Audrey Tang: This is a playground for all those emerging technologies to interact with people to facilitate this kind of co-gov potentials. For example, for a long while, like a year or two, we’ve had self-running vehicles here. These are not traditionally associated as self-driving cars. These are tricycles. These are really slow and doesn’t hurt anyone when it runs into the walls.

Audrey Tang: It’s also open-source, open hardware. Everybody can modify it. What we’re trying to do here is, instead of just passing a law that may be far disconnected from the real technology, we’re asking the society to help us to come up with the norm, which is what society expects from technology.

Audrey Tang: Instead of asking people to adapt to technology, we just bring technology in its rudimentary stage to the sandbox for people to figure out what it is, together. I’ve found that this radically increases participation. People can feel that they can participate in a very early stage instead of at the later decisional stage.

Audrey Tang: We interact with the market, which is quite literal. Just next to us is the Jian Guo Flower Market. We have people just…

Visitor: Is it OK to take a picture?

Audrey Tang: Of course…just flowing from the street. As you can see, we tore down the walls and things like that. People can just discover us from the market. I remember an elderly couple from the Jian Guo Flower Market with lots of potted flowers and just walk by while we’re playing around with these self-driving tricycles.

Audrey Tang: They say, “Minister, what are you doing with those shopping baskets, those shopping carts?” I’m like, “These are not shopping carts. These are self-driving tricycles. If you hop on one, you tell it where to go. It drives through there.” They’re like, “No, it looks like shopping cart.” If you have lots of flowers in your hand, everything look like shopping carts.

Audrey Tang: They try to put it into the basket. Of course, it holds. They’re like, “I don’t want to be driven places. I really want them to follow me around as I was shopping in the flower market so I can do hands-free shopping.” They read on the news that self-driving vehicles can form a fleet. [laughs] They would like the empty baskets always follow them around.

Audrey Tang: Once it’s full, it moves a little bit backwards, summon another one, and follow them so they can continue shopping and interact with these self-driving tricycles as if they’re automatic shopping carts. They don’t want to be driven home anyway because, at the end of the shopping, they will probably put everything in a taxi or something like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very different use case of the emerging technologies. Once the market interact to create those norms, we work with the local universities and even basic education and high school students, because this is open source and open hardware, to tinker those self-driving tricycles to fit the social norm.

Audrey Tang: Once we do that, we also work with the original creator, which is MIT Media Lab, to figure out the security and safety parameters, what people now are calling AI ethics. What would you do to yield to a certain part of the population more than other part of the population?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, the experiments showed that people would defer mostly to elders and protect the elders, then people who are handicapped, then maybe pregnant women, and then children. In Boston, it’s the other way around. People would protect the children and ignore the elders. [laughs] Basically, every society has a different norm.

Audrey Tang: This norm-making atmosphere let us technologists have a much more clear view of what people expect from the architecture of the code. That then determines, at the end of it, what the law should contain. The law is not anticipating the norm, nor is it lagging behind the norm. The law is exactly one year or two year following the norm, just like a feed, I guess.

Audrey Tang: This is the model, so-called norm-first, that we’re approaching. I just wanted to show one more thing. This is how we build effective partnerships that work and pilot it on a smaller scale. Very soon, you’ll see a self-driving bus near the Taipei City Hall and also self-driving solar-powered ships in Kaohsiung as well.

Audrey Tang: Many a time, the civil society and private sector can start a pilot, but doesn’t have the political will to scale it to the entire country. This is a common problem with a lot of similar programs, like the Prototype Fund in Germany, actually.

Audrey Tang: It’s also encouraging failure by encouraging people to publish and mix and match each other’s contribution. If things work, there really is no way for a state to scale it to the state level. This is what, additionally we built called the Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: What it does is that it encourage everybody who can identify with any of the SDGs to bring their idea forward. Every year, we give out five trophies to the five teams. Last year, it was a team that used machine learning to help the water repair people so that they can detect water leaks within two days, instead of two months, by building a chat bot that tells them where are the most likely leaks.

Audrey Tang: This is a really good idea. It’s trilingual, in public sector, private sector, and academic social sector, all collaborative together, to build such a chat bot. They won the trophy. The trophy has no money. It is only a micro projector.

Audrey Tang: It looks like this. When you turn it on, it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, handing the trophy to you, which is very useful, because it symbolizes the presidential will, a promise that whatever they have done in the past three months, we are committed to make it into national policy within the next 12 months.

Audrey Tang: Doing whatever required for budget, personnel, or for regulation, even. There was another case last year that uses telemedicine, because in Taiwan, we have a lot of offshore islands, like Orchid Island, Green Island, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There is also local clinics that maybe have a general practitioner or nurse, and that practitioner is often distrusted by a local family. They would insist to send their family members through helicopters to the main Taiwan island for better treatment.

Audrey Tang: Last year, at night, a helicopter crashes, and so everybody is looking at the root cause. The mayor there said, “Well, we’re not trusted enough. We wish that a specialized doctor from the mainland island and the dispatch center of the helicopter can give a three-way video conference to show the family members that we can actually perform the diagnostics and even treatment by the instruction of the doctors in the main island.”

Audrey Tang: They prototyped such a trilateral video conference system, and it also worked really well. They won the award. The thing is that, during those three months, it’s a sandbox, but that is actually illegal. At that time, there was no law authorizing a nurse to operate patients based on doctors that are over video conference.

