Emily Haws: I got the story. You talk about digital government and government services, a little bit about you, why you’re in Canada, all that good stuff. I know you’re speaking at a conference. Are you speaking later today, or was it yesterday?

Audrey Tang: No, I did it yesterday as a keynote and then also as a domain expert for service delivery in a conversation. It went well.

Emily Haws: Good. I wanted to make it to the conference, but it didn’t work out. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m sure they’ll put recordings and write-ups and whatever online.

Emily Haws: Hopefully.

Emily Haws: Perfect. Tell me about why you’re here. Have you met with any Canadian officials or done anything notable?

Audrey Tang: Interesting? [laughs]

Emily Haws: Yeah. What have you been up to?

Audrey Tang: First, I visited Toronto for a couple of days. I worked with the Civic Tech Toronto, which is part of Code for Canada, a network of civic technologists. We organized a two-day workshop for the people in the Ontario government, people in the Toronto City government, for the civil society organizations, professional facilitators, and the Civic Tech people to learn about how to deliberate.

Audrey Tang: We chose an issue that’s come onto both Taiwan and Ontario, which is Uber and Lyft and other ride-sharing services. I think here it’s called private taxi companies, private transport companies. Both of those have regulated them in 2016. Now, it’s due for a review in Ontario, I believe.

Audrey Tang: We chose that as a subject for us to simulate a different way about talking about these instead of by public commentary and consultation around different focus group, we experimented with a more structured conversation where we bring the different stakeholders and check with each other’s facts, then after that, feelings, after that, ideas and after that, decisions.

Audrey Tang: It’s a long consultation. We witnessed something very interesting, which is the civil society organizations, the tech people, the city envoy, the provincial people, they started the workshop sitting very close to their kins.

Audrey Tang: Our first instruction in the workshop, which is co-hosted by about six facilitators from Taiwan is to maximize the number of strangers in each table so that in each table, you if feel somebody you already know, move to some other table so they really mix and work together.

Audrey Tang: Some of them tell us that it’s the first time they actually sit down face-to-face to talk about this cross-sectoral issue in a way that feels a lot of rapport. People actually build common values instead of just sending Word documents to each other.

Audrey Tang: It’s a highly-facilitated conversation, and I learned a lot about the civic tech people here. We visited MaRS. We visited quite a few, like Toronto University and things like that, and worked with the social innovators here as well.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, the civic tech people and the social enterprises were mingling together. Here, it seems like the two are just starting to talk to each other. That’s one of the observations that I’ve had in Toronto.

Emily Haws: How about in Ottawa? What are you up to here?

Audrey Tang: In Ottawa, I attend the FWD50 Conference. The conference brings everybody digital together. It’s primarily run by the Canadian Digital Service as well as the other, like Digital Academy, the CIO, your new digital minister, [laughs] and people like that.

Audrey Tang: People feel, I think, very optimistic. For the first time, digital is seen as one of the pillars in government services, in delivery of news services, in reducing the work and the risk of public service, in making it more accessible, inclusive, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: For the first time, digital feels like something that includes everybody in better service delivery rather than just IT, which is mostly just about automation and cost reduction, which is not that interesting for ordinary citizens. The spirit of co-creation was one of the main theme at the conference, and that’s the topic I talk about as well.

Emily Haws: Canada’s just beginning to get into digital services. In July is when we appointed our minister of digital government. What advice do you have for Canada in terms of how to integrate digital more into everyday life and into government services?

Audrey Tang: My first suggestion -- this is my keynote -- is to basically think digital innovation and social innovation in the same strand of thought instead of being two different things. This is my office in Taiwan, literally, and people just visited.

