Audrey Tang: Hello.

Kate O’Flaherty: Hello. How are you?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good. Thank you.

Kate O’Flaherty: Good. You’re in the airport at the moment.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I’m in the airport lounge. I’m going to speak a little bit softer, assuming that you can still hear me of course.

Kate O’Flaherty: I can hear you really well. That’s great. Where are you going?

Audrey Tang: To New Zealand, actually, to Auckland.

Kate O’Flaherty: Fantastic. What are you doing there?

Audrey Tang: There’s this annual Foocamp there called the BAA Camp, or Kiwi Foo. I’m attending it for the first time.

Kate O’Flaherty: Fantastic. That sounds lovely. Well, thank you for taking the time while you’re at the airport to speak to me. I really appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: Just for setting the time frame, I have two and a half hours. I don’t know whether that will be sufficient for you.

Kate O’Flaherty: That’s plenty of time. Don’t worry. I think we’ll take a half an hour probably, if that’s OK.

Audrey Tang: Sure, because there’s a lot of questions.

Kate O’Flaherty: Yes.

Audrey Tang: If you want to go through them all, I would estimate one hour of time would be.

Kate O’Flaherty: It could be.

Audrey Tang: Give or take.

Kate O’Flaherty: It depends how much you have to say, but if you have to say a lot, I’m happy with that because we want to get as much information as we can. We’re doing a big piece. It’s 1,500 words.

Audrey Tang: Oh, wow.

Kate O’Flaherty: We want lots of detail if possible. Should we begin?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, go ahead.

Kate O’Flaherty: I’m recording, but my recorder is only doing the audio at the moment. Are you recording, as well?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m doing a screen recording of the video of both sides, and also a regular recorder. We’ll have three channels, so there will be high-quality audio and video that I will send you right after the call.

Kate O’Flaherty: Perfect. Thank you very much. Could you start with telling me a bit about your background? Have you always been into programming? What was it like growing up for you in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: My background is pretty transparent. I started programming in 1989. That would be when I was eight years old. It was around the time when martial law was lifted in Taiwan. We had freedom of the press for the first time. My parents were both working in journalism, started to slowly migrate to typing instead of writing for their work.

Audrey Tang: At the time, things like the IBM PC and so on are still considered work and not personal items. I was interested, so I just reading up on programming when it was around eight years old and started programming without a computer at home.

Audrey Tang: I drew the keyboards and wrote down the responses that the computer would supposedly give me and so on. It went on for quite some time before my parents finally cave in and gave me a personal computer.

Kate O’Flaherty: How did you become interested in politics?

Audrey Tang: It’s immersive. When I was eight, as I mentioned, we just got democracy and freedom of press. Everybody was talking about politics. We get to vote for the first time meaningfully. I remember around the dinner table in our home, because my dad is a political commentator in the newspaper, and my mom also covers for politics when I was young.

Audrey Tang: There’s this constant debate about the speed we’re taking to our democracy, about what’s the best form, whether it’s splitting up, whether it means constitutional amendments, whether it’s other things like that, and how this multiparty system actually work and things like that. I grew up listening to this, as did other people in my generation.

Kate O’Flaherty: Very interesting. Tell me about the Sunflower Movements and how it changed things in Taiwan and led you to where you are?

Audrey Tang: Like any large massive-scale movement, anyone’s viewpoint would be radically different from anyone else who participated. There’s literally half-a-million different viewpoints. [laughs] What kind of experiences would you like to hear about those 22 days?

Kate O’Flaherty: Where were you when it was happening? What were you doing personally?

Audrey Tang: I remember I was working with Socialtext in the Silicon Valley as well as a consultant for Apple at the time. I remember posting in a Socialtext chat channel, we call it Signals, that’s our virtual workspace, saying that I would need to take a leave because democracy needs me.

Audrey Tang: It’s like one of the statement that really stuck, because I really have to explain to my co-workers what’s happening, why a bunch of people occupied the parliament. I remember going there at the night of the protest, bringing my laptop and my phone for the covering of the event, providing the necessary equipment for the civic media there.

Audrey Tang: We all thought that it will end that night. We all thought that it’s just one night of demonstration. I remember this young person who lent me his laptop, because we need this really stable connection between my WiFi and through an Ethernet bridge to the camera person who is taking in the footage of the protests outside of the parliament.

Audrey Tang: He was like, "This is my administrator password." I think he was running Windows, and saying, "You can have that laptop all night if you want." He looked like a 20-something. How does a 20-something, is OK with parting with this expensive-looking laptop, [laughs] and just leaving it to a complete stranger for the entire night?

Audrey Tang: Little did I know that he belongs to the Black Island Youth, the group who decided to break into the parliament, climb over walls, and things like that. Laptop is going to be a burden, [laughs] which is why he’s just simply depositing it in the media camp right outside the parliament.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s a really interesting meeting between the free software people, my camp, and the people who are young activists, and people who are civic media. We did not work this closely in any of those demonstrations before.

Audrey Tang: There is plenty of demonstration, like the antinuclear, forced nuclear plant demonstration, where we strictly speaking just provided broadband and things like that, but always in a very neutral way. We just support the media, we don’t become the media.

Audrey Tang: The line becomes really blurred between the media, the network people, and the activists during the days that followed, because we had to improvise practically everything. There was no Internet connection that begin with, and we had to bootstrap ourselves.

