Anne Le Strat: Hi Audrey, nice to meet you again! Maybe as you remember, the first time we met I was Deputy-Mayor of Paris in charge of water and sanitation policy and Chair of Eau De Paris, the publicly-owned water company in Paris. I led the re-municipalization of the water service and carry out many reforms to improve its social and environmental sustainability and also to increase its democratization in particular by chairing a multi-stakeholders board and creating a Parisian Water Observatory. I’m now based in NYC, Research fellow at NYU and consultant. I am still working on public services, common goods and environmental issues, and public policies.

Anne Le Strat: In this context, I have a collaboration with Professor Mickael Menser for writing a research paper about public participation in public utilities and more broadly how we can improve public policy through participatory democracy. It’s a research paper based on concrete field experiences. This paper will be published by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. I lived in Taïwan and I know you have implemented very innovative processes of participatory democracy and public participation. For us, it’s very important to have your point of view on, of course, participatory democracy and your feedback on what has been put in place in Taïwan.

Anne Le Strat: Maybe before starting the interview, please, Michael Menser, Mike, if you can introduce yourself, and maybe also add some comments on the research paper.

Mickael Menser: Absolutely. Nice to meet Audrey. My name is Mike Menser. I’m also based in New York. I’m the co-founder and president of the board of the participatory budgeting project. I know that several of my people have met you and have been to Taiwan. There was the conference a few years back now.

Mickael Menser: I know that when you were here in New York, some of my folks were at that, and enjoyed meeting very much, and Beta NYC, and a lot of the folks working in the digital space. I’ve read some of the reports that they’ve written. I think some of the meetings were at Civic Hall, as I recall.

Audrey Tang: The Personal Democracy Forum.

Mickael Menser: Exactly. Right, PDF.  I have followed a lot of the innovations out of the vTaiwan process. As someone who has been involved with participatory budgeting, I have that angle on how do we connect government with communities but also with expert knowledge. That’s this triangular interface that we’re trying to scope out, construct and support.

Mickael Menser: I’ve also spent the last seven years working on climate change adaptation policies for New York City. Again, working with communities, working with the climate scientists, and working not just with the elected officials, but with the folks actually working in the agencies who deliver the services.

Mickael Menser: I was excited to be able to meet Anne when she came to New York. This project is really trying to develop a framework for how do we think about, not just municipalization or making the services public, but redefining that public, given the digital innovation, given the desire to create a different model that has democratic participation, but also addresses the reality of the complexity of these issues, the technical nature of these issues.

Mickael Menser: Also, the new technologies what they offer us. For sure, we’re very excited to learn more and hear how  the vTaiwan process has evolved in the last several years.

Audrey Tang: I’d like to start off by thanking New York for starting this voluntary local review movement because over a half now, about pretty much all the municipality in Taiwan is on board, and on the most recent tweets in my Twitter channel is the mayor of New Taipei City is saying that he was the first to join the VLR movement, from Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That ignited a lot of the communal participation and review because as you well know, a national voluntary review is a very different scale compared to a municipal one, and the municipal one does allow a lot more agenda-setting power from their communities. It is a brilliant innovation tool, not just for participatory budgeting, which is alive and kicking, also in Taiwan.

Mickael Menser: Yes. It shows the importance of an ecosystem of innovations, and how do we connect them, and how do we empower the different aspects and the new possibilities that result from it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Anne Le Strat: Great. We have a lot of questions, but, of course, feel free to add any comments, any idea, and any insight. My first question is about democratization experience in Taiwan. In my point of view, it’s a very fascinating case because Taiwanese people have lived under the longest martial law in the world, and nowadays Taiwan is one of the most progressive and innovative democracies in many ways.

Anne Le Strat: Several social movements have marked the history of your young democracy. With g0v movement, and vTaiwan platform,Taïwan has created different innovative tools for improving democracy in Taiwan.

Anne Le Strat: In your point of view, what are the main outcomes drawn from these experiences in terms of better consideration of the needs of citizens and the population, and in terms of the legitimacy of decisions taken by government institutions and their social acceptance?

Audrey Tang: Sure. This is a seminar topic, and I’m expected to give what, a five-minute answer? [laughs] Broadly speaking, during the martial law, which I still remember. I was a child, but I remember. What people’s community energy is channeled not primarily to representative democratic means, but rather to what we hear called a social sector.

Audrey Tang: You may or may not use that word, but we use the word here. The social sector comprises of the charities, such as G, which is a very large social network in a real sense. Also, the co-op movement, the homemakers unions and such, the community building movement, including community knowledge colleges, and many others.