Audrey Tang: These are people drawn by people with Down Syndrome. With the right digital technology, their communication style in geometry is actually better than we are. They turn out to be excellent visual artists that can do conceptual design, CIS, VI, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Without those digital technology enablers, we will think of them as vulnerable populations, while they actually bring their unique contribution to this community. Because I’m here in this space every Wednesday, 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, everybody can talk to me provided that they are willing to have the transcript published on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: We have rough sleepers, people who are homeless. We have social workers. We have people of indigenous lands and things like that to come visit me and ask me to visit their lands also. We introduce digital technologies like these self-driving tricycles in a way that helps the elderly, for example, in their transportation issues.

Audrey Tang: It always exists in a open way, meaning that if the elders and the community don’t like particularly how it flashes red when they feels that it doesn’t understand the situation, they can always change that very easily without encumbered by patents and copyright.

Audrey Tang: The second is that it’s always introduced in response to a real social need so it’s not colonial. It’s not some huge corporation wanting to use people here to experiment, rather a response to what people really needs here, which is a increasingly elderly population that needs transportation and a domestic animal that follows them to carry things, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Digital and social, I think, are two sides of the same coin. Instead of thinking large tech company and social non-profit meets, we really need to be in the spirit of co-creation. That’s my main message.

Emily Haws: What do you think are some steps that Canada could go about doing that?

Audrey Tang: One of the, I think, very good thing that Canada is doing is introducing a digital service standard. Taiwan also just rolled out the government digital service principle a couple months back. The standard basically affects procurement. It says that any new procurement need to consider the people and people’s needs before procuring any services.

Audrey Tang: I think the same spirit is in Taiwan and in Canada in that, in some jurisdiction, it’s OK to save people’s time by one hour by having the civil service work two extra hours just to please their constituents. Here, as well as in Canada, we consider front-line civil service as very important and the capacity-building very important, so that they are also users. They are also stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: We need to build digital services that reduce time and risk for both sides in a service journey. That is a very enlightened view. It applies to people with visual impairments, with different languages, like full inclusive and accessibility. That is one thing I think we have in common.

Audrey Tang: People genuinely find it surprising when I say in Taiwan broadband is a human right. If you don’t have 10 megabits per second, it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: The geography of Taiwan is pretty small. From the north to south, at most, it’s just one and a half hours by high-speed rails so we can afford to deliver broadband as human rights, even in places where it doesn’t make economic sense to do so in market force. In Canada, we understand the situation is rather different.

Emily Haws: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Better broadband infrastructure using more innovative technologies, such as the 5G technology, that is one thing that is very worthwhile for Canada to look into.

Audrey Tang: Even in places where it’s only land line service, there exists ways for people just call a toll-free number and talk to a Siri-like assistant that can search the Internet for whatever relevant information and get back to them through AI-powered services. They even deploy that in Columbia, of all places.

Audrey Tang: This is one of the things that a innovative digital service can look into, is just to make people’s life better using existing tools and habits that they’re using.

Emily Haws: I guess that is the biggest thing with Canada. The bureaucracy tends to be pretty slow moving. We’re just starting to move into the more digital space. How do you think that Canada can keep up? Technology moves so quickly that often by the time the government is done procuring something, you think of our pay system which has a giant problem right now.

Emily Haws: They procured it 10 years ago and they only launched it in 2016 and already technology has surpassed them. How do you balance that process and bureaucracy with digital technology that’s moving so much faster?

Audrey Tang: We introduced an idea in Taiwan. Technologically it’s called Open API, and I am going to explain it in more detail. Basically, we said, here as well in Taiwan, if you build a website, you have to let people who are blind to be able to use the website.

Audrey Tang: It’s called accessibility standard. It’s either through voice synthesis, captioning of images, braille display, or whatever it has to be able to be used in the same quality as people who are sighted. In Taiwan, we say AI or machine learning is a kind of blind people. [laughs] They’re not quite legal people, but they’re a legitimate user and reader of the digital services.

Audrey Tang: If a vendor says that, "I can only deliver the service to you through like PDF files or scans," or whatever, that is useful to humans but it’s not structured for machine learning. Then they have to charge extra, a lot more money to build a machine-to-machine interface to [inaudible 11:42] API, then we deem them as unprofessional, and they could be disqualified from the procurement process for saying so.

