Audrey Tang: Thank you, everyone, happy to be here. To somewhat compensate the lack of Q&A time in the previous session, we will start with the Q&A. If you have any device connected to the Internet, please go to this website.

Audrey Tang: It’s called slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com. Once you’re on this website, you will be asked to enter a number. Without the hash, it’s just seven two eight, or today’s date.

Audrey Tang: Once you enter the three digits, you can press join or a small, green button. Then you will be dropped into this anonymous or pseudonymous chat channel. Here, feel free to ask me anything, like literally anything.

Audrey Tang: If you see other people’s questions that you would also like to see me answer, you can just press like. The questions with the most number of likes will float to the top on this projection here.

Audrey Tang: For the rest of this hour, I guess, the next 15 minutes, I’ll begin with a short introduction, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, about my work in the Taiwan administration in the public digital innovation space, the PDIS, as we’re seeing here.

Audrey Tang: Meanwhile, as I’m talking, feel free to ask me any and all questions, which will show up on the phone here. Once there’s sufficient number of questions, then I will switch right back to Slido.

Question: What is your favorite programming language?

Audrey Tang: My current favorite programming language is text/plain character set UTF-8. [laughs] It’s one of the most versatile programming language there is. I’ll explore that more in my talk. I’m sure it’s your favorite programming language too. [laughs] Let’s get started.

Audrey Tang: Unlike many people working on democracy today, I’m an optimist when it comes to democracy and especially Internet democracy. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge and indeed future of democracy is happening on the web and my education in school is a little out of date.

Audrey Tang: I told my teachers that I found this wonderful constitutional democracy called Debian -- no, really, I did -- on the Internet, where people use Condorcet voting methods and these very advanced algorithms and policy development process and so on. I want to quit school and begin my education on the World Wide Web.

Audrey Tang: Surprisingly, my teachers were very reasonable people and they all agreed with it. After that, I just dropped out of high school and started a few web startups and just participated in this wonderful community of the Internet Society and the open-source and free software communities to basically see that how people can at least come to consensus or at least consent through radical transparency and rough consensus and so on.

Audrey Tang: Today I’m Taiwan’s digital minister for a year-and-a-half now. I’m applying the lessons that I learned when I was 15 years old, civic participation, rough consensus, radical transparency to the representative democratic system here. Surprisingly, it’s working and it’s changing, gradually, our society.

Audrey Tang: Two years ago, when President Tsai Ing-wen first became inaugurated as our president, she said an inspiring statement in her inauguration speech. She said, "Before, when we think of democracy, we think about the opposition between two opposing values. But now, from now on, Taiwan’s democracy need to become a conversation between many diverse values."

Audrey Tang: The key point here is the plural of this word "value." There’s many values in Taiwan and we’re going to build a conversational, deliberative democracy out of those very different but diverse values.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, previously, when people think about the government or the state, or things like that, people tend to have this picture, like we have different departments. We have different ministries. We have different council within the parliament, who talk to, for example, the environmental agency may talk to the environmentalist groups.

Audrey Tang: The minister of economy may talk to developmental, more capitalistic groups and so on. There’s different nodes within the government to talk to the different sides of stakeholders. People imagined that the government is what brings people together and who arbitrates between those conflicting or opposing forces.

Audrey Tang: This model of governance, as all of you know, has become bankrupt within the previous decade or so with the advent of the social web and the Internet activism.

Audrey Tang: The reason is that people can organize now perfectly fine without a representative organizer from the mainstream media or from the representative democracy. Also, because there’s so many emerging issues, we can’t have a different ministry or a different agency for each of them.

Audrey Tang: If the government insists on being still this kind of rope in between, not only is its organizational value much lower than before, it would be torn between so many different interests that it become paralyzed.

Audrey Tang: The distance between the government and people, while not increasing...The distance between people and people have much shortened. It leads to a recession or a distrust to the democratic institutions. The way we’re working on this is basically reimagine the questions governance systems ask.

Audrey Tang: Instead of asking who we need to represent or what is fair arbitration, we ask instead what is the due process in which that the various different stakeholders can find common values, and given the common values, can we come up with solutions that works for everyone, that everyone can live with.

Audrey Tang: This is the idea of civic tech or, basically, technology that enables people to listen to one another. This has, basically, a lot of international metrics measuring this, like the diversity of gender and participation in the Internet, like the rank of open data and accessibility, like the access to e-participation platforms.

Audrey Tang: Since 2015, Taiwan has been consistently ranked number one or number two in all of those metrics worldwide. The reason is that at the end of 2014, there is a radical U-turn of national direction by embracing the wisdom of the crowd and open government as the national direction.

