Ninon Godefroy: It’s not super serious...

Audrey Tang: It’s not super serious but we’ll make a transcript nonetheless. So, yeah.

Ninon Godefroy: Also, I was super happy because we’re talking with Nesta. We’re going to do a workshop with Nesta on collective intelligence. Taking one topic. For the moment, we are discussing two topics. I’m not sure yet. One will be a question where experts and people who are less educated in the field, or highly disagree because there’s a lot of attachment to views. One example could be, how health can also be something a bit like religion for some people sometimes.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Ninon Godefroy: The effect of electromagnetic field on peoples’ health. There are people who really believe in science who are like, "There’s no ..."

Audrey Tang: Microwave powers?

Ninon Godefroy: Yeah. I remember having an ex-boyfriend who really believed in unplugging his WiFi. It was really important for him and I was like, "OK, that’s his religion." You bring people like this together to discuss, but establishing the real process to reach some sort of...

Audrey Tang: That’s a great motivation. The other?

Ninon Godefroy: The other one is, Liam really wanted to ask you this one because it’s a bit unusual, which is how they want...With Geoff, the head of Nesta, I don’t know if you met him.

Ninon Godefroy: They’re interested in mindfulness, so how to make a town more mindful, which is how to change a place to make people think more about the present ?" He has written a question to basically break this down.

Audrey Tang: Meta-cognitive skills?

Ninon Godefroy: I saw in an email between Liam and Geoff that you guys also have in your core process something also a little bit about emotions.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we have one stage exclusively set aside for reflection of others’ affect, emotions. "How do you feel about it?"

Ninon Godefroy: That’s a topic on collective intelligence because when we hold this workshop, we’ll be really interested in digging into emotions more specifically.

Sylvie Barbier: With Liam when we work, I’m an artist in background, and so I use a lot of performance art to deal with the emotions, so that people can then really share their minds and thoughts.

Sylvie Barbier: If you feel resentment or not heard, then you tend to not listen, but also not really be able to share. What we are doing is combine some of the left-brain side and the right brain side so that the conversation can flourish.

Audrey Tang: Kind of a performative artist?

Sylvie Barbier: I do performance art. It’s not theater nor dance or anything like that. I use my body as an installation. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: A walking art figure.

Ninon Godefroy: A living art figure.

Sylvie Barbier: I do performance art. I think the key is like using your body and yourself because often in art if there is a difference between the art piece and the artist, but when you do performance art it’s just you right there, right now. To create a narrative and to engage, I do a lot of interaction with the audience so that they get to become the art piece with me.

Sylvie Barbier: Then they carry their own story also and make them reflect.

Audrey Tang: It’s an art that also facilitates. That’s awesome.

Sylvie Barbier: We’ve done one recently in Taiwan. That was really great. I think we’ll do more.

Audrey Tang: How large was the audience?

Sylvie Barbier: We just opened up art of tech space that is small. It’s like...

Sylvie Barbier: We invited about 15-17 people, they became part of the space. Then having interaction collectively and individually as well as creating a narrative and movements.

Sylvie Barbier: I am currently really enthusiastic and focused on education.

Ninon Godefroy:  I learned a lot working with Sylvie, her background in performance art, we do an event in France where we bring in super serious experts in different fields. In the morning, she makes us do these games with our senses and blindfolded. Afterward, we have talks sharing our research and understanding and collaboration reaches another level. It’s so magical. It’s an experience. You can’t believe it.

Audrey Tang: There is a social enterprise there in the lab called a dialogue in the dark. I think also it has European counterpart. It’s originated in Germany. The idea is that people would be enclosed in this totally dark place and have blind people as facilitators. Of course, they feel super confident in that environment.

Audrey Tang: Not only it made people much more aware of the space between what we call normal individuals are actually permeable boundary, but also have much more respect to blind people afterwards as a bonus. There’s quite a few experiences there.