Audrey Tang: Basically, all our new and revised procurement projects need to include interface, not for people to see only but also interface for other machines. The end result is that it could be a old system, but it’s OK because we can do a separate pilot procurement that puts a new paint on it, that delivers it through chatbot, or through virtual reality, or through whatever, without affecting the old system underneath.

Audrey Tang: At least it has a circuit that other people can plug into, but they cannot refuse to build a circuit. I think that is one concept that when I talk with the Digital Service and Digital Academy people, they really appreciate and they might look into incorporating that into Canada’s procurement.

Emily Haws: One of the biggest complaints or downsides of automation is that it loses human jobs, because machines can often do things faster than humans can. How do you balance the need for innovation with also making sure people have a way to make money? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It only reduce tasks though. It doesn’t reduce jobs. Like in our work at the moment during the interview, only very few part of it is mechanical. It’s mostly about understanding where we’re coming from and having a life experience to exchange authentically.

Audrey Tang: That part is not automatable by artificial intelligence at all. The part where we take this recording and make a transcript, that actually is automatable. I don’t enjoy doing that, and I imagine you won’t, either.

Emily Haws: Transcription is my least favorite part of doing this.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, because it doesn’t call upon our unique life experiences. No matter what education, what life experience we had, we’re going to end up with exactly the same thing. That part is purely mechanical and so automation will of course make that part redundant.

Audrey Tang: We use just high quality microphone because we can use AI to turn that into transcripts, and so because of that, the part in journalism that we don’t enjoy because it treats us as machines, not people, are delegated to machines, not people, to do.

Audrey Tang: It leaves more time for us to do the communication and quality journalism, and brings a perspective. Basically, the idea is that we look into our jobs and find the things that are trivial. Trivial is a computer science term that means it has a well-defined input, well defined output, and people’s creativity doesn’t make any difference. It’s only precision and speed that makes a difference.

Audrey Tang: For trivial parts of the job, of course they will be automated, but there are very few jobs that are entirely trivial. It lifts all of us to do more quality jobs, and I think we get paid better, actually.

Emily Haws: Turning more to you and your work as a minister, why do you choose to have everything transcribed and put on the Internet that you’re...Where does that philosophy come from?

Audrey Tang: The radical transparency is how the Internet is built. The Internet doesn’t have laws or regulations. They have what we call requests for comments, or RFCs, and the requests for comments are entirely voluntary. You can choose to follow it, you can choose to not follow it.

Audrey Tang: If people all follow the Internet Protocol, their machines connect to each other. That’ the inter part in the Internet. It’s by voluntary association, but how does the legitimacy of the Internet comes forward so that everybody need to hook into the same Internet Protocols?

Audrey Tang: The Internet doesn’t have a Army or a Navy. It can’t force any sovereign country to connect to the Internet, and the Internet as a body, it doesn’t even report to the any of the states. The UNITU tried for years to absorb us, but now it’s more of a partnership. Every year, there’s a UNITU Internet Governance Forum. I participated last year in Geneva as a robot.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I mean is, the Internet is sovereign. It’s sovereign because the legitimacy it draws from radical transparency that you can see exactly how the decision is made. Anyone who claim to have a stake can send an email and join the rule making process of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: That’s my first political system I learned when I was 15-year-old. That was 1996, and I told my teachers that, "My textbook are out of date. I can join this new world of the World Web." They actually agree with it, so I dropped out of high school and started a few start-up and participated in Internet governance. It would be another six year before I get my voting right.

Audrey Tang: This is the only political system that I know for the first part of my entrepreneurship life. I later learned, "Oh, there’s representative democracy."

Emily Haws: How do you go about your day? What does day look like on maybe an average day when you’re not traveling?