Audrey Tang: These were not illegal during the martial law, not like the press, [laughs] or not like opposition party. What defines Taiwan really is that during the democratization is mostly these social sector movements including the Wild Lady movement, the Sunflower movement, and so on, where the agenda is set jointly by the social sector leaders that transcends the especially local level partisan politics.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, the social sector is the one that sets the agenda. The ruling party, whichever party it was at the time, merely follows the agenda that is broadly agreed on the social sector. The social sector did not call itself a sector before the turn of the century. It was quite a few separate movements and the regional differences are large.

Audrey Tang: The unifying events were, for example, the earthquake, the September 21st earthquake, that’s basically forced all the social sector energy to move together in order to recover. In fact, most of the occupant movement in Taiwan follows the same collaboration as the disaster recovery and resilience as this social sector.

Audrey Tang: If you look at the 20 or so NGOs that occupied the streets around the parliament during 2014, you see pretty much the exact same collaboration model and style as they would be following a accident, natural disaster, a typhoon or things like that. That’s the network of resilience that fills in the void of the public sector inability or lack of the agility to respond to emergent social situations.

Audrey Tang: Now, politically speaking though, we’re a very young democracy. Our first presidential election in ‘96, and is already after the Wide Web. That imbues in the democratic designers a different sense of scale. Previously, if you operate only with paper or telegram, the old coin or the app or the phones, then that means that it only scales to speaking through radio.

Audrey Tang: Of course, one person can speak to millions of people. There was before the Wide Web, no easy way for millions of people to listen to one another, or to make technology that can listen at scale at all. Because of our democratization, the main institutional design was already after the Wide Web.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of bidirectionality and multi directionality baked in just because we could and because it’s the same generation that designs the constitutional amendments. We’re still working on one constitutional amendment right now. It’s like even the constitution get the kernel of the legal code is semiconductor design, you can just try a different layout every couple of years or something.

Audrey Tang: To summarize, this is captured in the phrase, “Democracy in Taiwan is a form of social technology.” People treat it as such, that one can experiment in a local scale.

Audrey Tang: Learn from overseas innovations, better Reykjavik, from Iceland, the Council Democracy Foundation, from Barcelona, and modern participatory budgeting, sandboxes, the prototype fund from German, which came to talent become Presidential Hackathon, and many other things.

Audrey Tang: We can listen to skill, we might as well input the bit-rate of listening, we consider that three bits every person every four years, which is called voting, is just a too small event to reflect accurately the social sector agenda, to the central governments.

Audrey Tang: Politically speaking, now, all the four parties are firmly behind the Open Government agenda and in fact, compete on how open, or how participatory they could be. There is no one who, after the 2014 smear election there to says, “Let’s go back to elitism, to technocracy or whatever.”

Audrey Tang: Everybody must commit saying, “Oh, actually, this epistemological variety inclusion is so good, that enables us to overcome the pandemic was not locked down and overcome the infodemic was no takedown.”

Audrey Tang: Not because we know for sure this will work, but rather because after Sunflower, the social sector has already made it very clear to politicians, that lockdowns or takedowns are non-stock tips, they are not to be considered.

Anne Le Strat: Nowadays, can you say that there is much more legitimacy attached to laws and regulations taken by the government? Do you think that the relationships between citizens and government have improved? and that as of today the people’s expectations in Taiwan are better taken into account?

Audrey Tang: It’s easy. Listening skill technologies mean that you get more signal than noise, that people increase the quality of their rule-making because they anticipate that with this rough consensus that people can live with, nobody will go and say, “Oh, you didn’t console that, so we’ll just occupy the parliament.” There’s always an outside game implicit in these configurations.

Audrey Tang: People switch to solar panels, not necessarily because there’s this very heavy-handed approach, but rather, because it became very inexpensive. That the same reason why in Taiwan, the central government and the municipal government are now adopting Internet-based consultation joined the g0v.tw.

Audrey Tang: Now, has 10 million visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan, not because there’s a strong mandate from the digital minister or any other ministers, but rather because it’s easy, it saves time, it reduces risk.

Audrey Tang: They do that by default, they have to find a reason for why they don’t post their regulatory pre-announcements or draft act to the consultation platform for 60 days. Even after the farther reason, they still can’t put it on just reduce it to 30 days or something.

Audrey Tang: Participatory budgeting, the budget visualization and real-time commentary, citizens initiatives that were 5,000 signatures are collected, we arrange the ministerial response and it is cross ministry. I also facilitate the cross ministry meeting vTaiwan style but with a different network. It’s called the Participation Officer Network.