Ninon Godefroy: We asked, for example, when you guys first sit down at vTaiwan to decide on a process. How did you come about with the process ?

Audrey Tang: You mean at the very beginning?

Ninon Godefroy: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: At the very beginning, there was this very specific consultation question which is how do we regulate teleworking? When I work at home or at a café, what does it mean to take a leave of absence? What does it mean to have a working hour? What does it mean to, for example, in the normal labor laws there...

Audrey Tang: For example, there is an existing regulation that says women are not supposed to be working hours after 10:00 PM, like that. All these need regulatory adjustments when it’s teleworking. Maybe she’s working from home, maybe that’s when her child goes to sleep. Obviously, the regulation was made for safety reasons. Maybe working at home doesn’t have safety reasons.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, what if there’s accidents that happen in the work place. Is it the employer’s duty or is it the employee’s? What does the inspection even mean when someone works from home and things like that? There’s a specific case of consultation.

Audrey Tang: There’s also a few others in vTaiwan like people were setting up companies at Cayman Islands, not because of tax reasons, but mostly because it allows them to retain control even after a few rounds of investment because it has special voting rights or special stocks and things like that, closely held companies.

Audrey Tang: Should Taiwan adopt this legal structure or their people forming entities, companies that are crowdfunded? The crowdfunded people may want to give out equities. Is it OK to allow a company to raise capital like that even if they are not publicly listed?

Audrey Tang: In the beginning, vTaiwan starts with these very specific questions. First, what do we do about things like that? That comes later. This question has a common structure which is, it doesn’t work if you only get five representatives into a room and agree on something. There is no union of fellow workers. There is no association of people who want to set up a company in the Cayman Islands.

Audrey Tang: There is no traditional article representative structure among the stakeholders. It is not like you’re trying to negotiate whether to build something in Taipei City or Taitung City. In which case, you engage with the city council and the neighbors. In all these cases, it doesn’t really work if you just engage with a few people.

Audrey Tang: We need to come up with a process that lets us discover the stakeholders. Does the stakeholders have a say in the agenda? Also, let the expertise that’s outside the government to contribute because the career public servants do not usually have the experience of teleworking, setting up a company overseas or crowdfunding for that matter.

Audrey Tang: We’re talking about things that are beyond the senior executive’s expertise or comfort zone. We’re talking about problems that has a none zero-sum solution. There could be potentially work against for everyone involved and a structure that doesn’t really work across the traditional article representative structure. That was the design condition of the vTaiwan process.

Ninon Godefroy: It’s very specific here. It’s very specific policy. Has there been other people who have tried to take your process and implemented it in their own country? Is it also a cultural thing, I am wondering?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Our process has inspired quite a few people. There’s people like Jeremy Corbyn who went as far as including massively-scalable online participation in his campaign.

Audrey Tang: On a smaller scale level like in New York City, in Toronto, in Madrid and Barcelona and a lot of places, there are people who look at vTaiwan papers and experiment and incorporate part of the pool, part of the process into their existing process. We do a lot of cross pollination.

Audrey Tang: Even in Taiwan itself also at the national levels, which has implication platform that let people petition anything. It doesn’t have to be pitched on issues. We also took part of the vTaiwan process and adapted it to handle new petitions in an internal, what we call, participation officers that work inside the Taiwan national ministries.

Audrey Tang: The vTaiwan process starts as an experiment, but the experiment has been adopted bot by civil society in Taiwan and the central government in Taiwan, as well as other non-national cities and townships.

Ninon Godefroy: It was always for that type of question that you mentioned.

Audrey Tang: Like for e-petition, we have very local issues like the south in Taiwan, the HengChun people petition their ministry of interior to station their helicopters as ambulances in their local airports because it’s too long a drive from HengChun to the largest nearest hospital. It takes 90 minutes.

Audrey Tang: Whether to deploy the helicopters there as ambulances that becomes a petition subject. There’s nothing digital about it. We handle 27 e-petitions so far using a veto online approach. This process is being adapted far beyond the original problem scope.