Audrey Tang: It was catalyzed and epitomized by Occupy movement back in 2014 where people occupied the parliament for 22 days in a nonviolent demonstration. When we say demonstration, we mean it in like the demo day sense. It’s a demo.

Audrey Tang: At the time, the members of the parliament in Taiwan refused to deliberate a cross-strait service trade agreement because they think constitutionally Beijing is part of Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: In any case they refuse to deliberate a statement, a treaty. People occupied the parliament and did the MPs work for them by basically deliberating line by line what the service trade pact entails.

Audrey Tang: There’s more than 20 different NGOs in all the different streets around the parliament, in a non-violent way, just deliberating aspects of this cross-strait service agreement.

Audrey Tang: I was part of the movement that supported the logistics and the ICT communication for this movement. It’s called g0v.tw or just g0v. The idea of g0v is very simple.

Audrey Tang: For any Taiwan government services that all end in gov.tw, we just register this domain g0v.tw so that people, whenever they see a government service or website that’s not to the people’s liking, they can just fork that website and build a more interactive, open version that just changes the O to a zero on your URL.

Audrey Tang: It’s very easy to discover. It solves the discoverability problem. Like for the legislation, legislative yuan gov.tw, the corresponding shadow government is just ly.g0v.tw. It’s very easy to remember. It’s a very neat hack. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The first project of the g0v movement, back in 2012, before I joined, was called budget.g0v.tw. It’s essentially interactive platform that shows a visualization of the national budget.

Audrey Tang: Everybody can just look on the part, the specific project that they are interested in, have a real-time discussion on the discussion forum center on that budget item as the social object instead of on the budget as a whole.

Audrey Tang: The idea is forking the government. Usually, the g0v projects are under a free software license or really the Creative Commons Zero license, which is not a license. It’s just a declaration of donation to the public domain.

Audrey Tang: The result is that when the state-level government, at the end of 2014, want to incorporate this into the participatory budget program and things, they don’t have to ask anyone. They just take the g0v forked versions and merge it back to the state-level governments.

Audrey Tang: So far, there’s like seven different cities adopting this. As of this year, the national government also merged this in. Today, in join.gov.tw, you can see all the 1,300 national projects and all its KPIs, its deliverables, and have a real-time discussion with the career public servants in charge of that governmental project, essentially bypassing the representative democratic system. It enables a real discussion.

Audrey Tang: Why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan, who, during the Sunflower Movement, just a lot like me...I just talk to my clients that I need to take a three-week leave because democracy needs me.

Audrey Tang: There’s hundreds of people who did that back in 2014. Why is that? I’m 37 now. We’re the first generation in Taiwan that can actually do democracy after three decades of martial law, which was lifted in 1989, around the time of personal computers.

Audrey Tang: We only had our first presidential election in 1996 which is about the year of the popularization of the World Wide Web. Internet and democracy, they’re not two things. They’re not two different branches of people. It’s the same generation of people. It’s the same thing in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The advent of democracy and the advent of Internet and direct democracy is the same time in Taiwan. We don’t have 200 or 300 years of a representative democracy tradition. When we had democracy, we had also the Internet.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when we see or when we talk about free software, we translate it as [Mandarin] . It’s always free as in freedom to assemble, freedom of speech, freedom to express, and never free of cost.

Audrey Tang: We know that freedom is never free of costs. Our parents’ generation, our grandparents’ generation fought very hard to get those freedoms. It’s up to us to use the software freedoms to keep the society free.

Audrey Tang: At the end of 2014 and after the Occupy, there’s many mayors, mayor candidates who were Occupy supporters or Occupyers themselves, who very surprisingly found themselves elected mayors when they did not expect. It’s something that also happen in Spain also [laughs] and in many other Occupys in that time.

Audrey Tang: At the time, the premier during the Occupy resigned, saying, "I don’t understand you people." He just resigned. A new premier, an engineer, said, "OK, so from now on, crowdsourcing and open governance is just going to be the national direction."

Audrey Tang: The Occupyers and us, the supporters of the Occupys, the facilitators and the ICT experts, were then hired into the national government in early 2015 to help designing systems to collaboratively solve issues, such as Uber, at the time.

Audrey Tang: Uber, in 2015, has entered Taiwan and operated legally using rental cars and professional drivers for a while. In 2015, they also introduced a new line of service called uberX. It is using unlicensed drivers and unlicensed cars and without insurance.

Audrey Tang: The PR idea of Uber at the time is to use this meme, which is a virus of the mind, this meme called "sharing economy." This meme means very different thing to very different people.

Audrey Tang: For the Uber PR department at the time, it means very specifically that code dispatch cars better than laws, so we obey code not laws. It’s very simple message that spreads around the world. It’s not just in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It’s like epidemic of the mind. People, after becoming a driver for a couple weeks, maybe they feel that there’s no protection, that they didn’t actually earn that much.