Audrey Tang: The PO network, which is in every ministry, 32 of them. There’s a group of people in charge of engaging the public, similar to how parliamentary officers interface with MPs, and journal listing officers interface with the news workers.

Audrey Tang: The participation officers engage hashtags before they take to the street [laughs] and arrange this mutual listening facilitated nonviolent meetings.

Audrey Tang: This is again, because it’s seen as inevitable because it’s cheap and cheerful, in the best sense, inexpensive, and always produces something positive, but not because there’s a strong mandate.

Anne Le Strat: It’s very interesting. Does it mean that there is no reluctance from civil servants,and from the administration to use these democratic processes?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because it’s done by default, it’s part of their work. They did not have to learn a new system. They do not have to change their workflow.

Audrey Tang: Part as their workflow of filing in their long-term project reviews, which people already have experienced, thanks to the gender impact assessment framework that says, “All the draft bills and all the budgets needs to pass the civil society organization dominated.”

Audrey Tang: One more vote administers gender equality review boards, and all the important statistics need to be accounted for. They’ve been practicing this for 12 years.

Audrey Tang: Building on top of the agenda movement. By the way, this entire assessment is now public, everybody gets to assess. You can trust the citizens because they’re going to crowd moderate themselves, and you only have to provide a summary response to the more rough consensus points that convinced everyone from all the different aisles.

Audrey Tang: If there is just one lone voice, that doesn’t resonate with one another, you just acknowledge, but you do not have to respond to it in a way that changes your policy-making direction. This crowd moderation is very good, not just in theory, but also in practice.

Anne Le Strat: Amazing! Maybe Mike, you have some questions.

Mickael Menser: One follow-up on that. I know at least, and I’ve only been able to follow some things because of English, just able to read what’s in English, but I read in the early phase of vTaiwan, the recommendations made to the national legislature. Some of them were followed by the legislature, but many were not. That was not a high percentage. Was that true?

Audrey Tang: 80 percent was adopted, 20 percent were not.

Mickael Menser: Great. I read about the case of Uber and the taxis in Taiwan. I was just curious, is something like Uber that was resolved through this participatory process where the taxis got a new app, and that was about entering the vehicle and they’re marked. Has there been a return? Is this the process allow for further iteration around that issue?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Like our referendum, national ones are binding but only for two years. The interim results that’s from the vTaiwan or the joint processes. I’m part of the public sector now, so I don’t really run vTaiwan. I can only comment it up to 2016. vTaiwan has been working with the legislature directly now. They’re responsible for part of the consultation on the Open Parliament plan as well.

Audrey Tang: That’s another approach, but I’m not in charge of that. If you read only-English material, they often give a impression that I’m still running vTaiwan after all these years…

Anne Le Strat: Yes, I confirm.

Audrey Tang: …which is not true. It’s not true. [laughs] I gave the root password the controller of the technological apprentice late 2016. I am fully endorsing and supporting them, but my main energy is now on the participation of the network and the joint platform.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the point here is that if we make sure that the participation officers are equipped to respond in the here and now, in short iteration cycles, then what previously agreed interim consensus point are that draft consensus. Maybe we move toward that a little bit.

Audrey Tang: As soon as citizens’ initiative 5,000 signatures sometime not even 5,000. In 2017, there was a rapidly growing initiative, this is the tax filing experience, is explosively hostile. Then the participation officer engaged the initiator even before they hit 5,000 people.

Audrey Tang: Then we code-assigned a tax filing system of 2018, which became the mask pre-ordering system in 2020, later on the triple stimulus voucher ordering system. That builds the digital services that enjoy 98 percent last year approval rates, which is unheard of in digital service design in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That’s because a lot of people can say with good conscience that this is better because I participated in its design. We’ve had close to 100 different co-creation meetings like that. You can actually see pretty much all of them in the participation office and Network website, which is actually in English. I’ll paste it in the chat here.

Mickael Menser: Thank you.

Anne Le Strat: OK, thank you.

Mickael Menser: Can I add another follow-up on that? Your participation officers, so they’re paid by the government? They are government staff?

Audrey Tang: Yes, they are. They are quite senior.

Mickael Menser: How were they trained? Who trains them, because this is one of the things we’re looking at New York. How do we train the folks working as government staff to be able to do these more participant…?

Audrey Tang: Feel free to take the directions, principles, and regulations on that Web page, and install it in the institution. The trick are really very simple, is that, for example, when were co-creating the tax filing system, the people facilitating it in each table, the professional facilitators, are actually not outside experts.

