Dr. Todd Lowary: You met my colleague, Mario Pinto.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Dr. Todd Lowary: He suggested that I reach out to you to talk more about what you do as Digital Minister. I’m not naive enough to think that I can make that big of a difference, but one of the things I would like to do as part of working in Taiwan is to help the international community understand what’s so special about Taiwan and to try to help attract professionals to the Taiwanese workforce.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it goes both ways.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I’m really trying to be, to some degree, a foreign ambassador for Taiwan. If there’s ways I can help, then I’d be happy to do that.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I went and visited, I think, let’s see, Vancouver and Toronto and also I think Ottawa for two times already. That’s in the past year alone.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right.

Audrey Tang: I do see that we share many common values in that we seem to not be so acutely aware that we share some very common values. That is the part that I would really like to introduce because in Taiwan, nowadays, like with President Tsai’s agenda of not just marriage equality but also transitional justice but also about all the sort of different reforms, it turns out that our issues, social issues, are very compatible, actually.

Audrey Tang: We also have mining rights with indigenous lines and how to meaningfully consult with the indigenous nations. It turns out, you’re having the same problem, sorry, same challenge.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: A lot of solutions is common between the two societies. We should really build that social relationship aside from the existing trade, economic, and ecological ones.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right. What’s your portfolio, then?

Audrey Tang: I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

Audrey Tang: As for digital transformation, that is not a job of any single ministry, right?

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right.

Audrey Tang: Hence, my office is one delegate from each ministry. We have 32 vertical ministers, and they can each send one volunteer. Joel here is from MOFA, the foreign service delegate.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see, OK.

Audrey Tang: One volunteer to my office…Then, my office represents different values because every ministry is, by its nature, a different value. We don’t allow two or more people from one ministry at the same time. I hear the MOVAQ is maybe a dozen people now, right?

Audrey Tang: Then, we make sure that we work out loud meaning that whatever project they’re working on, they do separate themselves. I don’t score or rank them. I don’t give assignments. If they have incompatible values, for example, the environmental one and the economic one, that’s the common one or the science innovation one with the social justice one, that’s another common one, and then we can figure out ways to openly collaborate.

Audrey Tang: We do this through e-petition. That’s a common source. Each ministry now also have a team called participation officers in charge of tackling emerging issues. They can also raise issues to my office. That’s the second one. Also, our youth counselors, which are reverse mentors to each minister, they can also suggest one. That’s our three incoming sources.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, I see. You’re in charge of then providing solutions to a variety of challenges.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. My work is that of, I don’t know, philosophical work. I think everybody’s sides. I visit the rural indigenous areas. I live with people here, and then make their listening scalable and also make sure that the 12 different ministries also listen to them through tele presence while I’m in the indigenous or rural places.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we say meeting someone face to face builds 30 percent of trust, and so meeting through high-bandwidth tele presence may be 20 percent of trust. The importance here is that it’s entirely horizontal. They don’t need their minister’s approval to figure out solutions together.

Audrey Tang: Previously, it’s always the minister’s credit but it’s always the public servant’s fault. In a horizontal way, it’s the other way around. It’s readily transparent. It’s always their credit, and if things go wrong, it’s me that gets beaten by the local population because you cannot hit someone across the screen.

Audrey Tang: That’s the basic idea.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see. This is a new portfolio that was created by the administration?

Audrey Tang: It’s a new position, yeah. We always have horizontal ministers. It’s just a horizontal minister in charge of digital, that’s the new one.

Audrey Tang: We always have, for example, horizontal ministers in charge of law because each minister may pass their own laws and regulations, but someone needs to keep them coherent.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see. OK, good. You have a role in the science portfolio as well then. You tap into that?

Audrey Tang: Right. Basically, the staff, each of them when they join…I think you were a section chief?

Joel Chen: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Right. I think Ning Yeh was Director-general, and so on. They all have their own network so to speak, yeah.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see, OK, all right, understood. Then, you report directly to the president or do you have…Are you a junior minister and you have…

Audrey Tang: I’m working with the government. I’m not working for the government. I report to the Internet community.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, so you’re not actually an elected official, then.

Audrey Tang: I’m appointed.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see, OK, all right.

Audrey Tang: So appointed by the president and confirmed by the premier.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have fixed constituents. My constituent is anyone who has an email account.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, gotcha. You’re not elected in that sense.