Audrey Tang: They quit driving for uberX, but during that two weeks’ time, just like the common flu, they would have spread through apps to their passengers and to other drivers and to other passengers.

Audrey Tang: It’s impossible, actually, at the time, for us to negotiate with an app or with a virus of the mind like the "sharing economy" because it’s in a different category. It’s impossible to argue with the common flu either.

Audrey Tang: At the time, many state governments try use Old World methods such as confiscating. In Paris, they confiscated office, confiscated machines, put people to jail. Then the next morning, Uber still operates. It doesn’t really work in the old governmental methods.

Audrey Tang: We thought about it. We thought that during the Occupy, where people listen to each other’s positions deeply and feel each other’s feelings around the CSSTA, maybe we can reuse some of that technique and to work on the Uber issue.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we think that deliberation is a vaccine of the mind. Once people have really felt and empathized with different sides’ positions and come up with common values, people become immune to specific virus of the mind in the future.

Audrey Tang: I promise to check the questions at this point. I’m just going to do it right now. There’s 17 questions. I’ll finish this section and then switch right back to questions.

Audrey Tang: A proper deliberation involves four different stages. We used a system invented in Canada, in 2005. It’s called the focused conversation method, or FCM. It’s known as the ORID method also because it separates the discussion into four different stages.

Audrey Tang: The first is objective or facts, where people ask each other. Like the government publishes open data, all we know about uberX. We also ask all the private sector and civil society to donate data into this shared, fact-checked database.

Audrey Tang: Once people check the facts on the timeline and we can all agree with the facts, the various stakeholders then express their feelings. For the same fact, you may feel angry, and I may feel happy. It’s all OK.

Audrey Tang: It’s not until we checked everybody’s feelings that we find that there are some resonating feelings that people all feel as important concerns to ideate on. After the facts, the feelings is the ideas. The best ideas are the ideas that takes care of the most people’s feelings. Once we uncover those ideas, we then translate it into legalese.

Audrey Tang: Using the old governmental method, the main barrier is the language barrier. The professional public servants, the private sector lobbyists, and the independent academics, and so on use a professional language, while people on the street using a different language.

Audrey Tang: Under this situation, when people say the same thing but mean very different things, the facts and the feelings gets clouded. Ideas in this environment become ideologies. Ideologies are an even more potent virus of mind that blinds people to new facts and to each other’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: After we get everybody on the same page, checking the facts that by itself is important, we use a free software system under AGPL called Pol.is. Pol.is is a so-called AI-powered conversation that basically just provides a face to the crowd.

Audrey Tang: We ask everybody to basically look at one statement that their friends or just a random person on the Internet propose about their feeling, their [Mandarin] something. I think that, or I feel that passenger liability insurance is important.

Audrey Tang: As you agree or disagree with the statements, your avatar will move among your social media friends -- or you don’t have to login -- among well-known people on social media. You can discover that your friends and your family actually think about this in a very different perspective.

Audrey Tang: They are still your friends and family. You just didn’t talk about this over dinner. It makes it difficult for people to antagonize, to treat people with different viewpoints as enemies.

Audrey Tang: Rather it enables people to say that OK, after answering a few yes or no questions, I can also contribute my feelings. People compete on feelings that resonates with the most number of people.

Audrey Tang: We say if your ideas or if your feelings resonates with a supermajority amount of people -- that is, across all the groups, every group has more than majority agreeing with you -- then the feelings and proposals with the most resonance, with the most consensus, we use that as the agenda to talk with the stakeholders, with the taxi unions, with the Uber people and so on.

Audrey Tang: In this way, we send the same URL to everybody, and then spread it. One of the key interface design decisions during a Pol.is discussion, unlike many other social media venues, is that you don’t see the reply button here. There is no reply.

Audrey Tang: What we discovered is if you have reply, people focus their energy on discrediting the person who posted a comment that they don’t agree with. Like Slido, Pol.is, basically, if you see something that you don’t agree with, your best recourse is to prepare something more nuanced, that other people can agree with.

Audrey Tang: After a few weeks, in all the Pol.is discussions, what we see is that people recognize their differences in those divisive statements, but they don’t spend more time on it. People instead spend a lot of time refining the nuanced consensus, so that people can resonate, kind of compete, with the most resonance across the different groups.

Audrey Tang: We use a live consultation method, where all the stakeholders are invited. The taxi company, Uber, union people, and so on, the co-ops and so on. We just checked with them all the agenda set by this Pol.is conversation, one by one.

Audrey Tang: Saying, "Do you agree? If you don’t, why? If you do, why?" Because it’s live streamed, with thousands of people watching, people become bound to whatever they have said. Uber, at the time, said, "OK, so we work with our drivers, to help them obtain a professional driver’s license." They’re bound by the words they spoke at this live stream meeting.