Audrey Tang: I remember getting those 350 meters Ethernet cable to connect through the parliament building to the street outside. I remember talking in our hackathon, the g0v hackathon, about whether it’s a crazy idea to apply for a fiber optic line to a random place in a street’s cross section.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think any of the telecoms got those requests before, but it is the place we needed to provide the WiFi for the people covering the protests on the street. They actually consented, and sent us a fiber optic line a couple days later.

Audrey Tang: I remember setting up those real-time spreadsheets using a spreadsheet that I co-wrote with Dan Bricklin, the inventor of spreadsheets, called EtherCalc. We were just beta testing that free software spreadsheet, and then people started just swarming on that little host to paste all the links they could find that is relevant to the protests, including the maps, the charging stations.

Audrey Tang: The OpenStreetMap people did a really comprehensive mapping of the resources, the police force, where to get supplies, and things like that, as well as real time social analytics of the sentiments across the island about all the major arguments of the protest.

Audrey Tang: As well as, of course, court reporter style, stenographic recording of all of the debates that’s been held in the occupied parliament, as well as in the streets nearby. There’s a lot of memories. Toward the end of the occupy, there is a bunch of people who don’t want to retreat.

Audrey Tang: They appeal to us, saying that, "We want to use the system that you are using for decision making, Loomio, to have a real consultation about whether to retreat, or whether to continue occupying." I also remember how we started using Loomio, because we had this coordination problem of just random volunteers showing up to help with the connectivity.

Audrey Tang: We had no idea whether they are actual civic hackers or engineers, or whether they were just here for the fun. Because the engineers have a fast lane toward all the occupy stations, and so maybe people get in for the ride. We had to somehow tell a network engineer from a non-network engineer, and so we used Loomio to crowdsource the ideas.

Audrey Tang: We started with some really bad ideas like depositing one’s passport or an electronic ID. Nobody mentioned blockchain... At that point it wasn’t that popular, in 2014. We settled with something really, really simple, which is asking anyone who shows up who looks new what’s two to the power of six and two to the power of nine. If they can answer it, then they’re likely a civic or a Internet engineer. Things like that.

Audrey Tang: Literally, every day is a completely different topography and completely different configuration that we need to work with. I remember a day where the Supreme Court did this interpretation of the law saying that flash mobs are constitutional. They don’t have to get a approval beforehand if there’s no coordinator and there is no organized, premeditated will to gather.

Audrey Tang: Suddenly, we have random people showing up and holding iPads or wearing GoPros and saying they want to be volunteer civic journalists because now flash mobs are legal. We had to coordinate those people. We made a website where you get to upload your photo and type your name. They print out this civic journalist badge for you with a QR code.

Audrey Tang: A succinct explanation of your rights after this Supreme Court judgment, so that any police who didn’t get a note can scan the QR code and understand the civic journalists is now protected in the same way constitutionally as mainstream journalists. It’s 22 very different worlds day after day, but it’s fun.

Kate O’Flaherty: Fantastic. It sounds like it’s very highly organized, as well, which might be one of the reasons it worked so well. Do you agree with that?

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say it’s organized. It’s very tightly, I would say, coordinated. That that would be a better term.

Audrey Tang: There’s no organization, per se, there’s just protocols. It’s co-organized by at least a dozen, and by the end of it at least two dozen NGOs and some, not even organizations, like g0v, which is a random bunch of people.

Audrey Tang: Each of them had to find places where they provide some value to the other occupiers while agreeing on some way of achieving a rapid, rough consensus so that we can go on to do our thing throughout the day, respond to the media, and things like that. There’s this huge amount of using Hackpad, of using EtherCalc, of using all sorts of collaborative documents to do synthetic documents, guidelines.

Audrey Tang: It’s very common for one site, or one group, or just one person to put up something that they think is a viable plan for the day on Hackpad, and then people would swarm on it. The discussion itself would be recorded and actually live streamed. More people discovered and joined the discussion. Then, magically, people agree on something by the end of the hour, and things like that. It’s literally hundreds of people.

Audrey Tang: I would say that the non-human agent, things like Hackpad and EtherCalc are really providing the facilitation role in a very agency-wielding way, but I wouldn’t say that those collaborative documents are organizers of the protest. It would sound very funny. [laughs] I would say it’s "coordinated."

Kate O’Flaherty: That made sense. Tell me about how you met CL and how you ended up working together, because I’ve spoken to Nesta in the UK. They describe the situation where you met and you went back to the government. How did that work in real life?

Audrey Tang: You mean Chia-Liang Kao?

Kate O’Flaherty: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I met CL, I’m sure that we met virtually on some bulletin board systems, but that doesn’t count. We met face to face when I recruited him for a random Silicon Valley startup. That was in early 2000s, something like that. It’s around 2000.

Audrey Tang: I worked in my first startup as a CTO of a small company called Inforian. Inforian is a prototype, like we did a first online auction site in Taiwan. A meta-search client, and what we will now call the social media or a MySpace-like or Orkut-like thing. Got some investment from Intel around the time that I quit. It was one of the larger Internet companies back in 1996.

Audrey Tang: After I quit, CL became the CTO of that company and started doing the instant messenger, CICQ, which was really popular, also. We were alums in the same startup company, but our times did not overlap. After the dotcom crash, CL also left Inforian. We started planning what we were going to do next.