Sylvie Barbier: What do you think culture in Taiwan allows...so there’s a design of the tool, but also there is the user of the tool. Sometimes the user of the tool, depending on their culture, will adopt the tool more easily or interact with it differently. What do you think is Taiwan and its culture that created this level of interaction or appropriation?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is very new to this democracy thing. Representative democracy in Taiwan, like we are representative democracy, can only start after the martial law was lifted, which was just about 30 years ago. It’s just one generation of people, but around the same time Internet and world web came along so people also has some access to direct democracy through online games, chat rooms, boards.

Audrey Tang: The largest Taiwan forum, the PTT forum has its own court system, its own administrative system. There’s people who have experience in this kind of online democracy about the same time as we have representative, traditional forms of democracy. Very quickly after that, the direct election of presidents. Now we have referendums and so on.

Audrey Tang: What I am getting at is, whereas in other countries there is this tradition of republic that goes hundreds of years more. Internet was seen as this new and upcoming disruption thing in Taiwan. Internet and democracy kind of happened in the same generation so we’re much more open to experiments because there are no sacred traditions to deal with. We were a blank canvas for many experiments.

Audrey Tang: Estonia actually was founded after the Internet, which is why they could experiment so much with electronic forms of democracy, Taiwan and Spain are a little bit older than Estonia, but we are in the same ball park when it comes to experimentations.

Sylvie Barbier: Thank you, that’s a great insight. I have another question which is what is the question that people never ask you that you would like to be asked?

Audrey Tang: People have asked me that question.

Sylvie Barbier: Then I want to meet that person.

Audrey Tang: I can look them up. Actually, we have a "wiselike.tw" forum on the Internet where people can anonymously ask me questions. There are also some anonymous questions.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have anything to say really. I mostly respond to people.

Audrey Tang: There is no message... Well there is one meta-point I want to get across, it’s that I’m not doing anything "as" the Digital Minister. It’s more of an honorary title in my mind. There’s nothing I wouldn’t be able to do without this title. I don’t command anyone to do anything with this title.

Audrey Tang: The title does mean that it’s easier to communicate with senior executives, for example, but fundamentally the relationship is that of a voluntary collaboration. I say this more as a disclaimer than anything.

Ninon Godefroy: Thank you. [laughs] Do you have any question for us?

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah. A lot actually.

Ninon Godefroy: Yeah, tell us.

Audrey Tang: What kind of students or learners are you working with your educational work?

Ninon Godefroy: We have The Leap project. This is with Sylvie, me and friends. It’s a growing community. We are both half Taiwanese, and I think we always have this complicated story with Taiwan. We just really wanted to be Taiwanese. [laughs] I was like we’re fraud. My Chinese is crap. [laughs]

Ninon Godefroy: Her performance last week was about this, actually, where she only spoke in Chinese [non-English speech] . We can communicate, but then when we only speak Chinese, we realize so much frustration [non-English speech] we can’t get across.

Ninon Godefroy: We do really care about education, like I study educational policy and she’s a Steiner educator. Now, in Taiwan, we’re doing this thing called the Leap, which is for 16-25. We focus on young Taiwanese adults, soon to be full-on citizens.

Ninon Godefroy: We have this feeling of there are like young people in Taiwan who are very active, but around us we also see many who just want to leave and whatever.

Ninon Godefroy: We focus on this believe of creating an exciting future for themselves, and to believe in the possibility of being engaged in society through whatever means or aspirations they have. I guess it’s very personal, because I think for us this is also an aspiration.

Ninon Godefroy: In the education policy, I wanted to ask you something, too, because education is something everyone will always be...Education policy, everyone will be unsatisfied. In France, when there was the election of, Macron, before he ran for president, they did this movement.

