Chinasa Chukwu: My name’s Chinasa. I’m the co-founder and art director of Postscript. Postscript is a cultural anthology that’s focused on exploring the complexities of modern women of culture.

Chinasa Chukwu: What that essentially means is, we share stories from different parts of the globe from contemporary women in different industries that we find really inspiring. Predominantly, those are women in either the creative industries or the cultural industries, or women of note, changing the societal landscape – of which you are one, which is why we wanted to interview you.

Chinasa Chukwu: I have read some of your interviews. I’ve seen that some of them are quite focused on the technology and technical aspects of your work. We’re going to take a slightly more holistic approach to it, so your journey to where you are, and then how you found implementing new policies and particularly your work with digital transparency and social innovation. Is that OK? Do you have any questions?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I just posted you a link by Dumbo Feather magazine and that is one of the more personal ones, again, because we make a transcript and/or record everything. Therefore, the transcript is also in the public domain and you are free to use any of the material there.

Chinasa Chukwu: OK, thank you so much. That’s so helpful. Oh, nice, OK. All right. We’ll just start with more of a get to know you section. Going back to leaving high school, what was it in particular about the digital space? I know you left as quite a young teenager. What was it about the digital space that you saw that made you feel so strongly about it that you wanted to leave high school to focus on being yourself?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I encountered this website called Archive.org and that’s ARXIV, and it’s a preprint website meaning that people who post their journal papers to the peer review. Before it gets published, they post it to their Internet for people to discuss. Because I was doing a science fair project when I was 14 working on nowadays, it would be called artificial intelligence and natural language processing so I had to consult a lot of those preprint papers.

Audrey Tang: Now, I remember distinctly telling my principal at the time that instead of going through the university, college, post-doc, and so on, I actually wrote emails to the leading researchers of that field asking them questions, asking for clarifications and so on, and they all replied very kindly.

Audrey Tang: Now they didn’t know that I was 14 years old, they didn’t know that my English was not that good at all. It took me ages to compose that email and so on to them and just a fellow researcher. Because of this, a landscape opens before me instead of going through the high institutional process to take 10 years or more to get into their lab. I feel that I am in their lab already and we’re actually doing productive work together.

Audrey Tang: I remember my principal hearing that story and thought about it for a minute and said, “OK, from tomorrow on you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I’ll cover for you.” This is actually very happy story in that instill in me a certain optimism to the flexibility of bureaucracy.

Chinasa Chukwu: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. That was actually my next question, was what it that also convinced your teachers to allow you to go and do this, but you just explained that. Carrying on from that, do you think that in any way, just moving things forward a bit, do you think that kind of experience you had was part of the inspiration for focusing so strongly on transparency, and having this really open, collaborative process with citizens and within the digital space?

Audrey Tang: Certainly, without which I wouldn’t have the education. I remember reading gothic classics from the Gutenberg Project, and the Gutenberg Project, as you may know, digitizes everything, all the classics that’s published before the first World War at the time, because they have fallen out of copyright.

Audrey Tang: After that copyright gets extended quite a few times, and we only got a new release of material only in the past couple years. During my kind of self-education, I read a lot of classics but they were all written before the first World War, because everything else is still copyrighted.

Audrey Tang: I think that also instilled in me a certain optimism, because I haven’t read the things that written after World War, which tend to be more dystopic and pessimistic. But in any case, what I am getting into, is that without this volunteer social sector, that opens up the classics and at the time there’s no good optical character recognition.

Audrey Tang: People actually have to type them by hand to digitize everything and published it for everybody to peer review and use without these diligent people working in the volunteering and social sectors, it wouldn’t be even possible for me to have a liberal arts education by my own on the Internet, it was like my friends to have something to discuss.

Audrey Tang: Of course, afterwards, there’s Wikipedia, the Wiki Sources, and the whole open access movement, so nowadays the children don’t have to rely on Gutenberg Project alone, but the time for me was really transformational.

Chinasa Chukwu: That’s amazing, thank you. Going back a little bit more now, how did you get involved in hacking?

Audrey Tang: I started programming when I was eight years old, and I started without a program, machine, that is to see I learned programming as mathematics. I just had some programming books on the bookshelf, I think from my uncles, and I just started reading it.

Audrey Tang: I was pretty good at mathematics, but I really isn’t that good at calculation, it’s never been my forte, so I learned about this machine that can automate all the calculations, but leaving the mathematic, the creative part of mathematics to human beings.

Audrey Tang: We didn’t have computers at the time, so I just took A4 paper and split it in half, and drew on the button half a keyboard, a QWERTY keyboard, and started mock typing it and writing the computer’s responses and so on.

Audrey Tang: Of course, after a couple month my parents kind of gave in and bought me a personal computer. I always remember programming without computer. It kind of what we’re saying today is called computational thinking.

Audrey Tang: You can learn computational thinking without a computer, just like you can design thinking without being a professional designer. That is just a kind of habit of the mind, so that’s how I learned program when I was eight years old, that was 1989.

Chinasa Chukwu: So considering that you didn’t finish high school, and you taught yourself all these processes, how did you get your first job in Silicon Valley? What was that process like?

Audrey Tang: I participated in the free software movement really early on. I happened to be visiting Silicon Valley when the open source movement began. Open source is kind of a rebranding of the free software movement.

Audrey Tang: When I was in Taiwan, I’m already kind of maintainer of many Perl, the computer language of the early Web, many Perl applications and I also contributed a local Perl community on Usenet which is a forum system. In any case, with that experience, I’ve always felt at home at these voluntary communities.

Audrey Tang: When I was visiting Silicon Valley in ‘90, I think it was ‘98 or something, there was this new movement to convince large corporations like Netscape to open up its source code. That would later on become Firefox.