Audrey Tang: It all depends on which day of the week it is, because I have a very by the week schedule. As I said, every Wednesday I’m in the Social Innovation Lab for everybody to talk to. On Tuesdays, I tour around Taiwan to district Hualien, a more indigenous place and Taitung even more indigenous tribes and nations live there.

Audrey Tang: When I tour around Taiwan like this, the 12 ministries working in social innovation are in Taipei in the Social Innovation Lab, but they see through my eyes how the local people are like.

Audrey Tang: I’m like their investigative reporter that goes to places, maybe stay for a day or two, and really understand what the people there are suffering from, what their problems are with the current regulations and policies.

Audrey Tang: Usually, if they write an email to their minister, that ministry will say, "Oh, we’ll have to consult that ministry, that ministry, that ministry." It’s always a structural problem, but when all the 12 ministries are in the same room, enjoying good food, good geometric design, and things like that, they actually get into a very creative mode.

Audrey Tang: They think about solutions together, seeing face-to-face though digital technology to resolve the local issues. Usually, they resolve it just like that within two weeks because it’s every two-week iteration cycle.

Audrey Tang: If they admit that the government doesn’t have the resource or the policy currently is really a problem, is really blocking the social process, the entire thing is published on the Internet, really very transparent.

Audrey Tang: Everybody who want to break the rule in the name of social innovation can then go to the sandbox platform and say, "We’re going to break this rule or regulation, or even law locally because you guys have admitted that the government is currently unable to deliver."

Emily Haws: They’re like, "I see in your transcript that you said the government can’t do the solution, so..."

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Then they get a free pass, either in platform economy, fintech, or [inaudible 18:56] or 5G, to experiment on new innovations without maybe breaking the law for one year in that vicinity.

Audrey Tang: Everybody gets to see whether, did it actually solve their social problem and highlight it or not? If it doesn’t, it’s open innovation. Everybody learn something. The government costs nothing. If it really solves the problem, it becomes the new regulation and competitor can enter the market. That’s how we drive innovation, and that’s Tuesdays.

Emily Haws: Are you ever concerned about security when you’re traveling around different parts of the world or even different parts of Taiwan? I think of our ministers. A lot of the time, they’re in very structured environments. The Prime Minister’s security guards often say Prime Minister Trudeau was difficult in a way because he loves going into large crowds, which cause security headaches.

Emily Haws: Are you ever concerned about stuff with that?

Audrey Tang: I’m concerned about cybersecurity.

Audrey Tang: This actually just came out two days ago. I make sure that the operating system, the hardware are the latest. I use the state of the art into an encrypted systems, and cybersecurity hardened virtual work spaces, and things like that, but I don’t worry about physical security.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think there are people who would want to harm me, because this way of communication, it’s to the benefit of everybody on the planet actually, so I’m an enemy of nobody.

Emily Haws: As far as we know, you’re the world’s first transgender minister.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emily Haws: Do you feel like you need to set an example at all or...

Audrey Tang: Mm-mm.

Emily Haws: No? OK.

Audrey Tang: I’m post-gender, so I don’t care. That’s what it is. I think also in many Taiwanese First Nations, some of them are matriarchical like Amis. In for example Paiwan, which is I think our president’s grandmother’s nation, they don’t actually make a difference based on gender in their social roles and things like that.

Audrey Tang: In my young age, just right after dropping out of high school, around that age, I lived also in the indigenous tribes in the Atayal region. I have a pretty different view around gender and gender expressions. I get the idea of the two-spirited and things like that, which carries a very non-binary situation in the First Nations. I mostly bring my gender understanding and narrative from that tradition.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the Internet, nobody cares about your gender anyway. Everybody is an email away. I would say I’m post-gender. It speaks highly of Taiwan’s human rights status when the LGBTIQ people are now talking not about social discrimination or whatever. They’re talking about a lot more like recognizing the third gender legally and things like that, really progressive things, which is very unique in East Asia.