Audrey Tang: After this, we then worked on ratifying the new what we call the diversification of taxi. One of the highest score is actually contributed by the free software community, by Irvin Chen, from the Mozilla community here.

Audrey Tang: Who said that we should take this opportunity to upgrade the taxi regulations, so that the best practices from Uber, for example, taxi doesn’t have to be painted yellow, and there’s the two-way rating system, and so on, could be used to facilitate better taxi qualities here in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Led by that consensus and six other consensus items, we then created a law so that now Uber is operating legally in Taiwan, but only with registered driver’s licensed cars. You also get email about your rides, insurance, every Uber ride, and you can also call taxi with Uber, and vice versa.

Audrey Tang: This is what we call a multi-stakeholder consultation, after which people’s consensus set the agenda for the politicians to talk about. Let’s take some questions.

Question: How can we help other governments enable open standards?

Audrey Tang: This is an excellent question. In Taiwan, we have this idea of the GDSP, or the Government Digital Service Principal.

Audrey Tang: It is modeled, loosely, after the Government Digital Service in the UK, who also published their digital standards. The GDS is a thought leader in this area, and they pioneered a lot of digital standards that are not just open, as in open source, or open as in open protocol, or format, but open as in open innovation, where people, everybody can contribute.

Audrey Tang: One of their key principles is being user-centric, which we here expanded in Taiwan, meaning that the users here not only include citizens but also people working in the front line in the public service.

Audrey Tang: The second thing that the UK GDS also advocates is that when you build a digital service, you need not to only test with people, and the frontline staff, but also test with the ministry and the cabinet from the beginning to the end.

Audrey Tang: Ultimately, they’re accountable for this digital service, and they can then solicit more idea of innovation from this service. We adopted this spirit, and also call for leader to be basically cross-disciplinary.

Audrey Tang: I think the person who asked this question is maybe most interested in our GDSP number eight, which says, "Open first," basically, open is the priority. To reduce the time spent on developing services, and the total cost of ownership, open should be the foremost principal when designing and building services.

Audrey Tang: By open we mean specifically that all the machine-to-machine data built by this system need to be available under an open license, most commonly the Creative Comments Attribution 4.0 license, which is the default license for all the ICT systems built in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Also, we prioritize open source. If the service component reuses existing open source components, we recommend people to use Linux Foundation’s SPDX, or S-P-D-X, manifest to solve this warranty issue for the system integrators. Once they declare their reusable free software components under SPDX, the warranty in the legal perspective has a clear delineation.

Audrey Tang: By this, we want to encourage people to innovate based on what the government has delivered, and improve on existing government services by forking the government, occasionally getting it right, and getting governments merging it back.

Audrey Tang: Not only open data and open source, we also say that it need to conform with open standards, so that it could be reused and also, it builds on common API and common components. All this is so that we can quickly reiterate and improve the services.

Audrey Tang: We have a support group of all the governments who endorse this standard. It’s called Digital Nations, and previously known as Digital Five, or Digital Seven, depending on the number of people in it. We have a chat channel. We share GitHub repositories. We communicate very regularly, so that the governments who embrace open by default have this venue.

Audrey Tang: I think our next meeting is Forward 50, in Ottawa in Canada this November. All the governments are solving very much similar issues. All the components that we deliver, it’s not just for improvement of our citizens.

Audrey Tang: Also, offering it, so that it could be reused by the government and people building their own self-governance system, not necessarily state government or representative governments worldwide. The short answer to this is to develop and adhere to a clear government digital service principle, to publish and circulate this widely.

Audrey Tang: To encourage this in the procurement laws, and to encourage this in the accountability, in the auditing laws, in the statistics laws, which we all have done. Then participate internationally in support groups in the democratic and open governance governments and basically share these best practice, or at least better practices, as open toolkits. That’s the thing that we’re doing.

Question: What do you wish from Debian?

Audrey Tang: I wish that Debian would live long and prosper.

Audrey Tang: Really, along with other large endeavors, like the Mozilla Foundation, and the Linux Foundation, which I just mentioned, Wikimedia Foundation, you folks are the foundation upon which that we are advocating to the representative democratic system that, "Hey there is some merit in this kind of radical transparency, and that kind of radical participation."

Audrey Tang: As a conservative anarchist minister, I have three conditions going into cabinet. The first is that I don’t issue a command to anyone, nor do I take a command. Everything is by voluntary association. This is straight from the Debian Constitution, where, by constitution, nobody can really be forced into doing any non-voluntary work.

Audrey Tang: The second one is that I get to work anywhere on the planet, and it still counts as working. It’s teleworking, and it also enabled a lot of e-government imperatives, when people discovered that by a paper-based delivery they can’t really reach me.

