Yura Jo: Thanks a lot. Today’s topic is three as a big part. First, before you became a minister, and second, your job as a digital minister, and the last, your advice to young leaders as a pioneer.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Yura Jo: I wonder, what do you as a civic hacker before you became a digital minister? This is my first question. Actually, I’m not friendly with the concept of civic hacker. Can you explain it first?

Audrey Tang: Yes, certainly. Before I joined the cabinet, I was a civic hacker. According to the Wiki dictionary, a civic hacker is someone who collaborates with other people to make opensource solutions using publicly released data, and code, and technology to solve socio-economic and environmental challenges. Someone who works in the open, solves common problems with everybody.

Yura Jo: Are you interested in solving problems or participating in your politics before you became a minister?

Audrey Tang: My main interest is to make space for people with very different positions to come to common values and to innovate, to deliver those values to solve the common problem identified by the people. For example, my first project in the g0v movement, that was in 2013, is called MoeDictionary.

Audrey Tang: It makes sure that all the different language communities in Taiwan, maybe people speaking Mandarin, or Taiwanese Holo, or Hakka, or English, French, Deutsch – that’s German – or the indigenous languages like Amis and so on, have a common infrastructure to share the dictionary and the translations between one another.

Audrey Tang: Even though the data is mostly from the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Education was very siloed in the sense that each language was in its own dictionary, but we compile a new dictionary that works on the mobile phones and also works through those different trans-portal perspectives, and that’s why we call it the MoeDictionary.

Yura Jo: Can you tell me again, the War Dictionary?

Audrey Tang: Moe, M-O-E. The MoeDictionary.

Yura Jo: Oh, MoeDictionary, OK.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Moe means, in Japanese, it means very cute, but [non-English speech] in Kanji means something like sprouting, a young plant just growing. It also means people. It’s always like this, like people with different perspectives, speaking different languages, discovering the MoeDictionary and adding their language to it, so it become multilingual in very short time.

Yura Jo: I think you can make the change in a civic hacker, but why do you became a minister such a young age?

Audrey Tang: We occupied the parliament for three weeks in the Sunflower Movement back in 2014, because the MPs were refusing to deliberate substantially Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement with Beijing. People took their place and did their work for them, because while we elected these people to do that work and they refused to do, so people do it for them.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that with half a million people on the street, and many more online, using civic hacking ideas and facilitation methods, we still managed to settle on a set of consensus, and they were accepted by the head of the parliament after three weeks of occupy.

Audrey Tang: Everybody saw that the demonstration is not just protest, it’s a demo, a showcase of what’s possible if you listen at scale using digital technologies. Around the end of that year, I was then recruited as a reverse mentor to a cabinet minister, Minister Jaclyn Tsai.

Audrey Tang: I worked with her for a couple of years before essentially taking her office. [laughs] I’m still in the same office when I work as a reverse mentor, and so become like an intern promoted to full-time job.

Yura Jo: Ah, I got it. Can you please give me a brief explanation of your job as a minister?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation, youth engagement, and open government. The way that I work is through voluntary associations. Many different ministries send people to work in my space, but they still report to their own ministry, but we always work out loud, meaning that we share our new innovations with other ministries in a horizontal way.

Audrey Tang: I work through radical transparency, so everything, including this interview, and the meetings that I chair, is published in a full transcript or video so everybody can understand what the minister real position looks like, and they can brainstorm much more easily, because they have the draft material of the cases that I chair.

Audrey Tang: Finally, location independence. Anywhere I’m working, I’m working. I can tour around Taiwan or tour around the world – before the pandemic – and work anywhere. That also enables me to empower people closest to the pain by going to the most rural places and give them a voice to amplify it to the national decision making. That’s the three principles of my work.

Yura Jo: Your law is bringing together and coordinating, and inter-dating things, right?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Yura Jo: Can you explain about how the work, minister work, and as a civic hacker work? How different is it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. A minister’s work is full-time. A civic hacker is a part-time work.

Yura Jo: That’s a big difference.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a big difference. As a civic hacker, usually, people only work with people who identify with the same ideas, but with the minister’s role, you need to work with everyone, taking all the sides, not just the few sides that are interested in making a dictionary, but really taking all the sides in the entire society, and when we develop ideas, develop ideas into digital service.

Audrey Tang: For a civic hacker, if people don’t like our service, people can choose some other service, but for the central government, or tax filing, or for national healthcare, there is simply no other choice. We have to think about how to include as much as possible people in the decision making, because for many government services, there are no other choices, so we have to be maximally inclusive.