Emily Haws: Taiwan is a leader in that region on gender issues.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Constitutionally, the marriage equality is recognized by the Constitutional Court. Also, in the past few years, the gender mainstreaming effort has really seeped into every part of our ministry. Dr. Tsai, she is not some politician’s daughter or politician’s wife. She earned the presidency by herself. All this I think speaks very highly about gender mainstreaming and also of LGBTIQ rights.

Emily Haws: As a minister too, what do you think is the most difficult part of your job?

Audrey Tang: At the moment, what we’re trying to do, and it’s taken us some time, is to raise the awareness that the economic sector, the social sector, and the people caring about environment, that they don’t have to be enemies. They don’t have to work at tension.

Audrey Tang: Through social innovation and the Sustainable Development Goals, which is structured that if you work in any of those 169 targets, you automatically reinforce everybody else in the other two sectors. The digital part is important because it makes everybody play on the same accountable growth, and that people can work on economy but without causing environmental externalities.

Audrey Tang: People can work on social solidarity in effective partnerships with social enterprises. Through open innovation, we can turn, I don’t know, plastic waste into oil or something like that, into carbon, into oil and things like that. This kind of cross-sectoral partnership is really new to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The branding of sustainable development goals, it really only caught on in the past couple of years or so. I understand in Canada it’s still also just catching on, right?

Emily Haws: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I think both Taiwan and Canada in our Voluntary National Reviews, we both admitted that there is a lot more to do.

Audrey Tang: Which is why I wear this all the time, and the pin and everything. The challenge now is really to raise the awareness about sustainability. It’s not just an environmental thing. It’s something that you can combine other sectors. We will, I guess, take a few more years to reach the point where people don’t think about the three part of the society as at tension but as reinforcing each other.

Emily Haws: When you’re thinking of a social policy, you’re also considering impact on the environment and how you can make that more digital, so they all work in tandem.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and also it creates more jobs with dignity.

Emily Haws: Would you recommend our digital government minister, for example, do things like the Social Innovation Lab where you sit for 12 hours and just talk to whoever comes in?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think that’s one really important innovation. It shows to people, especially in the more remote places, that we really bring technology to people instead of asking people to come to technology.

Audrey Tang: It changes the narrative around technology because where people, especially First Nations but also in the under-resourced places, they really don’t want the people go here and set the agenda through this disruptive technology that doesn’t really solve their social problem, or it does solve the social problem but it cause environmental problem, and so on and so forth.

Audrey Tang: They really want to set the agenda, and so by bringing the experiences of being deeply listened to, by bringing dynamic facilitation, which was invented here in Canada, by bringing facilitation to people and making sure that facilitators work in a digitally enabled environment where the people’s conversations can be captured, synthesized and heard back in the capital.

Audrey Tang: I think it brings a different narrative where the agenda is set by the people. We say devolution, I think that’s the same word that’s used here, where people even in townships of 50K people and so on, should be able to set their own identity, their own agenda. The digital agenda stems from those consensus instead of in the top-down manner. That would be my suggestion.

Emily Haws: Do you use digital technology and Skype into other remote parts? That’s what you mean when you say digital...

Audrey Tang: I go there and then I Skype back to Taipei.

Emily Haws: You first came to prominence as a protester.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Emily Haws: What was that like, to be in the parliament and occupying it?

Audrey Tang: I make a distinction, because what we did is a demonstration and not a protest. We made a demonstration or a demo. In the software language, a demo means that we show instead of telling the government how to do things.

Audrey Tang: Around that time, the MPs were refusing to deliberate substantially a service trade agreement. They were on strike, so the people went into parliament and did the MPs’ job for them...

Audrey Tang: ...by deliberating substantially that particular service and trade agreement. It’s concerted efforts by more than 20 NGOs, each deliberating from a different angle like labor rights, environmental, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Each NGO is supported by the g0v community, which is my tribe, to ensure a neutral, facilitated, fully transparent conversation around the 20 NGOs. Instead of other occupies where it goes nowhere because everybody has their own agenda, we converged over time.