Audrey Tang: Neither are they participation officers from the ministry of tax or economy or finance, but rather the participation officers from the Ocean Affairs, from the National Palace Museum.

Audrey Tang: The people who are core public service in charge of responding, engaging, but unrelated at all to the issue at hand, which is why they can take and they do take a citizen’s perspective because after work, they also file tax.

Audrey Tang: When we come to co-create under ocean policy and publishing the Ocean Affairs public information to the citizens, which is run by the Ocean Affairs Council, then the people hosting that are not the Ocean Affair’s participation officer.

Audrey Tang: This is a intersectional design of facilitation, and every other week, we run such co-creation meetings with the initiators, the petitioners, people as young as 16, 17 years old, who petition saying, you must ban plastic straw found bubble tea, which was controversial, not because of plastic, but because of bubble tea.

Mickael Menser: That’s great because it reminds me of rotation in a cooperative where you go into different roles, you get out of your silo, you get out of your own box, and you look at how these issues are playing out in other areas. I guess that’s a great idea.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right. We get the results that the civil service because if you run the participatory budget, you know that there is this fundamental tension between people who are good in networking on the Internet who sets the agenda and the people who are good on the grounds, organization who get the votes.

Audrey Tang: Using this collaboration meetings, one can basically say, in design thinking, the discovery and definition, where the first assignment is done by the Internet people, but it just set the agenda, and do not produce anything other than leading slightly toward as how might we question. It’s not about budget allocation yet.

Audrey Tang: During the co-creation meeting, the professional public service facilitators take the lead. However, they are actually viewing it from the citizens’ perspective because they are not belonging to that particular ministry. Their legitimacy is carried by their position, but their alignments, their affinity is to where the later parts of the second time in. I can elaborate more. This is similar topic, but you get the idea.

Mickael Menser: Yes. Thank you. Go ahead, Anne.

Anne Le Strat: I have a question regarding public governance and public policies. I would like to focus on a concrete example.

Anne Le Strat: Since recently, Taiwan has experienced a dramatic draught, the worst in over half of century. This very challenging situation leads the government to take drastic decisions.  To save water for homes and Tech factories, Taiwan has decided to impose severe water use restrictions and has shut off irrigation across tens of thousands acres of farmland. Even giving some compensations for growers in the affected rural areas, this decision to prioritize Tech companies does not meet with consensus.

Anne Le Strat: In concrete terms, in this case, has there been a process of consultation with the various stakeholders? Could a national debate on the uses of water, on the choice of public policies to be carried out, be conceived in your framework of participatory democracy?

Audrey Tang: The consultation was down around 2016, ‘17, ‘18-ish as part of the infrastructure plan. The special act on forward-looking infrastructures, I believe, that’s the official name, where the infrastructure around water was deliberated and so on.

Audrey Tang: No, currently, we’re playing a playbook that’s already pre-agreed on. During the consultation period, we did not actually run extra consultations because people understand that this is coming. We basically did make the consultation. This is similar to the White Paper on energy transition.

Audrey Tang: We’re not currently running a lot of consultations, at least not on the national level, but that’s because we’re playing the energy transition playbook that’s co-created during 2016, ‘17. There is no a strictly speaking new situation not foreseen by the ‘16, ‘17 consultations.

Audrey Tang: So far as I understand, there is no citizen initiative because the idea of the HR governance is that if there are citizen initiatives that says, “This emergent situation is outside of the playbooks,” Then, of course, we talk about it, but I just checked the joint platform, and currently, there’s no initiatives that’s talks about the water dropped or water shortage.

Anne Le Strat: Do you think it could be relevant to have another consultation on that issue?

Audrey Tang: If people want a consultation, they know how to start a consultation.

Anne Le Strat: OK.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The entire point here is that, either the municipality, the public service, or the social sector leaders, or the economic sector leaders, they know how to get 5,000 signatures and basically force a consultation.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, I don’t see such trending initiatives from the dashboard. That probably means that people understand that it’s within the scope of the current playbook, but if at any time like tomorrow, there’s this spike in participation in initiating conversation on any particular topic, then we, of course, go and have a consultation.

Anne Le Strat: In that case, if the growers or farmers wanted to sign a petition and to launch a consultation on that matter, could they?

Audrey Tang: Of course, that’s how we got, for example, as part of the forward-looking plan, we say that we must build the regional revitalization infrastructure for the least accessible places in terms of learning and health.

Audrey Tang: The formula did not favor a particular town of Hengchun, and so they did not get the hospital that they wanted. They started a petition that says we petition for the helicopters to be stationed in Hengchun so that when we have people who are hurt, major trauma or whatever, and could not get into the large hospital Hengchun in time, the helicopter should serve as ambulance costs.