Yura Jo: I think your focus is on openness or transparency.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Yura Jo: What’s the reason that you pursuing the society with high openness? Why did you come to that?

Audrey Tang: Because when I worked very early on, when I was 15 years old, that was 1996, in the Internet governance, we understood that the Internet, it has no army, it has no navy, it cannot force anyone to connect to the Internet, but the Internet works the way it works because of radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: Anyone with an email address can make contributions to the Internet and how the Internet works. The consensus is reached not by voting, but by rough consensus like people understanding it’s something we can live with, and then we can try it out. Internet governance is my native political system. It will be another few years before I can even vote.

Audrey Tang: That’s my earliest memory participating in a political system. I am taking that political system and see how much the representative democracy can be helped and complemented by this kind of deliberative democracy.

Yura Jo: I really impressed to your leadership in Corona pandemic, especially the mask application also used in Korea as a similar way. Where did you usually get the inspiration for the policy and other things?

Audrey Tang: It’s not my idea. The mask availability map is from Howard Wu from Tainan City, and also Finjong Kiang also from Tainan City made the second map, and worked with I think 15-year-olds from South Korea a month after his original prototype in March to make that happen in South Korea too. It’s really good collaboration.

Audrey Tang: My main role is just to make communication easier, to facilitate communication, making sure that our premier – that’s like prime minister – can see how the mask map works immediately, and I would explain to the cabinet members that if people already trust the citizen technologies, then we don’t have to invent anything new.

Audrey Tang: We just make sure they have the real-time data they want updated every 30 seconds, and people can trust each other more. When they queue in line, they can check that the system is actually working as intended.

Audrey Tang: We don’t have to do any top-down doctrine, or lockdown, or anything, because people will understand the science, and once three quarter of people understand the science, is willing to wear a mask and wash their hands, the R value will under one and we will be safe.

Yura Jo: Actually, I was shown a documentary about you in Korean. I think the most impressive thing there was that the T-shirts. There was soccer one and coloring in rainbows. Does the T-shirts have any special meanings?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The rainbows, of course, is a social signal. I’m just getting those for you.

Yura Jo: Yeah. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: OK, right.

Yura Jo: Ah.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Yura Jo: That was cool.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The rainbows represents the solidarity in Taiwan’s intersectional movements from the women’s empowerment movement that was many decades ago, all the way to the LBGTIQA+ movements such as the Pride in Taiwan, is the largest…this year, it’s the largest anywhere, because we have physical Pride and other places not.

Audrey Tang: Long story short, when we legalized marriage equality, we did something very innovative. We invented a way to legalize only the bylaws, the rights and duties of individual-to-individual, but we do not link to the part of the civil code that takes in-law relationships.

Audrey Tang: When two same-sex couples wed, their families don’t wed. That makes the elderly people or people who are more into the family-to-family wedding feel less threatened by the individual-to-individual relationship.

Audrey Tang: This kind of common value out of opposing positions is the kind of social innovation I have in mind. The rainbow reminds people it’s not just black and white, there’s not just a binary thinking.

Yura Jo: What do you think your strengths as a young minister?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and I think I’m just the beginning. There are going to be even younger ministers in the future.

Yura Jo: I heard that you have made more than 5,000 people become your minister. What’s the know-how? How can you actively lead the people? Is there anything to consider when leading citizens and talking to them?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I have met a lot of people, I think 5,859, minus one, that’s me.

Audrey Tang: The point of meeting people is simply to listen and to put myself in their shoes. If they say something, I always take their side. If they say something and I find myself cannot take their side, it’s always my problem. I can hang out with them a little bit.

Audrey Tang: When people talk to me in a public, radically transparent way, they already know that the future generations will see this dialog. Very few people in that situation will argue for something purely selfish at the expense of other people.

Audrey Tang: Everybody behaves much more pro-socially, because they know future generations are watching us. In this sense, we bring out the best sides of everybody. If I cannot understand the social good or the environmental good they are doing, it means that I have something to learn and I will always take time to learn that.

Yura Jo: Actually, I always wonder, do you feel tired when you’re leading so many people?

Audrey Tang: If I feel tired, I go to sleep.

Yura Jo: OK.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I sleep a lot. I sleep seven hours at least, but usually eight or nine hours a day.

Yura Jo: That’s the second part of my question. Around the world, the number of young people going into politics is increasing. At the same time, young leaders are becoming more and more influential. Can you explain the situation?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In Taiwan, we have formalized the reverse mentorship. I mentioned I was a reverse mentor before I was 35, and now we have institutionalized it. There is like 25 different youth advisers to the ministers, and each minister can work with I think a couple young innovators who are always under 35 to point out the new direction for their ministry.