Audrey Tang: They can reach me after a week or so. It is far easier if you just use email. The third thing, also very important, is that when I develop those voluntary co-creation methodologies, it is important for me to be radically transparent.

Audrey Tang: By radical transparency I mean not just meeting with lobbyists and journalists, are all published online, even internal meetings that I chair, we also publish everything as a transcript two weeks after every internal meeting.

Audrey Tang: It looks like this, it’s also using a free software system, called SayIt developed by, I think, mySociety, in the UK. When David Plouffe, speaking for Uber at the time, come to a lobby and have a conversation, not only is our discussion on the record, it’s on 360 Record.

Audrey Tang: We can put it on VR or Cardboard or something, and relive the conversation. [laughs] Every utterance has a permanent URL. You can get full accountability of who said what, where. This is important for the government service, because the public servants in this situation they become very innovative, contrary to popular belief.

Audrey Tang: Previously, when something gets right, and people like it, the minister always takes all the credit, and if something gets wrong, it’s always the career public servants who didn’t execute well, or something and the netizens has a way to blame the people in charge for it.

Audrey Tang: In that situation, there is no motivation for them to innovate. Now, with this radically transparent system, not only is the civil society more understanding of the context before making a decision, but also all the credit gets shared to the actual career public servants who proposed something innovative in the first place.

Audrey Tang: If anything goes wrong, well, because as far as I know, I’m the only minister in the world doing this, it’s all Audrey’s fault. I can absorb that blame, while people share the credit.

Audrey Tang: We get a lot of very innovative ideas, frankly, from the public service, such as adopting a thoroughly free software system called sandstorm.io for our entire public service, in all the different branches of government, not just the administration.

Audrey Tang: We use only free software on this sandstorm.io system. Davros replaces Dropbox, EtherCalc replaces Google Spreadsheet, Etherpad replaces Google Doc, Wekan replaces Trello, and there’s also Rocket.Chat.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure you know the other tools that the free software people uses. Basically, we say any public servants, as long as they have a gov.tw email address, can enjoy this for free, and even develop new applications on it, because it’s cyber security hardened.

Audrey Tang: We ask our best white hat hackers to attack it, and they filed a few CVEs, so that we’re [laughs] reasonably sure that it’s very secure now, so that people can develop applications by themselves, which is free software, and planning travels together, ordering lunch boxes together.

Audrey Tang: Unleash innovation within the government, because they know that this system can absorb the cybersecurity risk, and I can absorb the political risk.

Question: It’s good that you discovered Debian, and what makes it interesting at such a young age, do you run Debian yourself? Have you contributed to Debian?

Audrey Tang: Personally, my desktop environment when I started learning -- I think it’s around 1999 -- system-level programming -- I’m sorry -- has always been FreeBSD. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’ve never actually... I used the Debian compatibility layer. I don’t know whether that counts or not. [laughs] I’ve always been a FreeBSD developer and contributed to driver support in FreeBSD.

Audrey Tang: Also, most of my contributions in the Perl community and in OpenFoundry, here in Taiwan, in early 2000s, were first committed to the FreeBSD port system.

Audrey Tang: It’s a different culture. It’s not copyleft. It’s not copyright. It’s copy center. You go to the copy center and make many copies. That’s a very permissive [laughs] community. That’s my primary community, the FreeBSD community.

Audrey Tang: There’s various efforts within Debian to reconcile with, for example, the module signing system. I piloted the module signing system in CPAN, in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of packaging issues and so on. I basically chime in from here to there. I did not participate in the Debian democracy, but I really admired from afar, in the FreeBSD camp. [laughs]

Question: Does Taiwan has an open-source strategy?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I’m glad you asked. It’s called DIGI⁺. I don’t know how much of this is translated into English. Oh, all of it. It’s good.

Audrey Tang: If you go to https://smart.taiwan.gov.tw/ ... We tend to have one web page for each major government policies. There’s smart.taiwan.gov.tw. There’s AI Taiwan. There’s bio Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: There’s also CI Taiwan -- I think that’s not yet translated -- where the CI stands for Civil IoT, which is the shared open data and also open algorithm platform for all the different environmental data aggregated in a supercomputing center that combines the people’s, the g0v site of air sensors and also the government site of government sensors.

Audrey Tang: We can all talk with the same fact-based or evidence-based policy-making process. I encourage you to check out Smart Taiwan and also links to Asia Silicon Valley.

Audrey Tang: When we talk about open society here and also about the education, like interdisciplinary digital talents, in the DIGI⁺ plan, we specifically said especially in the basic education level, that is to say K-12 level...