Emily Haws: The digital was the connector between everyone else.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Every day, using digital means, we can see what are the rough consensus of people. At one point, it was half a million people on the street, and we’re still able to get what people generally feels like when it comes to the CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: We also developed tools where they can enter their company name or company registration number and show exactly which part of the STA affects them, so it enables a evidence-based conversation.

Audrey Tang: After three weeks, we converged on five consensus, and then head of parliament accept that, and so the occupy was a victory. I always say it’s a demo. It’s a demonstration, it’s not a protest. Protest is asking the government to do something, but g0v is, we do something and show the government how things should be done.

Emily Haws: How do you think that can be translated into the Canadian context, where people might not be as familiar with...We’re used to traditional protest in Canada.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Emily Haws: How do you go about that to bring about social change?

Audrey Tang: That’s where the civic tech community comes in. We just bootstrapped, started g0v Italy. This was the first g0v project before I joined the movement in 2012. It’s called budget.g0v.tw, and shows the visualization of the Taiwanese annual budget.

Audrey Tang: You can draw down to the exact part you would care, and express your sentiment. You can request for more information. You can have a dialogue. By this year, we merged it because all the g0v projects relinquished most of the copyright. Anything the government really think is a good idea, they can merge it back into public service.

Audrey Tang: We merged it into the join.gov.tw platform, which at the moment, after 23 million people in Taiwan, 5 million people are using the platform to show the part of the budget and have a conversation with the spending, with the KPI procurement and so on, with the career public service without going through the MPs.

Audrey Tang: The career public service actually get to show the professionalism without having to answer forty phone calls, each one not knowing that people have asked about this before. It’s a public forum around the budget.

Emily Haws: It’s like releasing any kind of media request, for example, answers.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. If you go to budget.g0v.it today, you’ll see the equivalent thing, but in Italy. G0v is not trademarked. It’s not patented. It’s just a meme that everybody can build a shadow government by taking any government website they don’t like, change that O to a zero, and get into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: I think the civic tech community, the Code for Canada people, really likes this idea. They are now much more willing to, for example, volunteer and contribute to, for example, user testing. Traditionally, when the traditional procurement do the focus groups, it’s usually with experts. Always university students who have a lot of time, but they’re not a good statistical representative of the population.

Audrey Tang: We are now hearing that civic tech people here are now assembling their own civic user testing groups that comprise of people who are much more statistically balanced. When the government is planning to roll something out, they can contribute by pretesting some early version of that idea. This, again, is not protesting, asking the government to do something. It’s volunteering in a process of co-creation.

Emily Haws: Are you meeting with any Canadian officials while you’re here?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Emily Haws: Which ones?

Audrey Tang: Several. We met with the Digital Academy, the Canadian Digital Service. It’s always in the context of FWD50, where we have a conversation around procurement and service delivery with the people responsible for that here.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just with Canadians, it’s also with Uruguay, South Wales, Australia. It’s truly international, with Ireland and so on. We are in the panels where we compare notes and share the better practices.

Emily Haws: I think that’s everything. I think I’m out of time. I think I said half an hour?

Audrey Tang: I think we’re good. We’re just having our...

Emily Haws: Perfect. All right, then. You clearly think that technology can make the world better and change the world. What advice would you give to young people who share that dream or that goal?

Audrey Tang: I would say that when you study technology, don’t think of it as technology for technology’s sake. Try to think what kind of limitations of physics, like paper-based workflow or the physical environment, is preventing people who think differently from realizing their common values.

Audrey Tang: In the Taiwanese education system, which I was part of the K-12 curriculum committee before joining the cabinet, we’re rolling our new curriculum starting next year, that instead of a skill-based education system, where people acquire tech skill A, tech skill B, and things like that.

Emily Haws: They take a programming class.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Now we’re switching that skill-based mindset into what we call [inaudible 33:15] -based or literacy-based mindset. We say we don’t predict how the tech world will look like 12 years in the future. Nobody can do that. Instead, we show the student how to think in a way that’s autonomous, that you can do critical thinking and find resources yourself.

