Interviewer: Thank you so much. Should we start?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Interviewer: The first question. From the...

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to follow your outline. You can ask anything that comes to your mind. We can make it a conversation.

Interviewer: OK. The first question. From tech people, what led you to support government? What inspired you about this view?

Audrey Tang: Well I don’t "support" the government... I work "with" the government, I don’t work "for" the government.

Audrey Tang: I am between the government and the movement. I’m like the middle point, the Lagrange point, that translates the language of government administration into the language of social movement, and then translate the language of social movement into the language of public administration.

Audrey Tang: The reason why I want to do this is that previously, people would apply pressure to different ministries like the minister of economy here and minister of environment here, for example, or the minister of finance, and the minister of social welfare. There’s tension like this.

Audrey Tang: The problem, of course, is two fold. The first is that the government cannot be the only organizer anymore. Now with the Internet, if you have a hashtag, tens of thousands of people can organize around that forum or around that hashtag, like #MeToo. We don’t need ministers to organize people anymore. People can organize themselves.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is there’s too many new things, like distributed ledger, and machine learning, and things like that. We cannot have one ministry for each emerging social or technical issue. This old model of governance is broken. That is why we are working toward a new way of governance. We call it collaborative governance.

Audrey Tang: This is how the Internet has always worked for the past 40 years or more. People with different positions -- we call them stakeholders -- different ideas, but we have some common values. We all want the world to be better. Like the Sustainable Development Goals, we want the environment to be better, the society to be better, and the economy to be better.

Audrey Tang: It’s just people have different opinions, but it’s all OK, because if we create a space and ask, "What are our common values despite our different positions? Given our common values, can we innovate to make things good for everybody, not just for one side or the other?" then it becomes what we call social innovation.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that there’s new ways of doing things that makes everybody better, not just one or two people. My way of working is to create a space as you can see here, the Social Innovation Lab, that we can bring people of different values, like AI, and all the different technologies, and bring them into a place where it’s possible to create new ideas that makes everything better.

Audrey Tang: I’m not supporting the government. I’m supporting this collaborative governance structure. This is the governance system, not the government.

Interviewer: What is the future of democracy on your mind?

Audrey Tang: The future of democracy is in a culture of listening. The previous generation of technology -- radio and television -- let one person speak to one million people. Television, one actor, one politician can talk to 10 million people, but they have no way to listen to a million people.

Audrey Tang: Now with the Internet, we can listen to a million people for the first time. That creates another problem, because if you have one million people talking, the one that has the most time, that creates the more controversy, more polarization, you will dominate the discourse, as we see on social media, for example.

Audrey Tang: Our work in our future of democracy is to create a space that let people check with each other for facts, evidence, like open data, but not just open government data, but also citizen science data.

Audrey Tang: Using data, we establish the facts. Around the facts, we can listen to each other, what you feel about this fact. You can feel happy. I can feel angry. It’s all OK. There is no right or wrong about feelings. Only then do we move to ideas.

Audrey Tang: On the social web, people post a lot of ideas, but almost nobody say what are the feelings and effect that leads to those ideas. You see a lot of ideas becoming ideology, in the sense that they cannot talk to each other. If we check the facts and the feelings fact, then the best ideas are the ones that address the most people’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: We create spaces like Pol.is, which is a way for one person to look at the feeling of other people. They can agree. They can disagree. As they do, they move among the people who are thinking like them, but it has two properties.

Audrey Tang: First, there is no reply button, so you cannot attack other people. You can’t post picket pictures or something like that. You can only propose something for other people to resonate.

Audrey Tang: The second is that it lets you see that it’s all your friends. It’s not some nameless enemies on the other side, so people will still compete, but they compete by proposing more and more ideas and feelings that resonates with people.

Audrey Tang: If you look at only mainstream media or social media, sometime, we get ideas. Those five divisive statements are all there is, because it’s sensational, creates advertisement value, but actually, people have far more in common with each other.

Audrey Tang: The future of democracy is a democracy of feeling and a democracy of listening, so that people can discover we actually have much more in common in terms of value compared to what the media will lead us to believe, the divisive statements.

Interviewer: What will technology turn from government to be more transparency?

Audrey Tang: There is a lot of technology that we use. I am a radically transparent minister. When I talk about radical transparency, I use for example, this technology called Say It. Say It is a civic technology that says after I become the digital minister two years ago, in those two years, I talked with 3,000 people.

Audrey Tang: We spoke together 158,000 sentences, speeches, in more than 700 meetings. Every single meeting that I am a chair of -- every single meeting with journalists, with lobbyists, with media, everything -- is actually published in full. It is not just the summary. It is what everybody says.

Audrey Tang: Every word I spoke as the digital minister in a chair position or to talk with journalists like you or with lobbyists is captured in the public web, and in fact, on the GitHub, where we relinquish the copyright. Anyone can use it for their purpose. It creates three effects.

Audrey Tang: The first one is that it becomes a social object. Every speech has its own website address. People get to discuss the why of policy making.