Audrey Tang: That’s got 5,000 signatures in a very short time, even though after consultation, we decided and we went there for the consultation, as well as on the Internet live streamed.

Audrey Tang: We decided that it doesn’t make sense to fly major trauma people, it may lead to complications. It’s much better if we build that hospital anyway, and fly the doctors to their patients or arrange video conference diagnosis and even telesurgery.

Audrey Tang: The loss was not friendly to a doubt. We change the laws and all of that because the local people from [Mandarin] to convince the tourists and themselves to start a petition on that.

Audrey Tang: That’s a concrete amendment to the result of the formula in the forward-looking infrastructure plan. Nothing similar has yet happened to my knowledge to the water infrastructure at this moment.

Anne Le Strat: One of the conditions for the success of theses participatory processes of deliberation is the widest possible awareness of, and knowledge about these democratic mechanisms among the population.  It means that everybody at every level knows how to launch a petition, to request a consultation process, and so on.

Anne Le Strat: For example, in that case, I am wondering if in your view the majority of growers and farmers know that they can request a consultation process?

Audrey Tang: In many senses, the joint platform is like a training wheel for the National referendum. Pretty much all the national referendum topics has its components, consulted on the joint platform, as citizens initiatives or pre-announcements of regulations.

Audrey Tang: Many people, know that this is like a training wheel that could get 5,000 people, which is far short from the signature they require acquired for a national-level referendum, but it’s a thought. It gets the people linking together.

Audrey Tang: If you ask an average grower, “Have they heard of the tax filing system co-creation?” Maybe they say, “No,” because the tax filing system probably isn’t their main concern.

Audrey Tang: If you ask, “Have you heard of the consultation allowing the amateur fishers to operate in the docks of professional fishers?” They’ll probably say, “Yes” because that’s closer to their life experience.

Audrey Tang: Even though the agenda-setting, the consultation is through the Internet, when consulting, we go to where people are, we bring technology to people. The upshot is that people may remember that particular consultation, not the Internet platform that led to the consultation unless they participated in the initial signature.

Audrey Tang: If the network does grow into a national referenda, for example, if you ask an average grower, do they know that we’re going to have a referendum about protecting the biodiversity around [Mandarin] and blocking a gas plant which may or may not hurt biodiversity, 100 percent of them would say that they know, but they may or may not know that consultation that led to this un-national referendum question.

Audrey Tang: If you ask, “Would you start a signature collecting process toward consultation or referendum on water use?” They may say yes, they may say no, but I’m not a grower. I don’t know why they would say yes or no. You have to ask that to get your qualitative answer.

Anne Le Strat: It’s very interesting because it’s not top-down, is a bottom-up consultative process.

Audrey Tang: It’s what I call, social sector first consultation process, because the social sector, to me, is not the bottom. It’s not the third or voluntary sector, is the agenda-setting sector. I’ll say, it’s truly led by the social sector.

Anne Le Strat: OK. Mike, maybe you are about to…

Mickael Menser: A lot of different things. Let’s stay on the concept of the social and the social sector. One thing that Anne and I, in this project, we’re operating on two levels. On the one hand, Anne and I, have both worked as bureaucrats or worked with bureaucrats, in terms of being internal to agencies, helping with policy administration.

Mickael Menser: On the other hand, though, there’s this level, how do we conceptualize these new arrangements that we’re creating or are being created? When we think about public-private partnerships and privatization, there’s always a lot of tension to those, and the kinds of agendas that they set.

Mickael Menser: How do you understand this more democratic public? Participatory governance, the terms civic engagement, are very inadequate. Consultation is interesting.

Mickael Menser: I use the phrase, social public, like there’s this re-articulation of the relationship between the public and the social. It’s not a great phrase. I’m hearing you use this term social sector, it’s not the bottom. The social sector is defined by a project.

Audrey Tang: It’s the people in the people public-private partnerships. People first, then public, then private partnerships.

Mickael Menser: Do you see, in Taiwan, is there tensions around the public-private partnership with respect to the social sector? Or is there more of coexistence with those or trust in those models?

Audrey Tang: Social sector, main output is not policies, and it’s not goods and services, as the public and private sectors are. The main output of the social sector is known that the social sector is responsible for creating norms.

Audrey Tang: To answer your question more directly. For example, the norm about disclosure of campaign finance, and the disclosure of donations, was not a norm in Taiwan. Before 2014, the National Auditing Office resist publishing the fine details of the legislator or president, or mayor’s campaign donation expenditure.