Audrey Tang: The elderly, of course, are more resourceful, are more connected, but the new direction is something that the digital natives, the young people, can help to think about, because they are not constrained by the existing imaginations of what to do and how to solve things.

Audrey Tang: It’s a really good inter-generational working arrangement, and I would encourage any institution to consider institutionalizing youth reverse mentors.

Yura Jo: How many the reverse mentors in Taiwan? Is there any qualification to be a reverse mentor?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We have a formal institution, the National Youth Advisory Council. As I mentioned, it’s 35 people in total and 25 of which are those young reverse mentors. The other ones are ministers, and the premier, and me. I’m no longer 35. I’m 39 now.

Audrey Tang: The other levels in each administration, each municipal government, and so on. All in all, it’s hundreds, if not a thousand or so people.

Yura Jo: Do you believe that young people should participate more in politics like you?

Audrey Tang: If they feel like. Young people do whatever they feel like. I just want to make sure that when they participate in the politics, their seniority is not a problem for them. In our part of the world, there is still a differential toward the more senior people.

Audrey Tang: In our part of the world, there is also a deference towards existing institutions, especially clearly spelt-out institutions that has a tradition. By starting an institution of reverse mentorship and maintaining the institution for many years now, even the more senior people defer to the institution of younger people as reverse mentors, because we defer more to the institution than to seniority.

Yura Jo: I heard that you are the youngest minister in Taiwan. Have you ever had a hard time or something like that, because you’re young?

Audrey Tang: I’m a little bit different, because I am not working with any particular ministry. My office is literally just a space where each ministry can work in a horizontal way. Because I don’t give them order, I don’t take orders, I’m more like a young adviser than anything.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, of course, I will not get into trouble, because it’s not my idea. It’s the idea from the civil society, from the civic hackers. I’m just communicating their ideas.

Yura Jo: Do you think young people can be a good leader of one’s society of one nation? Sometimes, they are very young, so seniors don’t follow their directions or don’t trust them.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s the same problem for senior people, too. Not everybody can accept you for who you are, and that’s regardless of whether you’re young or old or whether you feel more politically inclined or less politically inclined. There’s bound to be people who question your credentials when you are leading.

Audrey Tang: That’s good. That’s why we have a liberal democracy. If nobody dare to question you, that’s called fascism. It’s called authoritarianism, or even worse, totalitarianism. Only in a really total totalitarianism can a leader be free from complaints, because they execute the people who dare to complain. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s not the society we want. If people complain, that means they care, and if they care, we always invite them into a dialog and to see if there are things that they do better, and we can always incorporate their ideas into out public decisions.

Yura Jo: This is a literally different question. Nowadays, social media has become one of the political…

Audrey Tang: The what? I’m sorry.

Yura Jo: …political communication. Social media is a very important tool for political communication nowadays.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Yura Jo: What’s the pros and cons to using the media?

Audrey Tang: It depends which kind of media. If you choose the media that are pro-social, for example, the Join platform that we use, that more than half of population have used. You can start a petition, 5,000 people, and you get a minister’s response.

Audrey Tang: You can post of your pros and cons as arguments, but there’s no reply button, so people cannot attack each other. In this design, it’s more pro-social. People are more willing to share what they actually think.

Audrey Tang: There are also other kinds of social media that are more anti-social, where it’s easier to reply to people, it’s easier to bully, it’s easier to post the mean words and derail the conversation. The main thing is not about how to use social media. It’s how to design social media.

Audrey Tang: If there are existing social media platforms, how to negotiate with those platforms so they can form to so they can form to your social norm and not a random social norm that just happens to be the norm of their founder, that’s the main thing that I care about.

Audrey Tang: For example, around the election earlier this January, Facebook agreed to publish in real time all the advertisements and ban the foreign money from advertising on social media during the election season.

Audrey Tang: That is not because they don’t want that advertisement money. That’s because in our civic hackers space, we already demonstrated that public conversation is better if people know what kind of campaign donation and expenditure was listed.

Audrey Tang: We made a new law that took effect back in ‘18 that all the raw data of campaign expense and donation must be free for everybody to analyze, not just a few auditors. Because it’s a strong social norm, Facebook have to work with our social norm, otherwise they may face social sanction. This is how we encourage prosocial tendency of social media platforms.