Audrey Tang: You can communicate, interact with people with very different cultural views and training, and the common good, not using people as means but really listening deeply to people with different cultures and find common values.

Audrey Tang: We think that if the children growing, learning, those three things are important as a human, then they won’t suffer a loss of dignity when any part of the skill gets automated by AI, which will happen very quickly. If you over-identify with particular tech skills, then when that gets automated, you suffer a loss of dignity. That’s a very different perspective of our education. We’re rolling it out next year.

Emily Haws: It’s learning how to learn, and unlearn, and re-learn, too.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Also, learning for the sake of the betterment of the community, instead of learning for competition on individual basis, which is outdated now with artificial intelligence.

Emily Haws: Because the artificial intelligence can always do better than you.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, like [inaudible 34:30] .

Emily Haws: I want to see if I’ve missed any of my questions here. With social enterprises, how do you get things like non-profits to start thinking more digitally in order to create that ecosystem? A lot of them are underfunded, not funded, or they’re continually in flux. How do you get them to start more digitally and more into the future?

Audrey Tang: Usually, it’s from a communication perspective. The older NGOs in Taiwan, they have a lot of legitimacy and respect from the community, because they started in the ’80s where the martial law was lifted, but we still didn’t have a presidential election, which wouldn’t happen until ’96. They have around a decade of legitimacy buildup.

Audrey Tang: The older charities, the older non-profits and NGOs, if they go to a, for example, earthquake area and report a number, and administration reports another number, most people will believe the charity, not the administration. This is just the fact in Taiwan, because they have a longer time to build legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: What they found challenging is that they need to stay relevant to young people. They need to stay relevant to people who learn design thinking, data science and things like that, and find their missions fun and interesting.

Audrey Tang: The young people value community voluntary contribution also, but they do it in a collaborative way, whereas the older NGOs in the older, paper-based workflows, mostly still work in a hierarchical way. Interesting worldwide, because that was the best technology like 30 years ago.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, people bring in young people as communication experts to help them put their message through, to do digital storytelling, to make ways to interact with their constituents more, to bring more power to the people closer to the pain, to relief the social workers and [inaudible 36:41] workers of their chores, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Through this, the digitally native generation, learn that they can actually be guides or leaders in the not-for-profit community. Whatever innovations they make, for example, I’ll use one example. Environmental groups in Taiwan, which is highly respected, partnered with the civic tech community to do self-measurement of air quality.

Audrey Tang: They’re really cheap, like US$100 or less, that you can put on your balcony, school, or whatever, and measure air quality. It doesn’t just do that for yourself, but it uploads to a work space in cloud. It also checks into a distributed ledger, a blockchain, so that it makes sure nobody can change each other’s numbers. It’s immutable. It shows at a glance weather and air pollution level is like.

Audrey Tang: In many other East Asian countries, this would be seen as a threat to the legitimacy of the government.

Emily Haws: Because government is not cleaning the air.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s one. The second is that if the government published a different number, then people are going to trust the one that they build themselves, the old NGOs and with the younger people, the civic tech people, they combined have more legitimacy than the government.

Audrey Tang: Many other East Asian countries, they want to wait until there’s 200 stations, or 2,000 stations in Taiwan’s case. They will just try to poach the person leading the movement into the government or disappear them in other jurisdictions. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, no, we fully embrace the civic tech community. We say this is also a map of the digital divide in Taiwan. Clearly, in the mountains and in the first nations, there’s just not so much citizen scientists around. That’s where we really need to provide broadband as human rights, and provide our own measurement devices. We need to manufacture low-cost, high-precision device for citizen scientists.

Audrey Tang: We listen to them when they tell us they really want a air quality sensor here to tell the domestic versus the extra-jurisdictional air quality flow, but it’s impossible for citizen scientists to set up a station here.