Audrey Tang: They have to file it, but only the National Audit Office get to audit. They just published the order result and the summaries meaning that they are the, I don’t know, elites, experts or whatever. According to our Freedom of Information Act, they cannot resist if people go there and ask for a carbon copy of any particular campaigns records. That’s what we did.

Audrey Tang: The Zero Movement actually organized people in a sort of civil disobedience to go into the building to bring out carbon copies to scan them into JPEG files.

Audrey Tang: Yes? To scan them to JPEG…

Audrey Tang: Are you still hearing me?

Anne Le Strat: Yes…

Anne Le Strat: …just I didn’t hear you a few seconds, but now it’s OK.

Audrey Tang: I was saying that bring out them as skins and using computer vision tools to divide them into individual boxes, cells. Then made a game where people compete to identify, turn more of them into numbers, what we call otaku character recognition.

Audrey Tang: Then we OCR everything in the few campaigns that was in around 2015, to structured data, open data, and for investigative journalists to analyze. National Audit Office said, as you can’t be sure that these are – are you still hearing me?

Anne Le Strat: Yes.

Audrey Tang: You can’t be sure that these are accurate. We’re like, “Yeah, of course. Even if three people look at each cell, you can’t know it’s 100 percent accurate, which is why you should publish as open data.” The social norm become irresistible to the public sector.

Audrey Tang: In 2018, they do publish for the first time as open data, the raw campaign donation expenditure. Then the investigative journalists discovered that the social media advertisements were not filed, and is indeed a loophole.

Audrey Tang: The foreign people can interfere with elections. They can’t donate, but they can buy social advertisement or political advertisements. Then that creates this enormous pressure on Facebook and so on. We can say, look at our civic infrastructure built by the social sector, such as the PTT.

Audrey Tang: They have signed on the counter disinformation accord, which is not a law. It’s just a norm that says just like how the social sector forced the public sector to publish the raw data around expenditure, you should treat advertisement on social political issues during the election as such as campaign finance.

Audrey Tang: Basically, Facebook understood if they don’t conform to the norm, they will be subject to social sanction, and they don’t like being subject to social sanction. They, in 2019, Taiwan is the first jurisdiction where they published, in real-time, the audit campaign expenditure in the nation.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who doesn’t have a VAT registration company ID in Taiwan, they can’t place a social, political advertisement during the election season around end of 2019. That’s a very concrete case of people-public-private partnership.

Audrey Tang: The tension was first resolved during the people-public part, but when that’s resolved, it creates a powerful new norm, just like trade negotiation that a private sector cannot resist, but it’s not by installing a law, it’s by setting a norm.

Mickael Menser: Very heroic. Thank you, and I wanted to ask about social media, and how this fits in, in terms of political speech, so you were ahead of me. You answered before I asked. Let me drill down on a different point though, while you bring this up. What about people in the public and profits?

Mickael Menser: One of the reasons across Europe and the United States and Latin America, different in Asia, that people want the utilities to be more in public hands so that the profits from these enterprises can be reinvested in resilience, in addressing inequality, and speeding up the transition. Is that an issue that plays out?

Mickael Menser: When you mentioned the energy transition white paper, we were even talking a little bit with Francis about in the New York State, today we had a hearing. I was testifying in a hearing about a carbon tax, about a polluter’s tax. Not just a carbon tax, but the pollution tax, and she was saying that you’re approaching a debate there.

Mickael Menser: How is that debate play out in terms of profits, and how they get invested? Does the participatory mechanisms impact on how the surplus is reinvested?

Audrey Tang: Fundamentally, our constitution says that we must limit the private capital, and the constitution amendments also said that. For example, health or education, especially basic education, is not in the private sector, period. It’s a much more clear framework. It basically says that these are not for sale. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Even if there might be a good innovation from the private sector that can help it out, we’re at most a partnering or joint venture partnership. We are not, at any given point, handing the governance to the private sector.

Audrey Tang: This is why I bring up the PTT, which is Taiwan equivalent of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t have advertisers. It doesn’t have shareholders per se. It’s entirely state-subsidized through the Taiwan Academic Network and the National Taiwan University’s budget. The NTU because it enjoy academic freedom, the governance is entirely in the hands of people who participate the PTT.

Audrey Tang: It’s open-source. It’s a transparent governing mechanism. It has no shareholder interest to respond to. This is fundamentally different because if it both had a shareholder interest, then we talk about incentives. If it doesn’t even have shareholder, then we talk about equity. It’s a different conversation. I don’t even know how to start the comparison. [laughs]

Mickael Menser: We’re in a bad position in the United States on this for sure. It couldn’t get much worse, although it seems like things always can, but…

Audrey Tang: I hear the US is now considering what we considered in 2016, which is to redefine the word infrastructure. That’s a very good thing, because, in 2016, I worked with our then minister of culture and with the National Budgeting Office, convincing that even for things that are not made out of concrete, like not concrete things, it’s still infrastructure if it’s in the Creative Commons.