Ninon Godefroy: They went to ask on everyone’s door like, "Are you dissatisfied with the education system?" and everyone answered, "Yes." "Are you dissatisfied with the school?" and everyone answered, "No, I love my school." [laughs]

Ninon Godefroy: There’s often this kind of problem. Just like we talk a lot about the communities, the local levels, and just wondering how it would be possible to, one, have basically education policy at the community level, or at the school level.

Ninon Godefroy: Maybe it sounds a bit, but asking just the students and the parents, and to have that kind of deep consultation for educational policy. Wondering how that could be possible. Also, how it would be possible to imagine...?

Ninon Godefroy: We have the feeling, now, there’s a lot of people doing homeschooling. Where we were saying last time we met with dissatisfied parents, society, and individual like, "I’m so dissatisfied. I’m going to just raise my kid by myself." We met some parents like this. They do have...

Audrey Tang: Which is completely legal in Taiwan.

Ninon Godefroy: Which is completely legal, I know, and it’s also great like it was an amazing education. We want to think also about the politics of it. How would you...?

Sylvie Barbier: Thinking the words like, "Oh, nobody should care about how I raise my children. It’s my children. Public school is not good, so I want to give them the best education possible." That’s really wonderful to have the desire to homeschool and give the best education to your kids.

Sylvie Barbier: What about all of the other kids who their parents can’t homeschool, or can’t even have the means and time to do that? I think there’s maybe some right...Also, people who are very liberal, open, and maybe also they’re kind of like, "Oh, you don’t tell me if I get a gun or not."

Sylvie Barbier: They end up being a horse shoes, like these two extremes is about the government or other people not interacting. In a sense, I think the society is thinking of the collective that actually if your child is not well, my child is not well because then they bully each other.

Sylvie Barbier: If a grandmother feel really isolated and sick, we are ultimately connected, and it’s only by raising this awareness of our connection. I don’t think there is a shortcut to collective action, and there’s a shortcut to collective consensus of politics, or human-to-human.

Sylvie Barbier: Engaging people with the trust of the tool or society, and for us, the importance is in young people having this kind of, "You can be expressed. What is your narrative, and what do you hope for society? Or maybe you don’t want to engage, but you’re still a part of society. You never live isolated." We use that by...

Sylvie Barbier: I think Ninon and I, I feel that we were lucky because we were exposed to so many different social class, so many different cultures, and mindset. From that, we found what our path, or maybe, so your family is very right in your shoe, and then you see one what that literally will let you jump off the roof and figure out if that hurts or not.

Sylvie Barbier: It’s by being exposed to so many different things, and also many right or wrong [non-English speech] , and then engage with that conversation.

Audrey Tang: With autonomy.

Sylvie Barbier: [non-English speech] . Ninon. Yeah. [non-English speech], Then to expose also to local Taiwanese to do loads of different weird things, and [non-English speech].

Audrey Tang: Just like a mutual discovery process.

Sylvie Barbier: Yes.

Ninon Godefroy: The most important part of the program is [non-English speech] . [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Co-habitation for 10 days?

Sylvie Barbier: Yes.

Ninon Godefroy: I think having direct access like I don’t think we want to be sleeping in the same dormitory, and living together in nature, and then she’s going to do a lot of experimental games. We went to Yilan and we blindfolded a lot of 15-year-olds Taiwanese. [laughs]

Ninon Godefroy: [non-English speech] . [laughs] There was no one from our age range that came. Really, at the beginning we were like, "What to do?" We continued. Blindfolded everyone. [laughs] [non-English speech].

Ninon Godefroy: Why should we be depressed by it? [non-English speech] any age, I felt like I went back to being a child. People gave us amazing testimonies, but, yeah.

Sylvie Barbier: The idea is how do you engage that to do like a social hype is to grow them as a human being, find who do they want to become, and feel that they are cared for, but also who do you want to become in society, because...

Audrey Tang: To learn, really, with the society. To learn together. That’s the spirit of the new curriculum that we’re going to take it back next year. We reshape the basic education so that it was a more skilled-based education system, where people are in the system which tries to find a skill that they imagine that will have the fit to the society needs.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t really work anymore. We can’t really predict where the world will be 12 years down the road. Maybe...