Audrey Tang: They can only do so if the doctors are nearby, like sitting next to them, and that’s OK. Because they won a trophy, when the Minister of Health says, “This requires a law change, five regulation changes, and a lot of budget, and we may not have the political will to do that,” they just turn the trophy on and summon the president.

Audrey Tang: The Minister of Health have to get a meeting with the Minister of Interior. They propose a bill, and it’s passed by the parliament, so now, it is legal. Not only is it legal, they actually allocated budget for more than 100 point clinics in the indigenous and/or remote areas, so that people can actually enjoy the same set of settings anywhere in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Every time we coach or incubate a Presidential Hackathon place, every year, we pick top 20, so that we will form a data collaborative that integrates all the input from the society. It’s very fortunate in Taiwan that we have a lot of what we call data coalitions in Taiwan that are entirely social sector.

Audrey Tang: For example, everybody who measures the air quality by themselves, it could be their balcony, their schools. The primary schools are using these as teaching tools to teach not only about PM2.5, but also teach about data stewardship and data controller in terms of GDPR.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of concepts, it’s very difficult to explain, but once you own an AirBox that continuously uploads the measurement into a distributed ledger technology, then it’s actually very intuitive to the children. A lot of teachers use that as an education tool as well.

Audrey Tang: Once they reach around 2,000 measurement stations, they actually have higher legitimacy than the environmental minister, because the minister only have 87 measurement devices. You tend to trust your neighbor’s numbers and not the minister’s numbers.

Audrey Tang: They did a collective bargaining. They talk with the environment minister, saying that, “We understand there is a legitimacy crisis that you’re facing, but Taiwan is a free country, so you cannot beat us, you can only join us.

Audrey Tang: “In exchange for you joining us and partaking in our measurement network, we would like to kindly ask you that you set up AirBoxes according to our standard and uploading to our network on these gaps.” What are those gaps?

Audrey Tang: These are industrial parks areas. These are places that are private property, and they cannot break and enter and install AirBoxes. We had an internal discussion. It turned out we owned the lamps in the industrial parks. We just hang the AirBoxes on the lamps and participate in the system measurement network called the HAAS.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s open source, open hardware, everywhere around the world, people can just download and start participating in this network of measurement. Altogether, we’ve applied this not only on the air, but also on water, and also on disaster prevention, earthquake prevention, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Every year, these data coalitions partners with the social sector and the public sector, who sometimes remain anonymous, because they are just mid-level and low-level staff who only reveal themselves when they win the trophy.

Audrey Tang: Together they proposed more than 100 ideas. Those ideas are selected to build social legitimacy by voting. This is a new way of voting called quadratic voting. In quadratic voting, we ask everybody who visits join.gov.tw, where there’s more than 10 million visitors…

Audrey Tang: Considering Taiwan is 23 million, we’ve got a lot of visitors. They may build a case with 99 points and vote it among more than 100 projects. If you really like one project – for example, this one, which is using computer vision and drones to detect marine debris on the ocean and to stop them at the ocean before they hit our shores – you can vote one vote.

Audrey Tang: That costs you one point. Two would cost four, three would cost nine, and so on. It’s quadratic. The intuition is that the marginal cost is the same as the marginal return. In any case, what they were trying to vote into that, the 10th vote cannot be cast, because it would cost 100, but you don’t have 100.

Audrey Tang: You can cast 9 votes and 81 points, and you have 18 points left. With 18 left, nobody want to squander their votes. Maybe you like the Loan Alert project, which is using machine learning again to combat organized crime and illicit financial flow by detecting shell companies automatically using machine learning. “That looks interesting,” so you vote 4 votes, which costs 16 points.

Audrey Tang: You have 2 points left. Then maybe you move to a nearby case, which is the WaterBoxes. It’s the AirBox team using the collision detection for the waterways between the arable lands, the land for agric use.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, because we have a new law this year that says any industrial plant on arable land that pollutes the organic plant gets cut its electricity and water automatically by the minister. Some of them would say, “We didn’t pollute. Upstream pollutes.”

Audrey Tang: They’re building an AirBox-like WaterBox detector so that everybody can be accountable to be each other, again, using distributed ledger technology. It’s, of course, more than one vote, so people would take some votes back and spend it here.

Audrey Tang: Maybe they do it 7 and 7, which is 49-49 points. Using mechanism design, we have seen that people studied a lot more than they would have if they just gets mobilized here, and spread out their votes into five or seven different projects, based on their expertise and understanding.

Audrey Tang: When we chose the top 20, everybody feel they have won and learned a lot, instead of the traditional way of voting, where half of people feel they have lost, or everybody feel that they have lost. This is actually building social legitimacy, so that when any of the teams make it into the top five, the legislators, the ministers will have no resistance to make it into a reality.

Audrey Tang: It already gained social legitimacy. If any of this interests you, I’m happy to expand more. I will just stop on this slide, which is this place, this very place. Every other week or so is occupied by a dozen – literally, 12 – ministries, section chief or higher level people.

Audrey Tang: Along with people, officials from the other four municipal social innovation labs to listen together to a trip from me that I visit the rural, indigenous, and remote islands, and meet them exactly where they are already meeting.