Audrey Tang: If it builds a digital equivalent of a national park, a national museum, a town hall, or things like that because it can be used by pretty much anyone. The social sector can set the agenda there is a public good. Even though budget-wise, it’s not a investment, we can classify it as forward-looking infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The forward-looking objective, very important, because there’s no way [laughs] that we can fit in into existing infrastructure categories, and we succeeded. The digital infrastructure components, there is budget-wise structure very differently from any other infrastructure components.

Audrey Tang: That includes universal broadband access and so on, but not from a NCC or FCC perspective, but rather from a Ministry of Culture perspective. The same conversation is happening a little bit in the US, and that’s a really good trend.

Mickael Menser: Yes. Thank you. That links back to the gender budgeting and the gender evaluation with the budget.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Mickael Menser: This stuff becomes very much an issue around social reproduction and gender. Go ahead, Anne.

Anne Le Strat: Just to jump in this private-public issue; In one of your interview, you said, - it was very interesting for me -, that in Taiwan there is a collective priority of rebuilding strong mutual trust between the government and the civil society.This is something that a European nation, especially people who worry of the private sector having too much control of the government, could perhaps look into. I would like to ask you how post-pandemic democracy could limit the influence of large private coporations in decision-making?

Anne Le Strat: What is your point of view regarding common goods and public service management, and how it’s possible to implement a public management model with a genuine public participation?

Audrey Tang: I would like first to say that if the social norms are not just felt, but spelled out, and deliberation is a great way to spell it out, then, it’s binding to the private sector in a way that binds even more strongly than most laws because laws are subject to interpretation, loopholes. It’s just like working around patents, with sufficient amount of lawyers who can always do it.

Audrey Tang: With these norms, even the lawyers that participated would tell the customers they’re wrong, right? Norms, in essence, are stronger. To spell out the norms requires the government to trust citizens. That’s actually harder than citizens trusting the government.

Audrey Tang: We’ve all worked in the public service. We know that there’s a natural tendency for the government to say, “Oh, if we just publish the positive parts of our work, then the citizens will trust us more,” but to trust us citizens means to publish whatever we collect even before we see it.

Audrey Tang: Our open API initiative started when it was 2016. The first digital minister action is the open API movement that says the public servants are not held liable if we build systems that pre-delineate on the privacy boundaries. Things unrelated to privacy and trade secrets or whatever are published upon collection, meaning that nobody reviews it.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, they’re not liable for the data bias or data errors, because the errors and bias are also social objects. They are in the Commons. For example, during our national mosque rationing – started last February – we were quite happy because the pharmacies were to dispense the mask overlay almost exactly with the population census due to market mechanisms.

Audrey Tang: We think that each person has the same distance when they go to secure their PPEs, but because we publish every 30 seconds, their real-time purchasing history, it soon turns out we’re biased. It’s not a company. It’s called OpenStreetMap. It’s a community.

Audrey Tang: Communities find a member of the parliament, MP [Mandarin] , previously VP data analytics, Foxconn. She knows something about data. In her interpolation to the Minister of Health and Welfare, she said that the OpenStreetMap community notice if you zoom out a little bit, then the people who have good access to public transportation get it much, much more easily.

Audrey Tang: The people who don’t don’t, because by the time they get to the pharmacy, the pharmacy may have already closed for the business hours. What looks the same distance on the map is actually not equity.

Audrey Tang: It may be equality on the very abstract Taipei, everybody having good helicopters, [laughs] abstract viewpoint. It’s wrong that the data is biased. I know that Paris or New York never has that problem, right? [laughs]

Mickael Menser: That’s a great example.

Audrey Tang: Right. Minister Chen, instead of saying something defensive, because they thought they will be liable, because they know they’re not liable for this, Minister Chen simply said, “Legislator give us a better distribution mechanism.”

Audrey Tang: When this invitation is made, nobody thought that anyone need to resign or any public servant needs to be punished, because it’s in the Commons. Everybody can write a better algorithm. OpenStreetMap people actually did.

Audrey Tang: Within 24 hours, we not only changed the distribution mechanism, but we enlisted the private sector at the convenience stores to get into the preordering network. The points to collect must have tripled. MP Go was very happy and said that yesterday’s interpolation turned into tomorrow’s co-creation.