Audrey Tang: We thought that we could build a federated, not centralized, social system. We would build on bulletin systems, which is part Freenet, part Diaspora — now that we have words for it. It was really hard to explain in the 2000s. We did the startup together. That’s how we met.

Kate O’Flaherty: How did your relationship develop? How did you get involved together in the current Taiwan initiative?

Audrey Tang: It’s 2001 or 2002 where we started those weekly meet-ups called the Elixus Meetups. The Elixus project was... mostly it’s a random bunch of people who are inspired by things like Indymedia or nettime-* and those communities, and want to build a similar community in Taiwan. We did a lot of things.

Audrey Tang: We translated this very important software called Movable Type and before Movable Type, Slash; and also published with O’Reilly Taiwan quite a few books. Also, translated the word "blog"（部落格） and started this circle of bloggers that meet regularly to talk about how we can decentralize or re-decentralize journalism.

Audrey Tang: CL and I were both active participants in that circle. We meet every week, every Sunday at Wisteria House, which was a Mecca for the Taiwan activists working on democracy for the past 40 years or something. It’s interesting. We quickly gathered random sorts of people who I will now see as a prototype of the g0v movement some 10 years later.

Audrey Tang: That’s how our relationship developed. He taught me this programming language called Lisp, and I taught him this programming language called Perl. Then we did some software projects together. He did this decentralized version control system called SVK, which is like a predecessor to Git.

Audrey Tang: I implemented this language called Perl 6, and things like that. We always check other’s projects and collaborate it and fill in where there are things that the others missed perhaps when starting a project. Sometimes me in the supporting role, sometimes he in supporting role. It went on, I think, for years. He went to London, I think, to Fotango.

Audrey Tang: After I joined Socialtext, I managed to convince him to join Socialtext. It was 2008 when I joined Socialtext. He had this, I’m sure that he told you this, paragliding accident which was the foundation of the g0v movement, because he was paralyzed in bed and couldn’t do anything other than try to organize people.

Audrey Tang: That was when this ingenious domain name (g0v.tw) was invented. I think it was the missing piece. We tried to bootstrap communities of this kind for at least five times before, but this domain name, "g0v", I think is crucial.

Kate O’Flaherty: You’ve been digital minister since 2016. You are the youngest-ever minister in the government, is that correct?

Audrey Tang: Not quite. Of course, I was the youngest when I joined. There was a minister who’s younger than me, Cheng Li-Chun, when she joined the cabinet many years ago for the first time as the minister in charge of youth affairs. She was, I think, a few months younger than me when I joined the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: I’m the youngest minister without portfolio, but that isn’t saying much.

Kate O’Flaherty: [laughs] You’re one of the youngest, we could...

Audrey Tang: You can say that I was youngest when I joined or the youngest minister without portfolio or the first digital minister. I don’t really care.

Kate O’Flaherty: [laughs] What’s life like for you now?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

Kate O’Flaherty: What’s a typical day like for you now?

Audrey Tang: There’s no typical day. My work is very structured around the days of the week. There’s a typical Monday, there’s a typical Tuesday, and so on, but there’s no typical day, per se.

Audrey Tang: Which day of the week is your favorite?

Kate O’Flaherty: I have no idea. Friday.

Audrey Tang: My typical Friday [laughs] is having a multi-stakeholder forum or discussion with the participant officers in the ministries. In every ministry, and it is part of a national regulation we instated is that every ministry must assign at least one person, but more often than not, a team of people who work as POs, or participating officers.

Audrey Tang: Just like officers who talk with the Parliament or officers who talk with the media, these people are there to talk with everybody, with state organs. The PO network is one of our ways of trying to imbue into the government this coordination without control or leaderless framework that we’ve been quite dependent on for the past 20 years or so outside of the government in a national setting.

Audrey Tang: The way it works is, of course, we use this free software system called Sandstorm that provides collaborative documents and spreadsheets and Kanban Boards, you name it, chat rooms, and get the people from every ministry to form this network on it. What we do is that we look at the e-petition cases, whereas before we had this national petition system as a result of the Sunflower Movement.

Audrey Tang: By the end of 2014, it is a demand of the national forum of citizens, which was held because of the Sunflower Movement, that the government must not repeat this mistake, which was to open the cross-trade service trade agreement to public consultation very late in the process, where people are left with the agenda-setting power of, I don’t know, just bikeshedding.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that for all the regulations and all the laws, there must be an ongoing system for people to have meaningful conversations. When the agenda set in power was monopolized by the government, people really want a We the People like addition system where 5,000 citizens together can demand a response from the administration.

Audrey Tang: Unlike We the People, many people propose to cross-ministerial issues. It wasn’t really clear which minister or which officer would be in charge of responding to those e-petitions. What we observed was that the single-ministry issues get really meaningful two-way dialog with ministries, especially the already public-facing ministries, such as the health and welfare.

Audrey Tang: Pretty much all the cross-ministry issues just get an explanation rather than a real solution, a real dialog for that matter. The reason why is that the ministry people is very silent. They are not used to working with or across ministry boundary lines.

Audrey Tang: As a ministry without portfolio and therefore not partial to any ministry, the idea is that I lead this peer network in a service-based leadership way, in the sense that I don’t command it do anything. If they need a facilitator, we provide the facilitator. If they need to co-design workshop, we hold the co-design workshop. If they need ways to handhold them to talk with angry stakeholders, we do that, too.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we lower their fear, uncertainty and doubt. On a typical Friday, we will meet in the social innovation lab in Taipei. We meet roughly twice a month, sometimes three times a month, to do a mind map together with the stakeholders who did the petitions.