Audrey Tang: I participate into their town halls this week. When I listen to them, I go there by myself and a very small staff. All their questions have somebody here to answer. In Taiwan, we say meeting face-to-face builds 30 percent of trust.

Audrey Tang: Across high-definition bandwidth, it is maybe 20 percent of trust, but that’s enough to give the section chiefs here a lot of credit, in the sense that they can brainstorm across ministries much more easily, instead of abstractions.

Audrey Tang: If they propose something that works, instead of their minister get the credit, they get the credit, because people can see them as on the radically transparent report. If they say something insensitive, that upset the people, then instead of them, I will be at risk as the only one at the local vicinity.

Audrey Tang: By absorbing the risk and the spreading the credit, we enable this iteration of two weeks to resolve any regulatory problems, to propose new sandbox cases, and new Presidential Hackathon cases, by learning from the local people’s wisdom, and taking social technology to people, instead of asking people to come to technology.

Audrey Tang: That, we have also found that increase trust dramatically, not only between the public sector and the public, but also between the citizen groups here. That’s my answer to your question, I guess. Maybe we can have a follow-up discussion.

Visitor: Thank you for your introduction and overview. These are some good projects…

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Visitor: …some of the work that our members of delegation…

Audrey Tang: Yes?

Visitor: Any questions?

Visitor: First of all, thank you very much. This is impressive, very inspiring. How did you convince your colleagues in the government to do that? What was the biggest resistance you were facing initially?

Visitor: I was thinking, “Wow, this would be…” I cannot imagine this happening in Germany. Maybe it’s just, I don’t have enough inspiration. That’s maybe because Taiwan is smaller, or your people are more innovative. How did you make it happen?

Visitor: What was the biggest resistance initially, and how did you convince people to say, “OK, we’ll give it a try”? I mean your colleagues in the government.

Audrey Tang: Just six years ago, if you ask a random person on the street whether that is possible, they will say it’s impossible. It’s not fit for that. [laughs] The main catalyst, of course, is that we occupied the parliament in the March of 2014 in the Sunflower Movement and showing as a demonstration that this way of deliberation actually works.

Audrey Tang: Demonstration in the sense of demo, not as protest. At that time, there’s already 20 or so NGOs, each deliberating about one part of the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA. They have more legitimacy than the government, because they’re all very well-established NGOs.

Audrey Tang: If they together can form a consensus that gets then accepted – all the five demand, not one less – by the head of the parliament, then people generally think it’s a legitimacy-building journey. At the end of that year, 2014, I was hired, along with a lot of other people, who facilitated the occupy as reverse mentors to the cabinet then.

Audrey Tang: It was the Mao Chi-kuo cabinet under president Ma Ying-jeou. We’re quite familiar with how scalable listening works, having participated in Internet governance, but we are not very clear how the public service works.

Audrey Tang: Then it comes two years of mutual understanding. I trained personally thousands and thousands of public servants. We work on concrete cases, such as UberX, Airbnb, and so on, before I become the minister.

Audrey Tang: I think there’s a lot of trust just in public service that this way of working actually makes everybody more effective, in the sense that they can go home every day sooner, rather than working overtime. The foreign service people would understand what I’m talking about.

Audrey Tang: Also, it decrease risk, because the accountability is not just unidirectional. It’s not just people demanding from the government, it’s that people who have demands are invited to co-create. We can hold them accountable as well.

Audrey Tang: Mutual accountability decrease the risk of everybody. Finally, it increased the pride of becoming a public servant, instead of an anonymous person that gets blame when things goes wrong and gets no credit when a thing goes right.

Audrey Tang: Everybody gets an opportunity to show to the society how much they actually care about society and is creating something of value. These three axes – to reduce chore, to reduce risk, but to increase credit – this is the three axes that we’re improving without sacrificing any of the other two axes, so only Pareto improvements.

Audrey Tang: I think that way, we don’t meet the resistance. In a sense, we are the resistance. When you talk about anti-democracy and totalitarian worldviews, Taiwan is the resistance. We don’t meet a lot of resistance. We ask ministries to voluntarily send delegates to my office.

Audrey Tang: Theoretically, I can have 32 colleagues from ministries, but of course, we don’t have all the ministry sending. We have a staff of maybe 20 or so people now. It means that the Minister of Defense never send anyone.

Audrey Tang: This is not universally adopted, but the foreign service did send someone, as well as most of the people-facing ministries, all the 12 of them. I think this is a good start, and we’re certainly not forcing the ministries to adopt this way of working if they feel they are not ready for it.

Visitor: This is a direct follow-up because of that. I was also wondering, as your work is so impressive, it seems to me very good, it has to also have a very disruptive effect. For example, it can be negative or positive on the political system.

Visitor: You’re not talking about resistance from the democracy, but much of what you do is also traditionally in the purview of the parliament, taking in concerns of the citizen’s voice.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We’re augmenting their listening, yes.

Visitor: Stating norms into laws and all this. I see you are a minister without portfolio, meaning you have lots of risk to work with existing ministries. Maybe you could be even more disruptive, spend more resources. I’m wondering what’s the resistance you’ve faced there from the parliament…

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not like that.

Visitor: …the budget for your ministry.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have a ministry, that’s true. I rely on people who voluntarily join me from each ministry. The first people who joined, for example 葉寧, was a director-general, right? There’s many high-level public service people that are very much into this way of working.