Ninon Godefroy: Let alone 50.

Audrey Tang: Maybe this model worked 50 years ago, but they no longer. We did a curriculum, and now includes autonomy first. Then interaction, again, the common good. That becomes what we call character-based education system.

Audrey Tang: A lot of that is that we were doing away with competition, like linear competition between the students. We’re doing away with everyone has the same classes to have. For example, in the senior high school level, we’re now doing what used to be only doing at the senior level of college. We just have the children design their own classes according to their needs and abilities.

Sylvie Barbier: A little bit like Montessori.

Audrey Tang: It’s a little bit Montessori, that’s true. Also, in the senior high school level, to encourage people to discover their connection with the local community, with the society more, by having each school teacher and parent association design the courses for that particular school.

Audrey Tang: Every school, even in the best education system, get to experiment a little bit. The whole idea, really, is to make teachers co-learners, and stop teaching, really, and just help children discover themselves.

Audrey Tang: We took the 10 years of experimental education in Taiwan, not all of them works actually, so we took the parts that worked, and folded them into the basic education system. We have the examination system, the university credit system for instance.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, everyone think they need to finish four years of university before going to the society. Now, we’re saying, "OK. If you finish junior high, you can actually go to start something, do some project, and come back to college later. And after a couple of years in college, you can actually go out and do some experiments and go back. Maybe you need a different set of skills."

Audrey Tang: How the university engage with learners will change, it’s not one single major, one single diploma anymore, it is bundles of credits, bundles of works that you can continue in lifelong fashion. It will completely reshape the expectation of university education.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s part of the paradigm shift that we’re telling people, the community and the college, the university, and whatever, they are just resources and anyone are entitled to use them according to their own needs, not what their teacher or professor instruct them to do.

Audrey Tang: The autonomy becomes driven by the students. That’s the main curriculum change philosophy. I think we’re pretty ready for that next year.

Sylvie Barbier: Is there any teacher training? I think at least for me, I used to teach in Florence. There was exactly this experience, that I felt like I was put there to basically sign knowledge.

Sylvie Barbier: Like I’m the brain, and I was loaded. That was never what I did. I was always in the quest of enabling their inner, already existing potential, that they get to discover themself. There is also, it’s, in a way, it’s a certain skill. It’s a soft skill, but it’s still a skill, and learning how to enable that. Is there any training program for teachers to...?

Audrey Tang: There’s plenty. The National, I think, Normal University, the one that teaches teachers, is already adjusting to the new curriculum. There is many, actually, horizontal connected teacher networks to prepare their classes together.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is very highly connected on the Internet everywhere, most of our population has broadband access. There is just those spontaneous, horizontal groups and meet-ups formed by teachers, like collaboration groups, that talks mostly about adjusting their skills from those lecturing skills to listening, empowerment, facilitation skills.

Audrey Tang: There’s plenty of workshops, also, and quite a few magazines dedicated for this kind of thing. It’s really happening. Used to be the plan was the curriculum would take place this year, but because of some controversy surrounding the history class, we delay everything by one year.

Audrey Tang: We are really seeing this year a lot of pilot schools, a lot of pilot high school, or just primary schools, that are already using the new curriculum for teaching. Maybe in selected classes, maybe just in one grade, or something like that.

Audrey Tang: They are already actively sharing their new experience. If you look them up, there is this 108-curriculum support group on materials. You find quite a few online, as well as offline. That’s the basic education.

Audrey Tang: I completely agree with the idea of making autonomous learning into a new norm of basic education. If we just let the experimentation schoolers be autonomous, frankly speaking, it’s just a small fraction of people. We really need to take the best ideas, and then scale them out in the basic education system.