Audrey Tang: As a concrete example, people petitioned that there is now random scams on Facebook that propose to sell some goods at really cheap price, but when they order and pay on arrival. When they pay for, say a hard disk, when they arrive to their doors, they found that it’s actually counterfeit goods or really, it’s a brick, but they have already paid and delivery people have already gone.

Audrey Tang: The sender is anonymous or a non-existing entity. When they came to the ever-so-helpful instant-message assistant of that Facebook page to discover it is actually a robot. [laughs] It is actually a legitimate concern. There was widespread scams on Facebook last year. More than 5,000 people petitioned, so that the government can look into it and do something.

Audrey Tang: Just like the problem of email spam, the solution doesn’t really lie in any single ministry, nor does it lie in any sector for that matter. We need to all do a little bit in every point possible and solve the issues collaboratively to increase the close of scammers essentially.

Audrey Tang: What we did is we meet in this social innovation lab with not just the petitioners. We invite up to five co-petitioners to Taipei face-to-face. We also live stream it if they want, and also invite the stakeholders such as the e-commerce association, the delivery companies, and so on, and try to figure out where exactly in this problem map are we.

Audrey Tang: We come up together with this mind map of where exactly is the problem and how do we respond to it creatively? Now, this is going to be all like Chinese characters for you, but I’m going to share my screens anyway because it’s difficult to paint this picture without a picture. Just a second.

Audrey Tang: How do I share my screen? Here we go. You can see my screen now?

Kate O’Flaherty: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It’s coming through.

Kate O’Flaherty: Yes, I can.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. As we can see, the primary responsible ministries are the Consumer Protection Agency, the Ministry of Transport and Communication, and the Ministry of Finance. Then, in assisting capacities, the Ministry of Economy Affairs, the Fair Trade Commission, and our Ministry of Interior, because they are the police people and also the central bank because they’re interested.

Audrey Tang: The e-commerce associations, the delivery guys, the petitioners and co-countersign people. What we did is we used this design thinking method to ask people to write in post-it notes colored as problems or challenges. The blue ones are the facts. Then, the red ones are the feelings -- they’re negative mostly, the restrictions -- and the ideas are colored in green.

Audrey Tang: The responses from government are colored in orange. We dissect the entire, from the touch points, the journey of people getting into a scam -- they’re receiving and they’re not able to get a refund -- into very small steps. Then, get to assign responsible ministries for each very small part of it.

Audrey Tang: Afterwards, we started this problem statement about how to educate the people and how to make those kind of scams more expensive and co-created the solution. The idea is that people who complain the loudest are co-creators, and they kind of earn the right by starting a useful petition.

Audrey Tang: We can also assign some cards to external stakeholders, such as how to educate users to identify those scams and how to associate this report scam mechanism with other validation mechanisms, such as the gray tick on Facebook. Those two Post-it notes we assign to Facebook, because that’s something only they can do.

Audrey Tang: When I visited Facebook, I just brought out this context, saying all the other stakeholders are already committed to be part of the solution, so why don’t you show some corporate responsibility to society? To their credit, they after just a couple weeks joined locally the Taiwan e-commerce association, and started a face-to-face dialog and forum with the people impacted and tried to co-create a solution together.

Audrey Tang: I think this kind of structured conversation, if it’s just once every year or so, it will be seen as a experiment. Now, because we do it literally like 20 or 30 times a year, it becomes a part of the norm. The ministries think that, "OK, it’s just a way you deal with petitioners." Actually, this methodology can also be scaled to deal with pretty much everything that needs to work across silos.

Audrey Tang: We use the public pressure from the petitioners and a known weak point, that is just an inability to handle cross-ministry issues, and organize or coordinate the ministries so that they can still organize and meet the stakeholders. Turn those noises, those statements that people post on the petition platform, and group them into signals, that is to say the aspects that are constructed on this mind map.

Audrey Tang: They are now all pretty well versed in this methodology. We have run like 27 co-creation workshops thus far.

Kate O’Flaherty: Can I ask you how do you ensure the participation of kind of a wide range of people? Because, obviously, it’s quite appealing to young people. Do you have quite a wide range of age intended?

Audrey Tang: I think participation is such a wide word. We deal with local issues as well. There is one case where we deal with the Hengchun, which is the south most part of Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The people there were petitioning for the police helicopters, the Black Hawks to be stationed in their local, little-used airport because they’re too far away from the close-by large hospital, who is able to treat cardiac arrests, and it’s a popular diving place.

Audrey Tang: They want helicopters to essentially serve as ambulance cops, because the closest large hospital is like 90 minutes away. They employ many tactics, and it’s definitely not just young people.

Audrey Tang: The Hengchun Township doesn’t have even the population for the petition, but is a very popular touristy attraction, so they organized booth, and there’s a bed and breakfast that scares their customers, saying if you get heart attack here, you better go online and sign this petition before checking in.

Audrey Tang: There’s all sort of community organization methods that it did to push the conversation on a national agenda. I’m very grateful that the Minister of Healthcare and Welfare, as well as the Interior and the Transportation, we explored, literally, all the possible solutions to this problem.