Audrey Tang: They’re all quite resourceful. Even if they are not yet section chiefs when they joined – you were a section chief – when they joined, they become section chief, once they started doing the work here and go back to their ministry.

Audrey Tang: With more than 12 ministries and the blessing of director-general, at least section chief work, there is actually a lot of resources. The horizontal minister, as I prefer to translate the word, means that I work mostly to coordinate the values between the ministries.

Audrey Tang: This is a, originally, the position is for several ministries, for a horizontal minister to coordinate. We have nine horizontal ministers, each with the purview of certain ministries. I think I’m the only one, or one of the two, that doesn’t have a set ministerial association.

Audrey Tang: Any ministry that likes the idea of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement can associate with my office. We have a team of participation officers in each and every ministry as well to talk about those emerging issues.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that this is not a command and control, vertical leadership. This is a purely horizontal, facilitative leadership. For the parliament, I am no threat to them, because they are still in charge of the development and decisional delivery part of the policymaking.

Audrey Tang: What I am trying to do is just to reform the discover and define part of policymaking. In design thinking terms, these are two different diamonds. What they have done, and what they are focusing on, is on the decisional stage.

Audrey Tang: What we are focusing on is on discover and define stage. If people are more interested in public affairs, nobody will be against that. The fact that, at the end of 2014, all the mayors that are against us, saying, “The people are too stupid,” or something, lost the election.

Audrey Tang: Only the mayors that supported citizen participation won the election. There really is no reversal of this trend when William Lai, our previous premier, was running against in the primaries Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. Now, of course, they’re running together in the single ticket.

Audrey Tang: When he was running, he was saying, “If I become the president, I can be even more open in open government.” Simon Chang, which is Hang Kuo-yu’s running mate, also said that, “Dr. Tsai is not being open enough. I will be even more open,” and so on. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This is becoming a race toward openness, and there really is no threat to the parliamentary system.

Visitor: Who is it participating? Is that all age groups, or sorts of professionals? Or is that a specific group that is more digital?

Audrey Tang: The idea of multistakeholderism, of course, you only participate if you have a stake. For more global issues, like the marine debris that I talk about, we banned the use of indoor plastic straws. A couple years ago, there was a petition who get 5,000 signature required for ministerial response very quickly.

Audrey Tang: Because we allow pseudonyms, we only know them in the pseudonym, “I love elephant, and elephant love me.” We don’t know what mobilized this many people. When we meet them face-to-face, we discover she is just 16 years old, and she’s really good at social media and sharing how plastic straws damage the marine ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: It was a civics class assignment. She is basically just trying to find something that resonates with people and hit a jackpot. Then we invited the private sector who manufacture those one-use utensils, so that everybody understood, 30 years ago, when they entered the business, they were a social entrepreneur.

Audrey Tang: They were solving hepatitis B using these single-use utensils. Now, they are also looking to reform into new circular economy. We work out a lot of upcycling, carbon neutral, or even negative products, like coffee bean waste and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, it is an intergenerational solidarity, demographics show there is no disconnect between municipal and rural, but there is a difference in age group. The most active ones are people around 15 and people around 65.

Audrey Tang: Everybody else is just spending maybe spare time, but these two groups are doing full time. They have more time on their hands, of course. [laughs] Also, because, I guess, by default, they care more about the public welfare than the private welfare.

Audrey Tang: The 15-years-olds, I think, are always consistently shell the direction that the society should go. The 65-years-old know the wisdom of how to implement it well, without causing social disruption.

Visitor: I think you are the first minister globally that says 15-year-olds are leading the way, and you’re fine with it.

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. I’m old now. I’m 38. [laughs]

Visitor: Which brings me, bright as the future exists in Taiwan, I’ve seen reports that a couple of hundred students are out on the street. My question is rather, at 35, I think, obviously, you retired. How attractive is the offer?

Visitor: Has the offer to be that you come back and then take over quite a big challenge. Taiwan is a very digital place, in the sense that a lot of Taiwan’s wealth comes from laptops and the instrument space. I still think that with the demographics, even in Taiwan, of people getting older, it must have been quite a challenge.

Visitor: What was the deciding factor in the end for you to say, “I come back, and I challenge the matrix. I go through it. I want to leave my own footprint in the system”?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly what the premier, Lin Chuan, asked me, because he was kind enough to listen to my three working conditions when I joined the cabinet. It’s radical transparency, everything I chair, I publish.

Audrey Tang: It’s voluntary association, I never issue a single command, I don’t accept any command, and location independence. Wherever I’m working, I’m working. I don’t have to go to a cabinet office. I can be in the Social Innovation Lab and touring around Taiwan, and it seems around the world now.

Audrey Tang: These three conditions are not my invention. These are crowdsourced.

Visitor: I will talk with my boss about these three…

Audrey Tang: Yes, no. [laughs]

Visitor: What was that transparency?

Audrey Tang: Radical transparency, voluntary association, and location independence. Thank you. That’s the essence of open government. I didn’t create it myself. I crowdsourced this by a public Q&A session over a month with people online.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, when premier accepted those three demands, not one less, he said, basically, “It’s OK. We can do this experiment together, but I want to know your motivation. Are you here to accomplish a mission? Do you have a theory you want to prove? Do you feel an obligation to your people?” or something like that.