Audrey Tang: Also because in the next five years all the college-level students also need to learn computational thinking and programming, half of it, I think, by the year 2021 or something. All of it needs to be based on free software.

Audrey Tang: If the student graduates and joins the private sector and choose to use proprietary software, that is their choice. Of course, the government can’t do much about it, but while they’re still children, while they’re still in the schools, it is very important for us to not let the children or the students to be subject to vendor lock-in.

Audrey Tang: By the time they graduate, maybe the vendor has already moved somewhere else. Maybe the vendor lose interest in that product line. We see a lot of that dynamic. At least in the education system, we’re very firm that we prefer free software for education.

Audrey Tang: When teaching computational thinking, when teaching artificial intelligence, when teaching all those different DIGI⁺ powered smart machinery, green energy technology, and so on, we prefer free software when it’s in the school.

Audrey Tang: In the DIGI⁺, there is a strategy to raise awareness and have talents in school. There’s also twoss.io, I think -- I hope I remember this right -- which is not yet translated in English. it’s somewhat translated to English.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what this tries to do is basically by getting people sufficient education materials, so people working on any level of education can point to existing communities and introduce their students to such community.

Audrey Tang: Even people working in like city-level government or national-level government can also point to the success cases of incorporating PostgreSQL or OpenStack or Docker Ecosystem and/or TensorFlow or whatever and which is the success story.

Audrey Tang: You’re replacing proprietary systems. It’s not about procurement anymore. We already change our procurement regulations and the government digital service principle.

Audrey Tang: All that people need now is a boost of confidence, basically, [laughs] by people keep telling them it’s OK to use free software. This is the twoss.io. If you find anything wrong with it or anything you can contribute, please feel free to let us know in twoss.

Question: Why is Taiwan so restrictive on Internet access, captive portals, register with ID for iTaiwan WiFi access, etc.? Is there the reason, bad experiences or not?

Audrey Tang: The reason is usually cited as "cybersecurity," but it is not a very strong reason.

Audrey Tang: We are actively looking, actually, like in the Taiwan high-speed rails, to relax the captive portal. Especially when you’re on a high-speed moving train, it is very difficult to actually resume from hotspot to hotspots if you need to go through like five or three screens to register. That’s the first place where we will relax this captive portal thing.

Audrey Tang: Once this is done and piloted and proven that it really doesn’t need two more cybersecurity guards, that we can put other cybersecurity guards elsewhere on the stack, not necessarily on the personal identification level, then we will also relax the internal.

Audrey Tang: Within the government agencies, we often provide two WiFis, one for employees of the government and one called iTaiwan, also for visitors. The visitor WiFi, we then will also look to relax more.

Audrey Tang: That’s because those two venues, in the high-speed rails and also in visitors to government agencies, you already did your registration somewhere else. We don’t physically actually need you to register again.

Audrey Tang: I’m less sure about the city-level public WiFi, like TPE-Free, or other city-level WiFi because they have a certain level of autonomy. We don’t actually dictate what they do.

Audrey Tang: We just pilot this relaxed login portal thing and also establish corresponding cybersecurity rules. Maybe the city-level people will also get enlightened. We’ll see.

Question: Is it possible to be a citizen in Taiwan and interact fully with the government without using any proprietary software?

Audrey Tang: I’m glad you asked because that’s one of the cases that I’d like to show. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It used to be very, very difficult. Just last May actually, there was a petition that talks explicitly about it, very explicit. [laughs] Last May, there was an e-petition or a national e-petition system. After 5,000 people participate online...You can use email or SMS. It’s not a real-name basis.

Audrey Tang: Basically, after 5,000 people counter-signed a petition, the government is obliged to respond to it. This petition is by this user experience designer 卓志遠, which says that our tax filing system is explosively hostile to users.

Audrey Tang: It’s negative energy in that petition. There’s more negative energy in the body, which I will spare you the quote. Basically, at the time, about 80 percent of comments in that petition discussion area is very negative.

Audrey Tang: It caused for the resignation of the minister of finance. It caused...there’s a lot of accusations to the vendors who provide the system, and all because in Windows there is a proprietary Windows-based application for tax filing. For Linux and for Mac and basically non-Windows systems, there is a Java applet.

Audrey Tang: Because last year Oracle Inc. deprecated Java applets, the user experience become very, very bad. People will see that "Please wait. It’s still installing some applet components." Because the pop-up is by default blocked, so nothing happens. After 40 minutes, people are still waiting. It really is very, very difficult to use.

Audrey Tang: After the e-petition, basically there’s a participation officer team in each ministry. Each participation office, or POs, is responsible. Just like media officer who talk to journalists or a parliamentary officer who talk to MPs, POs talk to such emergent petitions.