Audrey Tang: No.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK. I didn’t…

Audrey Tang: I’m not partisan either. That’s not an anomaly, though. In the cabinet, there’s more independent ministers than ministers belonging to any party.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Oh, OK. That’s quite different than Canada.

Audrey Tang: Indeed.

Dr. Todd Lowary: And it’s a tradition in Taiwan to have this kind of positions?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think so because our design here is that the administration can propose draft bills; you don’t have to go through MPs to propose draft bills. The draft bills are of course subject to partisan fights among the amendments, but the skeleton of most bills are written and drafted by the administration, not by the parties.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Sure.

Audrey Tang: I think the importance here is that we are in the kind of neutral zone where the party politics are kind of at arm’s length. Then, we can consult meaningfully with people without as much party politics as they have in the legislation. Of course, they are free to act on our draft and do whatever.

Dr. Todd Lowary: What are some of the achievements that have come out of your portfolio?

Audrey Tang: One of it is co-creation of the important digital services that touches everybody like the tax filing experience, as well as mobile authentication to the universal healthcare system. The learnings from that effort will inform our plans next year to introduce a New eID.

Audrey Tang: We also work with the National Palace Museum – which is part of the cabinet because of an interesting history that goes back to the Qing Dynasty [laughs] – to co-design their ticketing systems. Their visitors may be 70 years old, may be 17 years old, and it’s a challenge to please those groups at the same time. We did a co-design workshop and there are still ongoing collaboration.

Audrey Tang: We worked with AIT a digital dialogue that invited both sites to communicate. Currently, our topic is security collaboration. There’s a lot of innovations in this field. Their first dialogue was how to promote Taiwan in the world. We came up with like the Presidential Hackathon and AIT should someone to the Presidential Hackathon, which they did, things like that.

Audrey Tang: Trade was the previous one. The next one is people do people, to be followed by AmCham’s consultation on talent circulation, I think. All this becomes kind of the norm for diplomacy to be public for everybody to participate meaningfully.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Have you engaged Sinica in some of these activities?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Actually, we think of Academia Sinica as an important incubator of the g0v movement. The information science, the computer science department is where the bi-monthly hackathon happens. All the initiatives I mentioned actually have their prototype there. The previous head of the information science, computer science is now also advisor to the president on cyber security affairs, Dr. D. T. Lee.

Audrey Tang: More broadly we consider Academia Sinica the incubator of Taiwan’s open source movement, and it’s home to many important infrastructure projects.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK. Then, are you also involved in this push to become more bilingual, if you will? That’s the focus of the government, I guess. Is that part of your strategy as well?

Audrey Tang: There’s the bilingual, meaning that everything concerning foreign people need to be presented in also English. There’s also the National Languages Act, which means that for the different populations, if they want to learn physics or something, they can do it through materials in indigenous languages. Taiwan’s curriculum also takes into account people from Indonesia and Philippines and so on…

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right.

Audrey Tang: On this part is kind of a multi-ethnicity nation being built. On the other hand, there is English from the kindergarten level that’s being taught. Those are two strategies. I’m paying a lot of attention to enable them without wasting too much time on repetitive work, so mission translation and AI to speech and also mission translation transfer from one language to a near but lower resource language and so on. That is my field.

Audrey Tang: I worked with Apple on Siri for six years, so I help on that regard, but law making, that is the Ministry of Culture and the National Development Council respectively.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK. A lot of this is driven by AI, then, OK. Have you engaged much with the Canadian AI community on some of these issues?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, on some issues, but I didn’t visit, what is it, the Direct Institute.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Oh, the Perimeter Institute?

Audrey Tang: The Perimeter, yeah. I didn’t visit there. There’s quite a few AI startups being brought both ways between the two jurisdictions. I think one of the challenges also is bilingual AI in the public service for Canadians.

Audrey Tang: I think that is something that we should actually have more conversations about because when our conversation with AIT came, they care very much about the ex-pats being able to type their suggestions in English but also understanding the Mandarin speaking community’s voices.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right, or having websites where the translation is actually understandable, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It must not only be machine translation because it lost the nuances, right?

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right.

Audrey Tang: It turns out that so far, we’re using the AI software called Pol.is for this kind of conversation, very recently got this kind of bilingual capability sponsored by the Canadian government because of French, English. Then, we contribute on top of that. We’re already sharing the technical level AI components, but we’re not sharing on the policy level at this point.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, good. That’s interesting. What’s the future, then? Do you think this will continue if the government changes?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I worked with the previous government, too.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Oh, OK. This was something that…

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK.