Audrey Tang: I’m like, “No, I’m here just for fun.” [laughs] I enjoy listening to people. I enjoy taking all the sides and figuring out new values together. This is actually my hobby. If people are paying taxes to make my hobby full time, why not?

Visitor: Thank you again what was really a fascinating presentation. It was so powerful. I’m curious, actually, to hear maybe how you work with existing bureaucracy. I’m sure that you encountered this, a difference in attitude, quite a bit.

Visitor: I also wanted to ask Christine’s question once more, but from the other way around. Not because you didn’t answer it, because really, it slipped my mind. Rather than asking what was the greatest resistance, what would you say would be the preconditions, maybe, for achieving this jump?

Visitor: It seems to me that it’s not a process for us. We just, a massive jump.

Visitor: …would be a suggestion, if I could…

Audrey Tang: Right.

Visitor: It’s very clear that, I think, we need to make this jump at some point. It is so painstakingly slow to move on anything digital. That’s got to do with history, with culture. This turnaround seems almost impossible to me. You say a few years ago, Taiwan would also see it as impossible.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, back then, people in Taiwan would also say it’s impossible.

Visitor: I was wondering what do we have to do? What are the preconditions?

Audrey Tang: When we occupied the parliament, we were fortunate enough to use a super high-speed network to connect not only the 20 NGOs and the people in the parliament so that the walls almost doesn’t exist, because we project exactly what they’re deliberating within – the parliament, the occupiers, I mean – but also coordinate all the activities around the parliament.

Audrey Tang: There was a day where there’s a half a million people on the street, and we can still coordinate quite well. That was because there was a previous generation of network called WiMAX that got deployed around that area.

Audrey Tang: Nobody is using that. We were sunsetting that, because Intel doesn’t want to maintain it anymore.

Visitor: I’m sorry, WiMAX?

Audrey Tang: It’s called WiMAX. It’s like 4G before 4G. It accomplished the same thing as 4G, but because of incompatibility with 3G equipment, it didn’t really catch on in Taiwan. We did a lot of early investment, especially in Taipei, but people just didn’t migrate easily from 3G to 4G.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, we had access to 4G technology two years before 4G deployment. We used a lot of WiMAX equipment in addition with just a physical, very long Ethernet cable to show that it’s almost magical.

Audrey Tang: If you have bandwidth, but narrow band, like 3G, so that you only see 240p, 360p resolution of each other’s image, and they haven’t met you before, they tend to project psychologically onto these low resolution images.

Audrey Tang: Then it creates mistrust, because it turns out that, with low resolution, people will feel you’re sending double messages. Actually, the micro expression shows exactly the message you want to show, but it’s lost in compression, not in translation. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Once we upgraded into WiMAX, or into high-bandwidth definition, so it’s at least 1080p, and sometimes 2K or 4K now, then people actually builds trust. It’s increasing trust. There’s a critical threshold.

Audrey Tang: Above a certain bandwidth, 10 megabits per second, trust become possible with real-time, synchronous communication, and below which, you can only rely on asynchronous modes, which doesn’t create the same sense of deliberation.

Audrey Tang: It’s still a discussion, but we wouldn’t call it a deliberation. In Taiwan, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, when she was campaigning for president last time, she promised broadband as a human right as her campaign platform.

Audrey Tang: It means that anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of Yu Shan, 4,000 meters, or the offshore islands of Dongsha and Taiping, everybody is guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second as a human right. Through 4G, or through landline, it’s now only â¬15 per month, â¬16 per month, so very affordable for unlimited data.

Visitor: You guys have that in every single corner of the country?

Audrey Tang: Yes. In the remote, rural, and indigenous areas, we now achieve 98 percent coverage. The other two percent are almost all above 3,000 meters, but even for those, the Ministry of Interior is saying they’re using the helicopters, when they’re not delivering wounded people.

Audrey Tang: When they are training in their drill runs, they are helping to set up telecommunication equipment so that we can complete the other two percent.

Audrey Tang: This is a real change in legitimacy theory, because as long as you have a significant portion of people who are not in the bandwidth that enable this kind of deliberation, live streaming, and bilateral, bidirectional communication, then you cannot make this model work.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t travel to places only with good WiFi. That means municipal areas. Then it increased the participation and legitimacy for municipal dwellers, and it will make all the rural people very angry. They would be then systemically excluded from this way of policymaking.

Audrey Tang: That would then decimate the foundation of democracy, literally taking 10 percent out of it. I think that is the foundational theory that we must do broadband as a human right first. Cybersecurity, also. These two as the foundation, then people can just innovate however they want.

Audrey Tang: We don’t have to do everything. The sandboxes, the social innovators actually do most of the things for us. We really have to do the cybersecurity layer and the broadband as human right layer.

Visitor: I think this is probably one of the most major differences between Taiwan and Germany currently, because one of our ministers said that we don’t need broadband in every village. She used the expression, “At every milk bottle.”

Visitor: The milk bottle is the symbol of the rural, traditional lifestyle, where you still have a bottle of milk in front of your doorsteps every morning.

Visitor: Delivered.

Visitor: In Taiwan, it’s completely the opposite. We need WiFi or…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so you can know the milk was from organic production. [laughs]

Visitor: Speaking of connection and cybersecurity infrastructure, in Germany, the big debate right now is on Huawei and whether or not Germany should allow Huawei to be used. What does it take as the Digital Minister, as the clear expert in this field?