Audrey Tang: By basically saying, I think, not only very quick, like 36 hours after this petition, our PO 楊金亨 just posted publicly that everybody who complained about our tax filing experience on non-Windows systems is cordially invited to a co-creation workshop, some Friday, in the Ministry of finance.

Audrey Tang: This is very interesting because just by proposing this invitation...Previously, like 80 percent of people were just flaming. 20 percent of people were saying, "Well, we’re using Windows. It works kind of OK." Nobody really took heed to them.

Audrey Tang: After this invitation is sent, 80 percent of people started proposing useful suggestions, useful recommendations. Only less than 20 percent still remained trolling or flaming people, but people don’t pay attention to them anymore.

Audrey Tang: Basically, what we did was inviting the trolls, who turns out to be not trolls. They were just fed up with the tax filing system. They had to vent their feelings. After they vent their feelings, we all then solicit ideas from them. People who can make it to Taipei, make it to Taipei. Otherwise, people can still participate using live-streaming.

Audrey Tang: One of the key thing here is radical transparency and also accountability, meaning that people who say that the words are explosively crowded, we just put that, post it as words are explosively crowded, that it is so brilliantly written that people are confused. Then we just post it.

Audrey Tang: People say instead of designing a system makes people feel better, people don’t feel good at all when they think about filing taxes, so we should shorten the experience instead of trying to make people feel better and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, people who proposed such ideations online, we just use service design methodologies and hold five co-creation workshops with all the different stakeholders involved in the tax filing experience.

Audrey Tang: This year, the tax filing experience for non-Windows systems is entirely HTML5-based. It adheres to the open standards. People can just using any platform that can run a browser to access the tax filing system.

Audrey Tang: The short answer to this question is that it has become more and more possible while we translate or transform existing desktop-oriented or Windows-specific or Java applets into web-based situations.

Audrey Tang: Now, if you insist that all the JavaScript libraries and CSS libraries that government system use has also to be open source or free software, that would take a little bit more time. It will need the current generation of system to be wholly replaced by post-government digital service principle, post-GDSP, systems.

Audrey Tang: We are focusing on reducing the load on the client side first. At the time, I think you can complete most of the interactions of the governmental issues like filing taxes and so on if you’re OK with using a free software browser, but there’s still some proprietary JavaScript code.

Audrey Tang: This is the compromise situation we’re in at the moment. With the rollout of GDSP, we’re also looking to make the JavaScript and CSS and also the backend systems more non-proprietary.

Question: Shared objects in the tax filing plugin is not open source. Why?

Audrey Tang: Because the copyright belongs to, I think, the vendor Chunghwa Telecom. Back when we signed the agreement with the Chunghwa Telecom, the GDSP was not in effect.

Audrey Tang: The contract, basically, attributed the copyright to the vendor, who only conferred usage right to the government and the citizens. This is a mistake that we will not repeat. At the moment, we don’t have the legal recourse for the current generation of plugin systems to be relicensed as free software. I tried. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The easiest way is just for the next version of identification methods, such as the national healthcare card, which, by the way, is currently in public consultation.

Audrey Tang: If you want to contribute, like you demand free software stack for the entire Medicare system, please feel free to go to join.gov.tw, where we are now asking for consultation on people who are looking to virtualize their universal Medicare card and/or to use NFC-based authentication.

Audrey Tang: We want to know about people’s preference when it comes to the technology, to the regulations, as well as to the total cost of ownership, and also of usage.

Audrey Tang: If you feel strongly about it, please do contribute online on Join platform, so that we can say to the people writing the contracts that people really feel that it is very important for our next-generation authentication methods to be nonproprietary.

Question: What is your opinion on e-commerce application refusing to operating on restriction-free devices like rooted Androids and jailbroken iDevices. Is it fair?

Audrey Tang: Mostly, I think they do this with the call to "fraud prevention." [laughs] It’s not about fairness. I think it is about the choice or the freedom of choice or the liberty of users. The reason why GDSP prefers free software is because when it comes to healthcare or tax filing, there really is no choice.

Audrey Tang: To be a citizen in Taiwan, you have to go through some government-sponsored API endpoints to produce some government-sponsored form data and so on. Because there is no choice, we really need to be open so that people can hold us to account to be more transparent and also innovate on existing solutions.

Audrey Tang: For e-commerce applications where there are no de facto monopolies, when people still have a choice, the government, at the moment, does not take a stance against the e-commerce apps who uses fraud detection or prevention methods that result in incompatibility with rooted Androids and jailbroken iDevices.

Audrey Tang: I think one of the possible direction out of this dilemma is to basically talk to people who work on "fraud prevention," just like how we talked with the high-speed rails and the government agencies providing iTaiwan software and WiFi for free.