Yura Jo: Thank you. Actually, we talk about the age. How can we deal with the ageism or general complex?

Audrey Tang: The age complex?

Yura Jo: Generation complex, ageism. How can you deal with that?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think there are a lot of argument for ageism. I think it’s more of a habit than actual ideology. Unlike any other  ism, this is actually something that’s best not to challenge it in a rational sense, because it was not rational to begin with. This is more like a habit.

Audrey Tang: I think the best way is just to form a very solid inter generational solidarity. Like when you talk about the mask rationing, when we designed a mask rationing, I made sure to do the focus group studies and so on with my grandma, who is 87 years.

Audrey Tang: She would introduce her younger friend, like 77 years old, and then we will work together on a way that makes the elderly also feel comfortable going alone into a convenience store to pre order some masks.

Audrey Tang: If we involve people of all different ages into the creation process, we will see that each age group have different life experience and different contributions to make. Once people get used to this inter generational solidarity, ageism just dissipates, because there’s no room for other people to project those ideology.

Audrey Tang: If people don’t have experience interacting with people of different generations, if they only have experience in their own home, then, of course, they will bring a lot of family assumptions back to other people of other generations.

Audrey Tang: That, of course, are the habit of ageism, how it perpetuates itself, but actually, people who care about the same social or environmental problem have much more in common than actually they and their same aged counterparts.

Audrey Tang: If you can get an inter generational group together to solve a common problem, sooner or later, you will find a solidarity. That will be vaccination against ageism.

Yura Jo: Thank you. What do you think is the most important leadership quality required nowadays?

Audrey Tang: Definitely the ability to achieve common good. Of course, the common good is what I refer to as common values. It’s by listening, by taking all the sides, by being able to innovate so that out of seemingly zero sum games like between public health and freedom of speech and movement.

Audrey Tang: You can innovate a new model like the Taiwan model of counter pandemic with no lockdown, and counter infodemic with no takedown, relying on the social innovations to move the society forward. Instead of the leader knowing the best, the leader must be humble and see each innovation as it is and amplify those innovations if it delivers a common value.

Yura Jo: Are you an optimist?

Audrey Tang: Mm hmm. I don’t know. I feel OK.

Audrey Tang: I guess I’m really not particularly pessimist or optimist, but from what I can see, I have reason for optimism, I will say that.

Yura Jo: Do you have any role models as a leader? It doesn’t matter he or she.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think it’s everyone. I listen to you, your questions, and then I try to model my thinking along the way that you think. Like when you talk about ageism, I try to see it from your perspective, because that was not a word that I usually use, but if I use the word, I, of course, can see myself in such context.

Audrey Tang: Just from learning from each and every person I make, I guess you are my role model too [laughs] when I model my response after your questions.

Yura Jo: This is my last question. It’s been five years since you work as a minister.

Audrey Tang: Four years.

Yura Jo: Yeah, four years.

Audrey Tang: Four years.

Yura Jo: Yeah, that’s right.

Audrey Tang: Almost to the day, yeah.

Yura Jo: What’s your goals as a minister?

Audrey Tang: To have fun.

Yura Jo: Very simple.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Yura Jo: What’s your ambition in your life?

Audrey Tang: To have fun and to optimize for fun.

Audrey Tang: If you say I’m an optimist, I’m not the optimist but I’m a, I guess, optimizer. I optimize for fun, that is to say, to maximize the joy that people feel when they work on common good projects. It’s not just fun for me, but also the fun for everybody involved.

Audrey Tang: When people feel that they are happy, they are joyful when making public contributions, they will make more public contributions.

Yura Jo: Actually, this is my last, last question. You said you value openness. Taiwan does not disclose the movement of Corona confirmations. Is there any reason to not open the route?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. The idea is that we only open the statistics, but we do not open the private details that will make people re identify the person. It’s not about openness. It’s about their privacy. If they decide to release themselves, that’s entirely their choice, but if they decide to not publish their whereabouts, that’s entirely their choice too.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when we talk about open data and so on, we always talk about the statistics level, the environmental measurements and so on. Those are, of course, open, but we don’t confuse open data with private data.

Audrey Tang: The personal data, of course, belong to that person and it’s only disclosed when they do a voluntary contribution where they donate. If they don’t donate, we don’t confiscate it from them.

Yura Jo: Thank you. I got it. Thank you for your precious time. I really want to meet you as a prime minister. Hope you have a great day, and happy holidays.

Audrey Tang: You too. Have a great local time. OK.

Yura Jo: OK, thank you.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Bye.

Yura Jo: Bye.