Visitor: What’s your recommendation for Germany how to deal with Huawei, is one thing, but also, how to increase an awareness in government and broadband? At every milk bottle might be the right step to take.

Audrey Tang: Two very large questions, and we have 15 minutes. Maybe we can do a seminar on it.

Audrey Tang: The first one is easily answered in a Taiwan context, because we had that debate when we occupied the parliament. 1 of the 20 NGO-occupied areas specifically talk about telecommunication services.

Audrey Tang: It’s 20 aspects of CSSTA. One of them is telecommunication services. The consensus on the street, literally, at the time was that it’s not about any single company. We talk about PRC components in critical infrastructures, including telecommunication.

Audrey Tang: There was two broad consensus. The first one is that there is no such thing as a private market player in the PRC. People generally agreed that the party, the CCP, can at any given time confiscate or de facto control through non-market forces, so that any operator becomes de facto state-owned, and everybody is aware of that fact.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that it’s not also not about backdoors or Trojan horses. It’s about a path dependency. Once we use a PRC component in the 3G deployment, it becomes very difficult to move away to another design, to another system.

Audrey Tang: You will have to work around it, designing more security parameters around it, and investing far more than the cost you save by using that component in the first place. Maybe it pays for itself, because it allows for early adoption or something like that.

Audrey Tang: Then, when it comes 4G, when it comes 5G, you will have to then reinvest again if you want to migrate away. It creates a path of least resistance to continued dependency. We think it’s not a good idea, while they’re making territorial claims, of course.

Audrey Tang: These are the two broad consensus. Because of this consensus on the street, the National Communication Commission and the National Security Council at the time is then taking the consensus from the street and doing their internal evaluation.

Audrey Tang: They accepted this result. Starting from 4G deployment five years ago, no PRC component can enter into our telecommunication infrastructure, periphery or core. That’s a done deal. You don’t hear us debating it, because it’s done five years ago.

Visitor: The economy hasn’t crashed, and people are still using the phones.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, look at our stock market. [laughs] Right, so the market hasn’t crashed, obviously. Also, it makes the cybersecurity industry in Taiwan growing, because instead of relying on the upstream vendors to do cybersecurity assessment, we have to do the systemic analysis ourselves.

Audrey Tang: This is not just about blacklisting. This is also about whitelisting, like promoting the component that pass the lab test here, that are originated from here or from trustworthy partners, and things like that. We build also a brand of ourselves, like we’re battle-hardened, because you don’t have to test it.

Audrey Tang: We face cyber attacks, like literally thousands, every day. If it survives such cybersecurity attacks, then of course, it’s pretty good equipment. That’s the answer to your first part of your question. I would, of course, encourage every jurisdiction to do their own systemic analysis on both the path dependency part, but also the non-market force part.

Audrey Tang: You may come to different conclusions. After all, PRC is not making a territorial claim on you. [laughs] This should be done and in a public fashion. That’s my suggestion. The second part is actually not very easy to answer, because unless the public clamors for it, there is no social or legal requirement for the parliament to listen.

Audrey Tang: It’s only in Taiwan that, when we say that broadband facilitates mutual understanding in a very public way, that we really show it to the entire country, who are dialing into the live stream of the occupiers, listening to the deliberations, analysis, and so on.

Audrey Tang: People see how deeper people can discuss about common topics, like telecommunication policy, even for people who are relatively not informed about this matter, do people actually believe this is actually good for democracy.

Audrey Tang: Just look at how the Hong Kong people are using live stream technology to that effect. It is educating not only citizens, but also everybody around a particular matter. Without that deliberation, demonstration, I don’t really see an easy way to convince the public that this is actually good for their town hall meetings as well.

Audrey Tang: If I may, I usually just show one picture. This is a real picture in the, not a very large town, as in Bowling Green, Kentucky in the US. What we’ve done there is that there is a system called Polis that we used here, first in 2015, to ask what people feel about UberX using non-professional-licensed drivers.

Audrey Tang: People may agree or disagree on each other’s sentiment. Once you click agree or disagree, another sentiment appears, and you can agree or disagree on it. Your avatar move toward people who feel like you.

Audrey Tang: Then you can also propose your own sentiment for other people to resonate or not with. As you can see, this area has nothing to do with the number of people in it. If you mobilize 1,000 people to go, it’s exactly the same, and when, it’s just one dot here. It doesn’t increase the area which measures the plurality, not the number of people.

Audrey Tang: We only take into agenda of our policymaking everything that can convince across all the groups. The divisive ideas really have no room to play. Because there is no reply button, you cannot do personal attacks, either.

Audrey Tang: This design facilitates common understanding. Every time we’re on Polis, we see something like that. In Bowling Green, for example, they have a set of five divisive issues that each one would neatly split the town apart into two roughly equal-sized factions.

Audrey Tang: These are the traditional ideological American issues, which I will not go into detail. It turns out most people agree with most of their neighbors on most of things most of the time, even for the issues concerning township issues.

Audrey Tang: Regardless of whether they are Democrats or Republican, everybody said that, “Our current education curriculum of science, technology, engineering, and math need to include art so that it becomes STEAM, not just STEM.”

Audrey Tang: This is such a simple idea. It doesn’t cost much. Everybody is for it, regardless of whether they are Democrats or Republicans. Obviously, if the mayor do so, their chance of reelection increase just by maybe 0.1 percent.