Sylvie Barbier: You are very positive that upon these reforms, that they will really change not just the superficial, but really change the relationship between the knowledge and the students?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because of the two dynamics. It’s that the schools are getting less and less tutor, just because of population, which means that there is more fraction of a teacher’s time that each child enjoy.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, in senior high, there is going to be a lot of empty classrooms if we’re not doing a curriculum change, just by the nature of less tutor, being more independent. Instead of saying those are empty classrooms, we’re saying, "No, we’re designing the course so the child selects their own course."

Audrey Tang: Maybe they want to learn indigenous languages. Maybe they want to learn a lot of things. Those classes are collaboratively built up with community support, with specialty teachers, with school design curriculum to rebuild the classrooms so that it’s still put into good utility.

Audrey Tang: Because the education budget is constitutionally protected, there is going to be this many budget, anyway. The resource per child is also increasing, just by the virtue of having less children.

Sylvie Barbier: Less children, yes. Quality over quantity.

Audrey Tang: All this are what we are taking into consideration when we are building the new curriculum. We’re free of a lot of constraint in the previous eras, where there is 50 children in a class. There is very little innovation you can do when you have 50 children in a class.

Sylvie Barbier: It is impossible to teach. You have to lead as well.

Audrey Tang: You can only indoctrinate, or whatever.

Sylvie Barbier: Just put them in a room, and make sure they don’t kill each other.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Now, it’s just 15 or 20 per class. It’s much easier.

Sylvie Barbier: What are the things that you are interested, or you’re up to on the maybe personal level, or on the personal...I personally don’t separate personal and professional, but what is the things that you...

Audrey Tang: Same here.

Sylvie Barbier: ...you looking forward to?

Audrey Tang: That’s what my disclaimer means. I’m acting always in an individual’s capacity. I really like listening to people. That’s my main work, actually. I’m being paid by taxpayers to listen to people.

Sylvie Barbier: And answer them, though.

Audrey Tang: And answer them, but that’s just to get them talk more.

Ninon Godefroy: Did you see? She’s threw a question at us, and then we answered with five.

Audrey Tang: Exactly right. No, but seriously, I do think a lot of political issues, you mentioned there’s no shortcut. The shortest path often is just to get everyone listening to everyone else. That’s the shortest already. It’s just people keep doing other, more ceremonial things, ritualistic things to prevent the listening from happening.

Audrey Tang: At the end, still, you’ve got to listen to each other, and then find out something that people can live with. By saying my main job and my hobby is to listen, we cut away all those ribbons, rituals, and ceremonies, and get straight to the business. That’s my hobby.

Sylvie Barbier: How did you got into maybe the love or passion of the practice of listening?

Audrey Tang: I remember reading through all those child raising books my parents purchased when I was five or six. They were very into education, so they bought a lot of books on education, philosophy, practice, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I remember when I was five or so, I really resonated with one of the books. I forgot the name of the book. It’s a book on the technique of active listening. Basically, not just listen, but empathize, and to basically co-create a horizon, a way of thinking, a perspective as part of listening.

Audrey Tang: It stressed that listening is what’s happening, and we’re just vehicles for it. It’s a very non-individualistic view on the art of the listening. I remember finding it really intriguing, and something that I can practice. It’s like playing a piano.

Audrey Tang: It’s not something magical. It’s just something you do. That’s it, perhaps. I learned it from a book. It’s just how it is, yeah.

Sylvie Barbier: There’s one thing that I’ve done. I think naturally for me, there was always something very close to my heart, when you hear someone, and then you feel the [non-English speech] .

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Sylvie Barbier: There’s no difference.

Audrey Tang: There’s an equalizing force.

Sylvie Barbier: Then actually, when you can deeply listen to them, you always find something that you can collaborate or create together. It is truly touching to experience, but also to enable more listening, the art of listening.

Ninon Godefroy: For me, it’s also something quite interesting, how difficult it is, how you can sometimes just go out of it. Then you remind yourself to be there. How quickly you can shift back to the non-listening mode.