Audrey Tang: I started working with the public service end of 2014, and then as reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai who’s the horizontal minister in charge of law. This is not a new thing in Taiwan and people actually competed on being more open.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the DPP primary, William Lai’s platform was that like the President of Taiwan did great on open government, but he will be even more open.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK. That gives me a good feeling for…One of the big issues in trying to attract foreigners is the low salaries. Is there a strategy that the government is really working on to try to improve things? Are you a part of that?

Audrey Tang: The what thing?

Dr. Todd Lowary: Salaries, they’re so low here.

Audrey Tang: The living expense is equally low though. If you translate to PPP, we’re doing very well.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, fair enough.

Audrey Tang: We’re trying to attract digital nomads for precisely this reason because they can earn a global salary, but they spend living expenses in Taiwan. That basically makes them twice as rich or thrice, actually.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, all right. You do have an active engagement of trying to recruit foreign talent?

Audrey Tang: We do. That’s why our Gold Card, unlike the Singapore one, is renewable. We want to attract as much digital nomads who are into hiking or surfing. I don’t care what attracts you. It could be food. You have property as a human right, so even if you hike to the top of the Jade Mountain, 4,000 meters almost, you have 10Mbps, you can work there. Well, maybe not for very long periods.

Audrey Tang: But that’s the idea, right?

Audrey Tang: In any case, the idea is that you can continue to participate in the global ecosystem but having a separate place to live. That’s the idea. Then, once you renew your Gold Card for another term on the fifth year, you can become also Taiwanese. You don’t have to drop your original nationality.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right, OK. This is really something underpinning the whole government.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, yeah. We want people to be also Taiwanese. We’re not saying that you need to convert to our nationality.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Excellent. What is your training, then? Are you trained as a physicist or a computer scientist?

Audrey Tang: I dropped out of junior high, so I’m self-educated.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Oh, really? OK.

Audrey Tang: I’m trained on Project Gutenberg and Arxiv.org.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, so you’re self-trained, then?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. My main research topic is social interaction design. That’s basically building the first system like my startup back in ‘96 did the first B2C auction site in Taiwan, the first meta search engine, et cetera.

Audrey Tang: I quit that company and joined the Free Software movement, later on also advocated for Open Source, which now rejoined the Free Software Movement, and then it’s just social entrepreneurship after that. When I worked on my first startup, it’s not just computational linguistics, but also just social interaction design because nobody understands why people trust so much each other online in no time.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Yeah, that’s true.

Audrey Tang: Then, we really want to figure it out. That’s my main research interest, figuring out this.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see. How did you get into working with government, then?

Audrey Tang: We occupied the Parliament for 22 days.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Oh, so you were part of the…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the Sunflower movement.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I see. That’s how you got the connection.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because the MPs were on strike. The occupiers were just doing their job for them.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, interesting. Well, that was helpful. Thank you very much for your time. Nice to meet you. I forgot to give you my card.

Audrey Tang: I just printed a set of new cards. Feel free to have several because they also double as communication material. It’s interesting, because my name card is designed so that I’m not representing anyone.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Right, OK. The connection to the UN is for…

Audrey Tang: For the sustainable goals. That’s the 17 colors. I’m just saying Taiwan Can Help. This is lowercase digital minister meaning that I preach about digital transformation. All in all, this is an anarchist card signifying I’m working with, not for, the government.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, very good. Anyway, I just thought I’d introduce myself and learn more about you. Like I said, if there’s an option where I could help for something, don’t be shy about asking.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that Joel will take you up on your offer. He’s our MOFA delegate. He’s in the foreign service, I’m just facilitating the space.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, very good. I won’t take anymore of your time.

Audrey Tang: Are you staying in Academia Sinica for a while?

Dr. Todd Lowary: I’m moving here.

Audrey Tang: Oh, you are? That’s great.

Dr. Todd Lowary: I’m the director of one of the institutes.

Audrey Tang: I read about that, but I don’t realize that it’s permanent…

Dr. Todd Lowary: Well, it is a permanent thing. I’m spending two years transitioning my research laboratory here, shutting down my operation in Edmonton. Then, I will be here until I retire.

Audrey Tang: OK. Every other month, there will be a large event in your vicinity, the g0v Hackathon, so please just drop by and you’ll see the social innovation in action.

Dr. Todd Lowary: OK, yeah. I’ll be in Taipei until I retire.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Yeah, good. OK, very good.

Audrey Tang: See you around.

Dr. Todd Lowary: Thanks for your time.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.