Emily Haws: Government would have to do it.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Even with a drone, you can’t stay there all the time.

Emily Haws: At a certain point, it does need to come back and recharge.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We’re building wind-turbine, clean-energy stations in exactly this place. We agreed to us their protocol and put their measurement devices around the power plant that we’re constructing along the Taiwan Strait, report to the same network, and check and balanced by the distributed ledger.

Audrey Tang: All this is open innovation without any MOU or whatever. People around the world just downloaded their software from Taiwan and build your own air boxes locally with open hardware. They can, of course, build their own analysis center, but by default, it goes back to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: We have a pretty good idea of those voluntary associated air quality, water quality, earthquake prevention, disaster relief, metrological data. We have a website called collectiveintelligence.taiwan.go.tw that does cross-sectoral data collection using, for example, the water quality data and contribution from the Taiwan Water Corporation around the flow and pressure of the water pipes.

Audrey Tang: The machine-learning people came forward and devised their algorithm that allows the people to detect new water leakage points in one tenth of the time, compared to when the old masters and apprentices have to tour around Taiwan and listen to the pipes where there were leakages happening.

Audrey Tang: That’s most boring part of the job. Their life should be spent on creatively devising solutions to deliver better water quality, not hearing and detecting possible leaking points. That is now being automated by AI. New Zealand saw our work around climate change and our water quality.

Audrey Tang: The team that collaborated for three months in what we call Presidential Hackathon to deliver the solution, spent another three months in New Zealand. I think they’re still in Wellington to work with their water company and to solve the water leakage problem, because they now have water shortage because of climate change. It is through this co-creation internationally.

Audrey Tang: Also makes good business sense. The environmental agencies doesn’t have to sign on a state-to-state level. It could be just Taiwan Water Corporation or the civic tech with that local accelerator people. When partnership like that happens, it’s almost magical because both sides trust each other with each other’s data.

Audrey Tang: Then we can develop pretty good business models based on analytics and so on, which then goes back to the fund missions of [inaudible 41:42] and charities that care about the environment in the first place. Here in Taiwan just this November, we passed a law that enables, I think here, it’s called Benefit Corporation or something like that.

Audrey Tang: It enables that purpose-led corporations to declare that their whole purpose is to make something better. That they will reinvest all its earnings to a charity or association that controls the sitting of the board of that corporation. It’s a charity-owned corporation.

Audrey Tang: Infrastructure was not possible before the Company Act changed, but through a multi-stakeholder consultations over the past two years, we agreed that the hybrid model is the best model that Taiwan can put forward to make the charities achieve sustainability economically.

Emily Haws: Are you meeting with Scott Brison at all? I know Canada and Taiwan don’t have diplomatic relations, but I was just wondering, are you planning to meet with him at all or any of his staff?

Audrey Tang: I listened to the minister’s team addressing the FWD50. I think there was another minster who gave a speech of procurement.

Emily Haws: Carla Qualtrough?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in FWD50, but we didn’t have one-on-one conversations.

Emily Haws: What did you think of their speeches?

Audrey Tang: It’s a interesting story of how accessibility first or inclusion first led to procurement. We totally agree with that in Taiwan, but we haven’t heard the message put so strongly like inclusion before transparency, accountability, and participation. Inclusion has to be the first pillar of the four pillars of open government. This is a new sequence for us. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: For us, it’s usually transparency-first, or for some people, participation-first. Inclusivity-first makes a lot of sense, because otherwise, you gradually leave some people behind because of digital gap. It’s only by trusting the people through including them in the procurement process and a co-design process, we can move at the speed of trust.

Audrey Tang: The more trust there is, we move faster together. I really welcome the message of inclusivity from Canada. I’ll bring that back to Taiwan.

Emily Haws: Perfect. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

Audrey Tang: No.

Emily Haws: I think we’ve talked about everything.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine.

Emily Haws: It’s great. I think I am good.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.

Emily Haws: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Indeed.