Sylvie Barbier: How do you create an environment to create listening, to enable listening in groups? I think that’s how, maybe in a very rich, grassroot, ad hoc way, I do with my performance arts, because what I saw in my ward of China is their methodology enabled listening in children.

Sylvie Barbier: I was like, "Why do that for kids? I’m going to do that for grown-ups." A grown-up is a kid. That’s why I blindfold them, make them roll on the floor, and god knows that. I believe that we tend to talk at each other.

Sylvie Barbier: That’s maybe amazing that we share ourself through our intellect, or our words, but there’s ways. If I make you do a silly game, and you look really stupid in front of someone else, then the way you perceive each other is really different.

Sylvie Barbier: Then the way they listen to each other, especially maybe your perception is, your value system is really different from their value system. It creates a, I relate to you as your inner child, in a way. For me, that’s the thing that I discovered that enables listening and communication.

Sylvie Barbier: I am just interested in, have you noticed paths that enabled a larger group? So far, the biggest group I have managed to do is about 35. [laughs] Of course, you’d like to scale this up for the universe, but I do believe in the power of listening, that it’s the most healing. I wonder if you’ve seen or used yourself methodologies?

Audrey Tang: Quite a few, actually. I am frequently invited to give talks to maybe 300 people, 500 people, 1,000 people. At that point, it’s impossible in our small wetware brain to track where every person is looking at, which emotional state they are.

Audrey Tang: The best facilitators can maybe do 50 people. Beyond that, it’s possible to keep track individually where everybody is at, and what everybody’s views about everybody is. It’s just combinational explosion.

Audrey Tang: I use a set of what we call ambient computing, or COM technology -- there is many words for this -- that basically says, "We’re using technology not to distract, but to do the real converse, to let us focus more."

Audrey Tang: For example, I will use their phones, because by far, when there is 500 people, at any time, 100 people of them are on their phones nowadays. It’s like a natural distractor. Whenever there is a large group meeting, people are just taking their phones out and checking their email for no apparent reason. It also influence people close to them.

Sylvie Barbier: Around them.

Audrey Tang: Around them. You have those little pockets of people checking Twitter in the middle of a session. Those apps are designed by the best minds that reinforce those short term, instant gratification. There really is no point in trying to compete with the red, small numbers on their screens.

Audrey Tang: One technique I always use is to tell at the very beginning everyone to take out their phone, and connect to this website, slido.com, and just write down anything on their mind. Anything they want to ask me, anything they want to tell a joke, somebody would want to say to a group.

Audrey Tang: Because everybody is taking out their phone and doing that, I am essentially occupying their phone, so they are not doing anything else. They are basically using this as a way to communicate. Then I will bring out this projector, project the people’s voices on their phones to the large projector, and ask people to like anything that they want me to answer first.

Audrey Tang: Basically, this co-opted people’s reflex to press like. They would not to go to Facebook on their phones. They will just use this.

Audrey Tang: It is just a lot of psychological gimmicks.

Sylvie Barbier: They’re deeply listening with their likes.

Audrey Tang: Right, exactly. Then I gave this binding power to things like, people ask me a question. Maybe I’ll just throw in a few silly ones. It’s all anonymous. People feel it’s OK, and just give binding power.

Audrey Tang: If out of 500 people, 100 press like to a very silly question, I will highlight that question, and answer that. Basically, it’s me engaging with the crowd, but the crowd synthesized as, perhaps, one person. It’s conversation with the crowd.

Sylvie Barbier: What’s the name of the app?

Audrey Tang: It’s called Slido, S-L-I-D-O.

Sylvie Barbier: It’s funny, because a while back, I organized a conference, and I didn’t know of that app. I wanted to do something like that, because I was like, "People are otherwise..." in a very similar way. People, when you have such a large audience, people rarely voice what they do want to ask you, or what they genuinely think.