Audrey Tang: Literally within a week, their idea become the new distribution mechanism. That basically said that the private sector, if they know very clearly what are the good social sector norms, then they can show their not just social responsibility. It’s a business development.

Audrey Tang: The vending machine vendor, the first one that did automate the pharmacy-collecting process get a lot of free press and so on. That’s because they know there’s a clearly spelt-out social norm that anyone queuing in line getting mask can verify using their own phone and when of any of those 100 different visualizations that this distribution is more fail and the previous one was biased.

Audrey Tang: Nobody held any person to a kind of revenge or discriminatory position. We just collectively said, “Yeah, we’re wrong. If the data was biased, let’s make it better.” Imagine if they have to go through freedom of information channels and only get it after 60 days. It will be a political disaster. That’s another example that I can think of.

Mickael Menser: Great example.

Anne Le Strat: Maybe Mike if you want to follow up with another question.

Mickael Menser: We got into the conceptual aspects and asked about the history. We’ve covered a tremendous amount. I don’t think I have anything else for right now. There’s always much debate, but this has been fantastic.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Anne Le Strat: Would it be possible after that to ask the question, to send you by emails?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Frances can also help answer some of the questions, especially the factual ones. Our conversation, I’ve not been recording the video but audio. We’ll make a transcript. There’s co-editing before we publish to the public domain.

Audrey Tang: If there’s any particular phrase or particular anecdote that you would like more information on, you can just quote that particular phrase, and Frances will get you more information.

Anne Le Strat: OK. Good.

Mickael Menser: I’m going to go through some of these materials that you just sent or put in the chat tonight, because we’re going through that. We are thinking a lot about, how do you educate people to do this kind of work, educating the public side, educate in the government worker side and the staff side?

Mickael Menser: We’re trying to create new programs of education in New York. That’s something that I look forward to reading more about, and then we could follow up for sure.

Audrey Tang: There’s a recent, more up-to-date paper, just short overview on the points of collective decision-making, counter infodemic, data coalition, digital public books, goods, and people-public-private partnerships that I just pasted. It has plenty of references. It’s also in Creative Commons. Please use the material however you would like.

Mickael Menser: Thank you.

Anne Le Strat: Thank you very much. I know that Taiwanese experience is very well-known among the open data, open governance, open democracy community but, in fact, not very well-known unfortunately among politicians…

Anne Le Strat: As you noticed, I’m a strong proponent of public services. It’s very important to improve the public services with much more participatory democracy. For me, it’s one of the key issue for our future and for our basic needs like water, energy, etc.

Anne Le Strat: I think we need to go in depth social governance question. That’s why we collaborate with Mike. It’s very important to design a new model, not only conceptual but also operational to have public participation in decision-making processes. Taiwan is a very fascinating experience for that.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Anne Le Strat: Even if what I understand is that theses democratic tools are specially relevant in order to discuss laws, regulations and norms, but not totally implemented within the management of public services. If I take the example of Taipei water service I am not sure that this kind of democratic governance is developped.

Audrey Tang: I think that the paper I just posted have some relevance to the Civil IoT project, is worth looking into.

Audrey Tang: We didn’t have time to cover the Presidential Hackathon. But for most politicians I interacted with, just mentioning the pandemic countering with no lockdown and infodemic countering with no takedown, that could make them feel that our democracy actually works more democracy, not necessarily a bad thing. It’s good opening to more discussions.

Mickael Menser: And that, it can be fast. It can be fast, right? Everybody thinks it’s slow in here, right?

Audrey Tang: Right. It’s fast, fair, and fun. And the fast way or fun parts, I think, is really the kind of saving grace of nowadays democracy is only if people understand that it’s actually more pro-social than what’s the anti-social social media the digital infrastructure on the private sector lead us to believe.

Audrey Tang: Because the private sector digital infrastructure leaders who believe the only way to get action is through outrage. Outrage is good, but it often channels on those anti-social corner into revenge or discrimination or toxic polarization.

Audrey Tang: But we say, “Oh, no, using the same social media principles, we can very quickly channel it into co-creation.” The example I cited about mask distribution is a pretty good one. I’ve mentioned quite a few in my TED Talk.

Anne Le Strat: OK, great. Thank you so much for your availability. It was a great pleasure as always and thank you very much for your insightful and stimulating thoughts. I hope I will meet you again in person. I don’t know when.

Mickael Menser: Me too.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, after this is over. Till then, live long and prosper. Bye.

Mickael Menser: Thank you, Audrey.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Anne Le Strat: Thank you very much.