Audrey Tang: This is what we call low-hanging fruit. They should have done it here. The bandwidth in institutional media, social media present it as if these are the only important issue. Actually, arts in basic education is a very important issue for the people there.

Audrey Tang: It allows people to discover that they are a polity after all. This is just in the township level. Even rural areas can conceivably do this, and also broadband. More broadband choice is always popular. In any case, what I’m trying to get at is that this is not what people usually think when they think of democracy.

Audrey Tang: People usually think the showdown between opposing values. Actually, conversation between those values, if you design the social media just right, so that it becomes prosocial media, rather than antisocial media, then people discover what they have in common.

Audrey Tang: That is the basis of democracy. Not just partisan democracy, but also deliberative democracy. I think that maybe just a regulative thought, because the opportunity for it to be done in every town is negligible, I guess.

Audrey Tang: Although Macron did send something like the European conference, where every town should talk about the future of Europe, but that is maybe a good idea in the ideascape. Any township leader, and any mayor, any district leader, can actually try this for free. It’s free software.

Visitor: What is the system called here?

Audrey Tang: Polis, P-O-L-I-S.

Visitor: It’s for free?

Audrey Tang: It’s for free.

Visitor: Did you design it?

Audrey Tang: We helped design it, but it’s invented by people in Seattle called Colin Megill. They’re also occupiers.

Visitor: Thank you.

Visitor: I had one question. It’s related to the democracy and deep learning, of course. There is a consensus mechanism also about this idea of collaborative government.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, co-gov.

Visitor: Do you see any risks also that this might change a little bit maybe norms integrated in a different way? This kind of joint approach is more of a challenge. If you would look in the future, or at the process for 10, 20 years, is this for granted, this kind of…?

Audrey Tang: It’s not for granted. As I said, broadband as human right includes it, rather than excludes it. Trust and cybersecurity, these are preconditions, but those are just technological preconditions. There’s also cultural precondition, that people are willing to take the other side sometimes.

Audrey Tang: That people see themselves not as bound by one single culture, but is willing to listen across culture, what we call transculturalism. In Taiwan, there is a very strong traditional of transculturalism, mostly the very devout monoculture people probably already emigrated somewhere else.

Audrey Tang: People who remained agreed to help each other when an earthquake comes, when a typhoon comes, and things like that, regardless of whether they identify as Austronesian or if they identify as ethnic Hakka, Hoklo, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Waves of new immigrants and new citizens now in this republic of citizens. I think this transculturalism, the spirit of it, anyway, which is, again, the foundation of liberal democracy. That’s what liberal means in liberal democracy.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s key, but if we lose that, if people think that we’re outside of the polity, think that these are not humans, and we don’t have conversation about non-humans, then this way just breaks down. A certain sense of mutual recognition of each other’s humanity across cultures, I think that is the societal precondition for this to occur.

Visitor: Some very quick questions. I think when you talk about digital and politics together, it is not possible to not talk about the tech giants and their role of the…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the private sector.

Visitor: …your perspective is Facebook, Google, etc. are more problem or part of the solution? If you allow me to be greedy and ask a second question, three months from now, will you still be a minister?

Audrey Tang: I was a minister in the previous premier and the premier before that. Before that, I was understudy minister working in the same office as a reverse mentor because I was still young back then, still 35, so I qualified as a young reverse mentor to Minister Jacqueline Tsai under the Ma Ying-jeou presidency.

Audrey Tang: A little known fact is that in the cabinet, there’s more independent, non-partisan ministers than ministers of any party. In the horizontal minister level, a vast majority, like six or seven of us, is non-partisan. Some of us, like John Deng in charge of trade negotiation, was actually a minister of Economic Affairs in the previous presidency. We’re not as stable as career public service, [laughs] but somewhat stable level.

Audrey Tang: Regardless, I think I’ll be serving some of these facilitative functions either under the Digital Minister title or just a lowercase digital minister, means I preach about digital. [laughs] It will work regardless because it really doesn’t depend on a title. It depends on people willing to let me take their side. That’s my answer to you.

Visitor: My question was more about what you’re doing…

Audrey Tang: It’s fine, of course. I would also say that it is not just about Taiwan. We have a lot of friends overseas who are eager to adopt this idea. I’m also a board member in, for example, RadicalxChange, which is taking quadratic voting to all sort of different places. They use it in Colorado for budget voting, in a semi-sovereign entity called DAO in Ethereum. You’ll find that idea in Gitcoin and so on.

Audrey Tang: There are people who identify with a governance system without that being a government. It could be existing entirely on Ethereum. That is also what we’re working toward. There’s also the CONSUL Foundation that assisted to power the Madrid deliberations in most of the Spanish-speaking world. I think they won UN Public Service Award.

Audrey Tang: There, because Madrid City is still using it but it’s not as active in contributing to it as before because of elections, they’re now relocating to Amsterdam, and we’re continuing this development. I’m also about to become a board member in it. A lot of work I do is on an international scale, but Taiwan is a good lab to test those ideas.

Visitor: And Facebook, Google?

Audrey Tang: They are actually governors, too. They are also doing design on international scale. They are similar to Ethereum in the sense that people identify with them and is willing to provide computational power in the brain [laughs] or in their computers at their service.