Audrey Tang: I think being anonymous is a key part of it. If it’s taking raising a hand, even in very liberal circles, like when around five people, everybody can raise their hands. If 500, it’s very difficult for people to, especially more introvert people, to raise their hands and ask a question, even if they have a lot to contribute.

Audrey Tang: In government settings, if there are superiors in the same room, it takes even more courage. If everybody is anonymous, and half of people are looking at their phones, you don’t really know who was the person who asked this question, or who raised this sentiment.

Audrey Tang: That really helps. Slido, or Pol.is, or Vmesh, or Join, all platforms, RealtimeBoard, all these platforms that I use to facilitate group listening, they have one common thing, is they don’t let participant reply to one another.

Audrey Tang: That just consumes people’s energy to more narrower and narrower conversations. In all those tech that I use, the only way to refute a argument, really, is to raise a better argument. There is no ad hominem attacks, or things like that. It takes some design.

Sylvie Barbier: Tell Audrey about IMED.

Ninon Godefroy: Yeah, sure.

Sylvie Barbier: Rufus is leading on the project called IMED, which is called...Shit, I’m so bad.

Ninon Godefroy: Innovating for Medical Enterprise and Development.

Audrey Tang: OK. IMED.

Sylvie Barbier: You remember last time when he came, he talked to you about an open funds, or open information. That’s basically, we got funding from Rockefeller to first do a white paper on the vertical of medicine.

Sylvie Barbier: Medicine is information, and I think emotionally, that’s the narrative that gets people going the most, is baby dying. We wrote the white paper. I don’t know if you want me to explain his system or not?

Audrey Tang: You can send me the link, and I will check it out.

Sylvie Barbier: I can send you the white paper. I think you’d be interested in the white paper. Also, we’ve been doing that, because I think the greatest barrier we’ve seen is that, even expert in these ideas and funds are themselves not really talking to each other, or have not got the narrative right.

Sylvie Barbier: When you go and speak to funders or policymakers, if you have not got your story right, it’s very difficult to move forward. I think roughly it’s the idea, I’ll send you the white paper and the deck. It would be really great to hear your input, or just your thoughts.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ll look over it.

Sylvie Barbier: I think what we notice is genuinely, because it’s a quite complex narrative, it’s basically being able to tell the narrative quite shortly and succinctly. [non-English speech] , because I think I have a curiosity if you believe Taiwan, would be a type of country. You would be interested in...

Ninon Godefroy: Basically, this year, what we are doing with the Rockefeller Fund is the first research that we did, like a horizon scan in the white paper. How would this mechanism of an open information fund work? It’s basically based on, like...

Audrey Tang: You can just airdrop that to me, actually.

Sylvie Barbier: We have it.

Audrey Tang: That’s one piece of technology that always works.

Sylvie Barbier: I think it’s on Keynote.

Audrey Tang: Keynote is just fine.

Sylvie Barbier: Oh, OK.

Audrey Tang: You can airdrop that to me.

Ninon Godefroy: Then the second phase will be a feasibility study. Then actually, the third phase is a pilot project in a country. Now, we’re first starting with Austria and other governments. It seems like something very promising.

Ninon Godefroy: I think to really change a system, often people’s first question, I feel, is how are the pharmaceutical industries, are they still going to make as much money? What we are showing is there is basically a dilemma now, we feel, between access and innovation.

Ninon Godefroy: Is it access, more access, or more innovation? We are basically showing with the IMED project that it is not a dilemma, that you can actually have both.

Audrey Tang: That’s a real innovation.

Ninon Godefroy: Yeah.

Sylvie Barbier: Because information has this nature of unlimited replicates.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. It’s non-scarce. Any scarcity is artificial with information.

Ninon Godefroy: I have a slide that Rivers had sent me. It’s here.

Audrey Tang: OK. You can airdrop me when ready, and I’m going to pay for the lunch. We need to slowly walk back.

Ninon Godefroy: I will send it to you later. I think it would be better.

Audrey Tang: OK, sure.