Audrey Tang: We finally settled on assigning a huge sum to build a large medical center in that place, which is really the solution that solves the root cause, because otherwise the doctors will just leave this place even more because the real hard cases are helicoptered away.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the idea is that we all went there, all the different the ministries and participation officers, the PDIS team, and so on. We all went to the south most part of Taiwan to have a face-to-face town hall style discussion.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we still have this co-creation workshop of around 30 people in one room, but also in the same building, in the town hall, we broadcast this entire conversation in real-time. I personally served as the anchor, like the ESPN anchor, [laughs] to explain to the townspeople why this expert is saying this, why is this PowerPoint slide important.

Audrey Tang: The people in the first room can still dial up in a somewhat more efficient way, using expert language, and so on, while people in the second room can always dial-in, using what we call Slido-aligned opinion collection system.

Audrey Tang: I go over every single Slido comments that’s being liked in the order of likes, and so to feedback the crowdsourced wisdom from the general population. I think the average age is over 40 on the town hall, and to feedback those into the real-time deliberation that is happening in the smaller room, which is coordinated and facilitated by the third-party, neutral facilitator.

Audrey Tang: We think the idea is not about just one face, one part of the deliberation that’s online. I think online is just agenda setting. It’s a signal that says, "This is important. You need to look into it." Afterwards, it’s ethnographic research. It is face-to-face. It’s small groups. It’s focus groups.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we do it in a transparent way, so that any meeting can refer to the product of the early documents of the meetings. Whenever we have a binding consultation, we always meet face-to-face, but also try to get people who would not otherwise able to participate, to participate through 360, real-time, live stream, or virtual reality, even, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s an equalizer. It’s not meant to replace the face-to-face meeting, which would of course result in more young people than other age groups, but rather a town hall meeting that is people of all the age groups, but also augmented with online participation. I think that kind of balances the local wisdom, versus the technical, scientific knowledge of the people who are online.

Kate O’Flaherty: That was very interesting. What are your aims for the future? Your Twitter profile, you define yourself as an anarchist. Could you explain that to me, and tell me what your aims are?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry. My Twitter what?

Kate O’Flaherty: On your Twitter profile, you describe yourself as an anarchist.

Audrey Tang: A conservative anarchist, yes.

Kate O’Flaherty: What does that mean?

Audrey Tang: Which part do you want to hear? [laughs] Both parts, I assume?

Kate O’Flaherty: Yes.

Audrey Tang: An anarchist is, to me at least, someone who does not give commands, who don’t coerce other people into doing things. Also, of course, equally important, someone who doesn’t take commands. All the transactions, and relationships need to be voluntary for all parties. That’s what anarchist means to me.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, it means that the bureaucratic organizations, such as countries or implicit command structures, such as nations, these are useful illusions, but they are not always useful. We still use it as an abstraction when they fit, but we don’t use it when it’s a leaky abstraction, and that they don’t fit. We try not to pay too much attention to any hierarchical organizational structure.

Audrey Tang: The conservative part kind of balances out. Conservative, to me, means that respect the traditions, respect the way people’s lives are. There’s a lot of existing ways of cultures, the Internet culture, as well as the face-to-face culture, that are worth keeping.

Audrey Tang: As those two cultures, or many cultures for that matter, are kind of mish-mashing into each other. I think what is important to me about conservation or conservative is to keep what works, and not to try to install too drastic a change in circumstances, or simply declare that one culture is good and the other is absolutely in need to be obliterated, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think the two words link together, conservative and anarchist, to me personally, means to keep what always has worked -- in the Internet culture, is where I think the larger civilization -- and try to fuse them gradually with the society without sacrificing any one side of things or what people value more.

Kate O’Flaherty: That makes a lot of sense. What are your aims as Digital Minister? What are you going to be doing, going forward?

Audrey Tang: I’m always doing the same things, whether or not people call me Digital Minister, or not. [laughs] I’m not really doing anything "as" the Digital Minister.

Audrey Tang: I remember the first interview with the Premier Lin-Chuan, the previous premier, who asked me whether I want to join the cabinet. I just draw him this mind map of all the work I’ve been doing on my projects. He looked at it, and I’m like, "Is there anything I can’t do in this because of my role in the cabinet?" He looked at it, and says, "No, just keep on doing whatever you already do."

Audrey Tang: The Digital Minister, to me, is more of an honorary title. That title really doesn’t stop me, and because I don’t take commands either, so I don’t get assignments, as such.

Audrey Tang: The work I’m always doing, regardless of whether I’m Digital Minister or not, is just to scale the experience of listening and being listened to.

Audrey Tang: See, when two people are meeting face-to-face, and they attune to each other’s emotion, mental state, and so on, the individualities melt away, people get genuine creativity, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Listening, like that, is magic. We do face a lot of space and time constraints, which is why we need this noise-canceling headphone to talk to you, [laughs] which is why we need Skype here, because we’re in different time zones, and so on. There’s parts where technologies can help, but it’s not to make us superhuman. It’s just to restore to a better human condition. That’s where we started.

Audrey Tang: The same goes to the number of people, because of this wetware restrictions, we can’t really have a conversation with more than a hundred people, or so, and keeping track in our head everybody’s mental and emotional state. It’s just not possible. The best facilitators can do, maybe, a hundred people, but no more than that.