Audrey Tang: A lot of it, people focus on privacy, but I don’t think privacy is the main gain. After GDPR, Facebook and Google eventually will conform to that. Aside from privacy, I still think the users of Facebook and Google are getting a bad deal even considering the future where privacy issue will have been solved.

Audrey Tang: For example, people still don’t have control over the data. Data is not about privacy. Data is about social relationship. As long as one of my friend who occur in a face-to-face meeting decide to check in on Facebook, my data of being socially present here is already shared and compromised without my consent.

Audrey Tang: There is no way for me to boycott Facebook or boycott their precision analyzers from targeting the fact that I’m here because somebody took a photo or described, “I am here with Audrey.” As a semi-celebrity, this happens to me all the time. Somebody just take a picture with me and send it to Facebook so Facebook knows that I’m here.

Audrey Tang: There is no way for me to opt out of it if they’re just describing me instead of taking a picture of me. Because of that, I think that there need to be more AirBox-like data coalitions in the sense that we’re performing, collectively, work to enrich their AI algorithms.

Audrey Tang: As long as one of people who appear in the social network setting agree to transfer the data, we’re essentially performing work for free for Facebook without getting any control over it.

Visitor: Or pay.

Audrey Tang: Or pay, right. If you’re more of a financial mindset, of course, then you don’t get a share for your collective labor, which is why labor union gets invented in the first place. [laughs] Individually, no workers bargain as well as the large capitalists. Maybe union is a good metaphor.

Audrey Tang: If people form a coalition and also decide to govern their data in a democratic function, just like the AirBox network and, very soon, WaterBox network, then it’s more like a cooperative. Of course, we can debate whether Ethereum counts as a cooperative. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that unless people form coalitions that can bargain on a data front beyond and above privacy, then Facebook and Google are always at a benevolent dictator, at least a governor stage, which is why our relationship with them is semi-diplomatic.

Audrey Tang: It’s not exactly private sector/public sector. It’s one governor to another. We did agree on certain norms. We say our Control Yuan, our National Auditing Office, and so on establish a norm on campaign financing. Everybody must be a citizen to donate to a campaign in the first place.

Audrey Tang: We publish the raw data in the Control Yuan, so everybody can do independent analysis on the contribution and expense. We say this is a norm in Taiwan. I don’t really care what the norm is in California, but this is Taiwan’s norm when it comes to political advertisements.

Audrey Tang: You either implement exactly the same as the Control Yuan’s level of transparency and accountability, or there may be social sanctions. We didn’t pass any law for that. We just say, “This is the standard we hold ourself to.” We see a lot of people who don’t donate to campaign finance because of transparency. They go to Facebook, to Google, for precision targeting instead.

Audrey Tang: We say, “You either treat yourself, as a fellow governor, to the same standard, or you can not run advertisements. We will say that there must be a social sanction against that.” Then they’re like, “Of course, we will implement exactly as you do.” Facebook now implements exactly the same accountability and transparency measures as the Control Yuan.

Audrey Tang: Google is like, “OK, we will just not run political advertisements for your campaign session.” Twitter says, “OK, no political ads.” There is some norm-setting possible using diplomatic fashion, like we do the same here. This is the norm here. Diplomatically, you need to respect our norm, but there is a limit of what diplomatic approaches can take.

Audrey Tang: Their diplomatic power goes more strong the more into life, like Libra or whatever, that they become, like issuing their own currency. Until a day where citizens can form meaningful coalitions, vis-Ã -vis those control-holders, it will become more and more difficult for so-called sovereign entities to negotiate with those semi-sovereign entities.

Audrey Tang: They are essentially collecting more tax than the sovereign entities.

Visitor: Is that not at least a bit pessimistic, though, because to your point, it requires a cycle of knowledge that’s going to take years to achieve, at least internally. I feel that people at Facebook are going to be 10 years ahead of us in the government?

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, you see the same with other addiction substances. With tobacco, with liquor, and things like that, it also took years for people to realize that there is an externality involved. Once people become very clear, and you can quantify the externality, you see very swift action from the consumer coalitions.

Audrey Tang: They become not only consumers, but actually co-creators of regulation against the environmental and social externality on addictive substance. Social media in particular is an addictive substance that has negative externality on mental health. If you take a more they are like liquor and tobacco company point of view, I do think that people would wake up for it.

Visitor: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Visitor: Great information, and thank you. It was very inspiring. I’m sure we’ll be in touch.

Visitor: Please come back to Germany and…

Audrey Tang: Yes, yes.

Visitor: …inspire and teach us.

Audrey Tang: I’ll be back on March 31st.

Visitor: Where are you at, in which city?

Audrey Tang: In Berlin.

Visitor: Invited by the government or…?

Audrey Tang: By the Green Party, I think.

Visitor: OK, March 31st.

Visitor: We have to help…

Visitor: …because this is 60 minutes of one thousand questions popping up with your great presentation. We need to physically continue. I have the urge to continue this conversation, but we also have a great program for the day. We need to give other people a chance to speak with her, but they will have a hard time topping what you just did.

Visitor: What is the best way to contact?

Audrey Tang: Just email me, and I’m also on Twitter. You can find my email on Twitter. I’m audreyt, and if you search for Audrey Tang, that’s the first hit.

Visitor: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Visitor: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, thank you.