Audrey Tang: Previously, you only get communication from the government after the policy is set, so you only get the what and the how. Now, we can talk about the why of policy making, is the first effect.

Audrey Tang: The second effect of radical transparency is that the career public servants, that is to say people who are professional public servants, they get the credit. Previously, before we make this kind of radical transparency, if something works really good, it’s always the minister take the credit. If things break, if things don’t work, the minister always complain the public servant.

Audrey Tang: If you are a public servant, it’s a pretty bad deal for you. If you innovate and it breaks, it’s your fault, but if it works, it’s the minister’s credit.

Audrey Tang: With radical transparency, it’s the other way around, because people can see who proposed which idea. They can see actually, the public service is very professional. They all have their names on it. The journalists can actually know that the public servants are professional, and the citizens can actually see which public servants actually come up with the idea that addressed their problems.

Audrey Tang: Even if those ideas didn’t make it at the end of the policy making, the civil society, the social sector, and the private sector entrepreneurs, they can take those ideas and make it happen using social entrepreneurship and other ways of regional cultivation.

Audrey Tang: People still respect the public service for proposing those ideas in the first time. It’s their only win position. If it doesn’t work, because I’m the only minister in the world at the moment doing radical transparency, it’s always my fault. If there is any risk, they can always blame Audrey.

Audrey Tang: In this sense, innovation in the public become really easy, because I take all the risk and they get all the credit. This is very different from the previous way.

Interviewer: Talking about AI, how AI can help reaching the sustainable development goals?

Audrey Tang: Yes. When we talk about AI, we think augmented intelligence or assistive intelligence. That is to say, it helps us to make things that are routine, that are trivial, that people don’t want to repeat working.

Audrey Tang: For example, sorting through hundreds of thousands of input is very, very tedious. No matter who do the sorting, it’s going to be the same result anyway. If you have a way for AI to power this listening conversation, then a hundred people, a thousand people can listen to one another, because the facilitation is in AI. The more people join, the better the quality.

Audrey Tang: If we use human as the main convener to relay those ideas and options, then the more people join, the more heavy the burden will be put on the public service. The public service cannot accommodate more than, say, 1,000 people talking together.

Audrey Tang: Using AI to power conversation, we can scale the idea of listening so that we can scale to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands people talking together. People can still listen to each other’s main points. This is how we are using AI to power our public service consultation. The technology is called Pol.is.

Interviewer: Do you have any country where you are learning from, in your mind, about the GovTech?

Audrey Tang: We learn a lot of this from many other, not country, but municipal governments. Taiwan, from Taipei, the north, to Kaohsiung, the south is just an hour and half by high speed rails. Geographically, we are small. We’re like a larger municipality, but population wise, we are 23 million people. It’s a lot of people.

Audrey Tang: We have people working in very different sectors. In Taiwan, we have five million people already using our GovTech e participation platform. It’s one quarter of the population already. We’re seeing that number increase over time.

Audrey Tang: First, I would like to say we thank, for example, the city of Reykjavik in Iceland for contributing their way of this kind of no reply button conversation. We thank the city of Madrid for developing the system for participatory budgeting together. We thank the city of Barcelona for introducing a way to decentralize decision making.

Audrey Tang: We are also working with the city of New York, the city of Toronto, and so on, and also the city of Wellington. There is this municipal network that all talk about municipal issues using technologies.

Audrey Tang: Innovation is very easy to happen in a municipality, because people have very similar life experience. If you have a very large country, even different time zones, then it’s very difficult for people to share their life experience. Most of the innovation happen in a municipal level.

Interviewer: The last question. What is the advise would you give to young generation?

Audrey Tang: The younger generation are digital natives, meaning that they are born with the Internet and the culture of sharing and open innovation. I am a digital migrant. I discovered the Internet only when I was 12 years old. I’m a immigrant. I migrated to the Internet when I was 12 years old.

Audrey Tang: Before, the original education, I still used pencil, and paper, and things like that. For digital natives, open is by default. No matter what people cares about, people know that people who care about the same thing around the world is a community.

Audrey Tang: For people who are not digital native, this is a very remote concept. People only form community with people who live next to them, their neighbors. These two kind of community building, it’s very different culture, but both are very important.

Audrey Tang: If you are a digital native, I would suggest you to also talk to your neighbors who are living in your vicinity, who carry their memory about their culture in that vicinity. In that way, you can also introduce the digital community to your local community and let them know their culture has something to share with other culture as well. [laughter]

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have indigenous people, for example, in Taitung or in Hualien. These are the same people, 4,000 years ago, traveled through the sea, all the way through the islands, all the way into New Zealand, to the Māori culture, or to Madagascar, or to the Polynesians, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Using the Internet, we can connect all these people together again, just like they connected through the stars, and navigation, a few thousand years ago.

Audrey Tang: The Internet becomes like a new ground for them to reconnect together in terms of language and culture, but first, you have to go and live with neighbors, and build your relationship, before you can introduce them to people who are just like them, who are actually their friends and families 1,000 years ago.

Audrey Tang: They have to build a trust with you first before you can introduce your elders to the elders to other communities.

Interviewer: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.