Audrey Tang: Of course, people can separate into groups, but then you get hierarchies. Hierarchies just kind of grow out of this inherent limitation. Worse, the group dynamics kind of mandates that there will emerge either a leader or a leading thought, ideology, or a duo at play that other people just kind of give up their creativity as time goes on. This is a very well-studied issue... until Internet came along.

Audrey Tang: Then suddenly people who shared the same affinity to a keyword just started trusting each other in a very quick way, and then it scaled out. It’s not scaled deeply, nor has it really scaled up the number of people. All it did is really scale out this shallow, not quite listening, listening.

Audrey Tang: My work has always been to go into all the three dimensions to scale out, to scale up, to scale deeply, and try to get the same listening experience. Instead of like radio and television, where one person gets to speak to one million people, but have no idea what those million people said, try to listen to those millions of people, a signal not as noise.

Audrey Tang: Equally importantly, too, to have millions of people listen to each other and to partake in this kind of listening experience. It’s been always the project. I don’t think it’s my project. [laughs] I think it is just how the technologies evolved in a asymmetrical way at the beginning.

Audrey Tang: It was the Internet, there was this huge dream, the Cluetrain Manifesto and the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and all that, to democratize this. It didn’t quite play out that way, so we talked about re-decentralization. We talk about re-de-re-decentralization.

Audrey Tang: Somehow, I think, artificial intelligence will either just make the facilitation so easy so that we don’t feel the limitation of 100 people, and will be able to listen to 100 people as if it’s one person, or it will fake that, basically just echo-chambering, and listening to the part in the 100 people where we already identify with, which doesn’t really mean anything, right?

Audrey Tang: There’s potentials in many different ways, and just trying to build some authenticity into this process, and to be with the public service, because they, of all people, are tasked with listening to the general public. If anything, I think the real innovations will happen with people who have the career of listening to just random stakeholders, just because there is more motivation for them to do so.

Kate O’Flaherty: You mention AI as one of the technologies that you think is going to be helpful and kind of play to these large amounts of information and opinions. Is there any other technology? Are you talking about the Pol.is Platform, that’s an AI-enabled platform, isn’t it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. AI means anything, now, right?

Kate O’Flaherty: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: It just mostly means automation now.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, it’s a AI-powered conversation for sure. It’s like the ELIZA of scalable conversation. It’s very easy to explain. Just like ELIZA, if you have seen the script of ELIZA, you know immediately how it’s like. You match some keyword and it’s just a chatbot.

Audrey Tang: Just like Pol.is, if you see how they use the K-means clustering to cluster the votes, and the principal component analysis to determine the most controversial dimensions. That’s pretty much it. There’s no deep learning, or anything AI, traditional machine learning involved.

Audrey Tang: That’s the beauty of it. Just like there was this chatbot with a face that was named a citizen of a Saudi Arabian country, or something, from Hanson Robotics. The beauty of that is that a chatbot with a face is actually, in many cases, working better than real artificial intelligence robotic assistants, because people want to hear other people. The chatbot is just a conduit, for lack of a better term.

Audrey Tang: You can think Pol.is as AI, but it’s really just a chatbot with a face that shows you the face of the crowd in a most cognitively pleasing way. Yeah, broadly speaking, I would think it’s AI. As things go by, I think of AI as just outsourcing the cognitive functions of the predictable parts of cognitive functions that a facilitator goes through as she is facilitating a room.

Audrey Tang: For example, she would need to hear the sounds and identify which part in the mind map that I just showed you is this person talking about. That requires semantic analysis and very simple things, just speech recognition and gaze recognition. When many people are talking together, they need to figure out the attention, like the gaze of the various participants around, and then to handle the group dynamic.

Audrey Tang: Of course, just like most of the cognitive functions, those are automatic, Part of facilitator training, just like driving a car, is to spot those cues and respond accordingly. Just like self-driving cars, these are what people do subconsciously.

Audrey Tang: These are what machine learning can help, and they can help in a way that doesn’t make value judgments, but rather just let the facilitator take the mind off, because it’s augmenting the human capacity, and so the facilitator can concentrate on understanding, and getting to a consensus that people can live with.

Audrey Tang: I see AI in a more, there’s a term for it, it’s called Calm Technology, in a way that’s the inverse, that’s the reverse of distractive technologies. It gives you more attention. It doesn’t take your attention away.

Audrey Tang: Most of the research and experiment that we’re doing now, such as the 360-camera that’s linked with system data, automatically transcribe whatever people says, who is speaking and who is paying attention to where and so on, are the things that are there so that people are just vaguely aware of it.

Audrey Tang: It’s the environment as a computer, and it makes people suddenly feel that they could focus on each other more. This is the kind of AI that I’m referring to, and Pol.is or Slido, and the real-time mind mapping are, of course, part of it.

Kate O’Flaherty: Very interesting. Are there any other plans in terms of what you’re doing in vTaiwan for the future? Are you going to be expanding out to beyond digital policy making?

Audrey Tang: You see, the e-petition platform, the Join.gov.tw platform, J-O-I-N, it’s not particularly digital. We talk about the deployment of helicopters or not. [laughs] In Hengchun, we talk about whether we need to ban fishing in our first open-to-the-public national marine park.

Audrey Tang: We talk about whether single women should be able to get a child by her own volition. There’s [laughs] nothing digital in those topics. The production system that I think of Join platform is our production system. On top of it is all of the laws, all of the regulations are now 60 days before taking effect or sending to the Parliament.