Audrey Tang: We basically said, "You can do your fraud prevention or cybersecurity on another layer in this system and not in the particular layer of requiring a captive portal and the MAC address, which is very easy to spoof anyway."

Audrey Tang: I think just by talking to people like this, or we talk to people who advocate copyright protection through blocking of the Internet. We say with IPv6, it’s getting more and more impossible.

Audrey Tang: Watermarking or real-time watermarking methodologies, it infringes on the consumers’ or customers’ experience is less. It is actually a better solution overall than just banning entire websites.

Audrey Tang: People have legitimate interest. There are legitimate stakes. As I said, often we think of it as like a tug of war, but in many different cases, it is possible actually with some what we call social innovation, an innovation that basically takes care of all the different sides of interest and leaves nobody worse off.

Audrey Tang: I would encourage people who feel strongly about it to contact your local, friendly e-commerce association, who does have a forum to talk about things like this.

Audrey Tang: We use that forum to talk about fraud detection and prevention of people selling counterfeit goods on Facebook to pretty good effect. I would also encourage you to contact your local association about it.

Question: Can we see any legislator supporting free software in the government movement, like Public Money, Public Code from the EFF?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when you see this government, the GDSP, we already say this. This is public code. This is open data. This is open standards and also common APIs.

Audrey Tang: We used also a Linux Foundation project called OAS 3.0, which was Swagger, to state that all the different systems built, as long as it has a machine-to-machine component, need to adhere to this machine-to-machine open API specification.

Audrey Tang: The reason why we put an equal amount of attention on the source code license versus the machine-to-machine integration is that if we only talk about public code or the license, it is very often that a system integrator will deliver something that is technically free software, but it depends on, for example, expensive Oracle systems or even more expensive DB2 systems.

Audrey Tang: That basically still restricts the reuse across different ministries and agencies. By saying for all the import and export, for all the batch-level access, by basically treating machine-to-machine accessibility the same way we treat universal access, like for blind people...

Audrey Tang: We basically say while you may still depend on Oracle or DB2 at a point, the next vendor can just build on your API and even batch export what’s in this public money-paid database and rebuild a service without depending on any proprietary technological stack.

Audrey Tang: I would argue that the freedom of portability is as important as freedom to fork and freedom to reuse. Both are of course very important. Constitutionally, I am not supposed to speculate on legislators, but [laughs] there is various younger legislators in all the different parties who are also interested in this area.

Question: Is there any chance, you can urge deans of higher education facilities like NCTU to deploy IPv6?

Audrey Tang: It’s a bootstrapping problem, isn’t it? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This year, we see a surge of IPv6 adoption, actually, after TWNIC changed hands and [laughs] embrace a very IPv6-first roadmap. We see, for example, Chunghwa Telecom has drastically increased the IPv6 connectivity of their mobile clients.

Audrey Tang: We also see other telecoms and other peering institutions and ISPs starting to adopt this trend. Once there’s sufficient amount of people using the clients that are IPv6-enabled and even IPv6-preferred, there will be sufficient pressure then for the service providers to provide as good, if not better, service over IPv6.

Question: (Q_Q)

Audrey Tang: I feel your Q_Q. I help you on your Q_Q. [laughs] 幫 QQ, right?

Audrey Tang: I think really, it is up to the students, the clients, and the users of the Internet, the last-mile providers to first build a useful and usable IPv6 environment before we can then demand the service providers to do so. We are seeing pretty good trends as of this year.

Audrey Tang: If you come back next year, I think there will be sufficient demand from the user side to have the institutional Internet service providers to provide IPv6 also. I’m technically out of time, so I’ll just take one last question.

Question: What is your opinion of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, or the GDPR?

Audrey Tang: My opinion is that the GDPR is a much-needed conversation that translates the idea of data from what people will confuse with assets, intellectual properties, which are leaky abstractions that doesn’t mean anything to a, what we call, data agency a relationship-based worldview.

Audrey Tang: Basically, as a government institution, if I hold your data, this is a beginning of a relationship where you can ask what happens to the data, who can update the data, so it reflects the purpose. If I try to use the data in any other way other than pure statistics, I need to check with you first, so that you can know what’s going on, and provide the most up-to-date data.

Audrey Tang: Instead of leaving just a shadow digital trail that’s five years out of date, that results in more bias. I think data agency, data as a relationship, and also data accountability. Accountability interestingly only translate in Mandarin as three different words.

Audrey Tang: For people who ask for accountability, it’s called 問責. For us who are held accountable, it’s called 當責. A system within it that holds both sides together, the relationship, is called 課責機制, or an accountability mechanism.

Audrey Tang: So 課責 is a relational concept. It is not a one-time transactional concept. I think GDPR is a much-needed wake-up call for everybody to see data as a relationship, as not as some digital asset or intellectual property. Thank you very much.