Audrey Tang: On top of it is every ministry’s budget and all their KPIs and how each government procurement or spending is going toward those government projects. There’s this nifty visualization of the national budget. Of course, there’s the e-petition part. The production platform has long since moved beyond the additional issues.

Audrey Tang: In fact, we meet every week or every other week to tackle those issues. The vTaiwan platform remains experimental. The government isn’t even at arm’s lengths. [laughs] We’re totally giving up control on vTaiwan, just as Minister Jaclyn Tsai totally gave up control when she walked up to the g0v Hackathon and say, "The government really doesn’t know how to do this. You guys figure it out."

Audrey Tang: In her tradition, [laughs] now that I’m the Digital Minister, I’m explicitly not telling the vTaiwan folks how to deliberate any particular topic. All I promise is that any topics that’s chosen collaboratively by the National Development Council and the vTaiwan community, I will give it binding power by personally attending the consultation meetings, by bringing a synthetic documents to the premier, by making it part of our additional agenda and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Other than providing binding power and the very nice social innovation lab to have weekly meet-ups, I’m not really directing anyone to do anything on any topic. This is a luxury, you see. For things like whether we build a building or not, whether we ban fishing or not, it’s not very clear that we can always find win-win solutions.

Audrey Tang: There’s going to be trade-offs. There’s going to be parts of it that are zero-sum. We try very hard with co-creation to find win-win solutions, but sometimes we find just solutions that people can barely live with. That’s politics.

Audrey Tang: With digital issues, nobody [laughs] really know how it’s going to end up becoming. Generally speaking, there’s no zero-sum, because there was not a status quo. There was no Uber before Uber was introduced. It is almost always possible with digital to find a way that is based on the abundant mindset rather than the scarcity mindset.

Audrey Tang: We hand-pick, curate those topics and give the vTaiwan people, the community full reign, because the worst they can do is to come up with the zero solution, meaning that we don’t do anything, which is OK with digital matters. [laughs] More often than not, they do come with these creative solutions and reach a lot of stakeholders. Also with digital issues, we can engage the international network community.

Audrey Tang: As we’re deliberating about Uber or Airbnb or platform economy, people around the world are doing the same thing. We get to think outside of the national or city boundary, and then to really do it in a way that’s sustainable to all the stakeholders involved, which is why Internet participation is very important.

Audrey Tang: It is very difficult to imagine for a local -- whether we build the hospital or not -- discussion that we would get a fraction of the international interest on these kinds of matters. Scaling out is kind of difficult, and political deliberations with international stakeholders won’t make much sense, which will necessarily make this anarchistic, leaderless community split.

Audrey Tang: There will be people who are more familiar with the local issue, or there will be people who think of it as a zero-sum game. The digital issues that we put vTaiwan don’t suffer from these issues. I think vTaiwan for the foreseeable future, I think, will remain to tackle issues related to the digital world, just because it’s not zero-sum.

Audrey Tang: But if we somehow, with I don’t know, cold fusion, things like that, [laughs] or matter replicator, things like that, to make real world stuff also non-zero sum, then of course we can open up more room for experimentation. Before that, we defer to the internal vTaiwan-like network, which is the PO network, and they’re all career public servants trained to tackle this kind of issue.

Audrey Tang: I still also give them free rein, but at least their peers are all participation officers, career public servants, and authorized by their deputy minister or CIO to make hard decisions if needed be.

Audrey Tang: So there are two communities, and for the Join platform we engage the internal PO community. For digital issues, we engage the vTaiwan and g0v community.

Kate O’Flaherty: Your approach is quite unique across the world, if you look at other democracies. Can you see it working anywhere else, or is it very unique to you?

Audrey Tang: We actually learned a lot from other places. The Join platform, particularly, the e-petition platform, while inspired by We the People, is actually modeled largely after the Iceland, I can’t pronounce their capital correctly, sorry, the Better Reykjavik, platform. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea is that, at city level, we learn from the Madrid city, the council platform, the Barcelona city. There’s actually many cities -- the Paris city, for their participatory budgeting platform, and of course many nearby city states, as well, the Singapore government digital service.

Audrey Tang: You see a lot of this kind of co-creation in community level, like in the UK, or in city level, in some younger democracies. I don’t think we’re that unique. What’s perhaps unique is that we’re scaling it to 23 million people. It’s the population, I think, that is the main, unique point. Otherwise, if you just look at half a million people cities, there’s plenty of them doing similar innovations.

Audrey Tang: I think the geography of Taiwan is particular in this regard, because with the Taiwan high-speed rails, going from the north most to the south most stations is just a little bit more than two hours. It is a city, right, by many measurements.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s mostly a single island, and so we’re very easy to get the 4G coverage or the Internet penetration to one of world’s highest, and even when moving hundreds of miles per hour on the Taiwan high-speed rail, we were able to give free WiFi access, even in the tunnels.

Audrey Tang: In many ways, the geography is in our favor, because we don’t have that much of a digital gap. Of the remaining like three percent of the areas, the population, we can’t afford, usually, if they’re indigenous, or really rural, like a remote island, places.

Audrey Tang: Because President Tsai believes in broadband as human right, we use special budget to fill all those remaining two or three percent, so there’s no excuse of saying, "We can’t get a 10-megabit up-link here." When you get there, then a lot of things just became a lot more possible.

Audrey Tang: Also, because Taiwan is constitutionally protecting the education budget, and the education reform now also emphasizes autonomy learning, co-learning with the teacher from the Internet and things like that as part of the new curriculum, the entire generation of kids are raised to have the skill of critical thinking and debating, both face to face and online.

Audrey Tang: Actually, to them, there’s really no difference between those two worlds anymore. With this kind of population, we can then treat 23 million more of like a 23,000-people city, geographically speaking, and so focus on getting the best ideas, but not focusing so much on just getting the last mile fibers or other things like that.

Audrey Tang: The education level, the young democracy engagement level, and the geography all work in our favor.

Kate O’Flaherty: Thank you. That’s really interesting, and thank you for explaining everything so clearly and concisely. I appreciate that.

Kate O’Flaherty: Was there anything more? I think we’ve covered all the questions. I don’t know if you thought there was anything that might be missing that might be interesting for our readers.

Audrey Tang: Let’s see. I kind of elided a question. That’s "how did the vTaiwan story play out of that?" We didn’t really go over that one.

Audrey Tang: You’re interviewing everybody else in the vTaiwan community. They’re actually starting a Hackpad to collaboratively answer that, so I’ll just give my side of the story then.

Audrey Tang: The vTaiwan story from my point of view, it’s a story of the central government having lost all legitimacy, and the Occupiers and Occupy sympathizers won the local elections, threatening to make the central government irrelevant. That’s the background, the back story of the story, if you will.

Audrey Tang: It’s also the story of a existing civic tech community, the g0v community, with the slogan, "Fork the government." We really didn’t want to fork the entire government. People just picked the part of government where we had the most gripe with, and fork that particular part of it.

Audrey Tang: When the central government, having lost all legitimacy, [laughs] and they came asking, "How about forking the entire central government?" Without that domain name, g0v.tw, I don’t think we’d have risen up to the task.

Audrey Tang: It’s subconscious, I would think, that people, after living with this domain name, g0v.tw, for three years at the time of when Jaclyn Tsai came to the g0v hackathon. We forked maybe 1‰ of the government, and we’re like, "You’re handing the entire national government’s working staff to us. What are we going to do with it?"

Audrey Tang: I think it’s subliminally in all of our heads that when Jaclyn asks something...and we did our research. We checked similar efforts across the world, and none of them really went anywhere if it’s national scale.

Audrey Tang: The closest we could find is the Cornell University’s RegulationRoom, and again, they picked things that they think that are very fit for this kind of online format. Even though they had a lot of problems with getting the message scaling out, they were able to scale up and deeply, but not really scaling out a lot.

Audrey Tang: To our knowledge at that time, at the end of 2014, there’s no project that addressed all the three dimensions simultaneously and succeeded in any way. We kind of very clearly told Jaclyn that what she’s asking is impossible, but we’re going to try it anyway.

Audrey Tang: It is to g0v community’s credit, that nobody feel that we need to do it right. People just started to do it every single which way, and because we think forks are good, so we forked ourselves, even. The community at that point forked into many different approaches to try to tackle this impossible problem. Only very recently do we see a little bit of merging back.

Audrey Tang: It would be a problem if it started as a organization. We would say, "The organization has fragmented to seven different factions," but because it’s leaderless to begin with, so for us, it’s just seven projects that all work in the open on GitHub, on Trello, and on Slack.

Audrey Tang: Some people has a philosophical stance against Slack, so some faction worked exclusively on IRC, and some on Telegram. We had to build those robot bridges to bring those channels together, so people can use the vehicles in channels they identify with, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We did a lot of those cultural hacks, and in the meantime reached people who had something to contribute to this network, but did not at all speak the language of technology. Without those people, we wouldn’t go anywhere, really.

Audrey Tang: After being asked of doing the impossible, the g0v community just dispersed into all the different corners. Because of the Occupy, there’s this implicit trust between the 20 or so NGOs and the g0v people who supported to get their message across. We were not seen as random strangers. We were the comrades in some sense, who worked just a couple months ago.

Audrey Tang: Then we started doing connections and bringing those people in. It is a scaling out, and then scaling deeply of the g0v community itself. I’m just one very small fragment [laughs] of it.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like with all the large open-source free software projects. Linus Torvalds liked to joke that he is just this lazy person — who happens to take too much credit. [laughs] I’m more or less in the same boat, which is why I try to get Shuyang or Avross or Kuan-Yu or one of the other people to go now to international conferences and speak and so on, because it is as much their work as anybody’s.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really want us, the first-generations in the vTaiwan project to dominate the discourse. It won’t be fair. Also, the digital issues we’re facing now in 2018 is radically different from digital issues we were facing in 2014. It’s very different. It needs new approaches. It needs new ways of thinking. The least I can do is try not to be in the way, so that’s my priority to start.

Kate O’Flaherty: Great. Thank you so much for talking to me today. It was really good to meet you. I appreciate your time.

Audrey Tang: We did end up taking more than an hour.

Kate O’Flaherty: We did? [laughs] One hour and seven minutes, that was good.

Audrey Tang: All right then, so I’ll send you the high-quality recording.

Kate O’Flaherty: Thank you so much. Really appreciate that. Have a good flight, and a good time in New Zealand.

Audrey Tang: All right. Cheers.

Kate O’Flaherty: Take care.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Kate O’Flaherty: Bye.