Audrey Tang: To open up its source code, and not for altruistic purposes, but rather for commercial purposes, because it makes it easier to maintain. It makes it easier to look at their cybersecurity profile and have volunteer, essentially users were also abusers, to help making things better, improve on things.

Audrey Tang: There was this whole movement of pushing free software for economic not a ethical or social perspective. That’s how I got involved in Silicon Valley, just by talking with my free software friends that they were online, but at the same time, they were beginning to get jobs from traditional commercial companies.

Audrey Tang: I remember first doing just consultancy work, just fixing up documentations, just patching up their issues and one of my first work is to provide Traditional Chinese, to Simplified Chinese translation software.

Audrey Tang: That was kind of my domain knowledge anyway, I work in search engine in my first start-up in ‘95, so I just contributed whatever I learned at the time into the CPAN, which is a comprehensive Perl archive network.

Audrey Tang: I guess job just found me, because I published over a hundred reusable software components on CPAN, and I got thank you emails from the likes of BBC, or from the likes of the Human Genome Project, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They are all part of this Perl community anyway, so when they want some contractual work, some consultancy work, or internationalization work like bringing their product to a Chinese-speaking community, they will contract my company to do so.

Chinasa Chukwu: Do you feel like, considering you were involved in this earlier movement to get commercial companies to create more open source, or make their software open source, and have it be something now a little bit more collaborative, do think that in any way has influenced your current at this instant? Has it helped? Has it made a difference in the way that you liaise between the government and the people?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. When I was working with the Silicon Valley companies, I’m not really working for them, right, at exactly the same point it’s like as you said a liaison or as I prefer to call it a branch point between the two bodies, between the movement and the government currently.

Audrey Tang: We had very different challenges alongside the different 20 years or more of open source movement. First, is just to get the idea out, the advocacy work. Very soon, when we do have some good examples such as Red Hat Linux, and the Mozilla browser, which later on become Firefox and so on, to convince the internal bureaucracy of large companies such as Microsoft to make them kind of drop their fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Audrey Tang: Even when I worked with Apple, it was around the time where Apple seriously considered developing a new programming language called Swift in the open. It means not only opening the software, but also opening the governance, meaning that it really let people participate where the language is going, even if you’re not running on Apple hardware.

Audrey Tang: Which at that time, is actually maybe even harder than advocacy in Microsoft, because it really wasn’t in Apple’s DNA at the time. Eventually, the people in the open source movement succeeded on both fronts.

Audrey Tang: Swift is now open governance and used on lots of things beyond the Apple ecosystem, and Microsoft now runs GitHub, of all things. I think the success stories gave us a wide-range of playbook to interact with different levels in the bureaucracy to convince them of the benefits of openness based on their own flow of work, not some outside/in, top/down command relationship.

Chinasa Chukwu: Now to go a little bit more to get even more personal, I suppose. Has being, obviously you’re the first transgender minister in the world.

Audrey Tang: The first openly transgender minister. Everybody may be transgender too.

Chinasa Chukwu: That’s true, the first openly transgender minister and the world’s first digital minister. Have you found that that’s affected your work in any way, whether that be your approach to the work, or working with people? Has that made a difference at all?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. I think having gone through two puberties, really helped the communication, because my mind has various different lived-in experiences that corresponds to people’s different stages in their adolescence, so it means that my range of understanding just the resolution meaning that the finer detail of emotions, of following each other’s emotional state, empathy, right?

Audrey Tang: Is greatly extended because we happen to share somewhat similar living experiences, whether your gender, or whether your preferred gender expression, or your gender identity, and so on. Also, even more importantly, it gave me a perspective of intersectionality. Meaning that although I do have my privileged positions, I also have my vulnerable lived-in experiences.

Audrey Tang: That is true for other advocates that I met, they may be suffering from some social injustice which I can relate with my experience of vulnerability of discriminated against, of transphobia, and things like that, but also can share how I managed to label those internal states and make them into empowering experiences that can be turned into not just personal anger, but social outrage that unifies people rather than divides people.

Audrey Tang: It definitely helps to bring this experience to fellow advocates no matter which injustice they’re advocating against.

Chinasa Chukwu: Then do you feel like, again, by being in this position, do you feel like there’s any added pressure, because you have to maybe represent anybody that is coming from that kind of vulnerable position as well? Would you feel like that pressure doesn’t exist?

Audrey Tang: It’s definitely true that Taiwan is especially inclusive and tolerant. We are, after all, the first Asian country that has marriage equality. This is not a coincidence, because we’ve been for the past 12 years, doing what we call gender impact assessment to every single policy and every single draft bill that’s 200 policies per year, and 20 or so draft bills per year.

Audrey Tang: Every public servant is required to fill in those gender impact assessment to every single thing that they do, even unrelated to gender, and have the CSO, the Civil Society leaders independently to review them. Our gender equality committee is designed so they have exactly one more seat than the government ministers. So maybe 16 ministers and 17 CSO experts.

Audrey Tang: They review each and every thing that they write. They correct the misconceptions, and they make new measurements and we put them into the gender statistics dashboard, whenever a new policy happens.

Audrey Tang: The indicators we watch is very comprehensive, and then we make series of changes based on the raw numbers, so that we can know that with each policy introduced are we empowering women, are we empowering people in disadvantaged positions, or are we contributing to patriarchy or some other kinds of systemic discrimination, and we know it through evidence not just through imagination of the ministers.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, we would be lost if not for the agenda dashboard, but now with the gender dashboard, and the entire public service doing that for 12 years when the constitutional ruling and the referendum came in, we immediately settled on the way to legalize marriage equality.

Audrey Tang: I think although I may be seen as advocating for next step of gender mainstreaming of what I call post-gender, that it’s built on a feminist movement and on the gender mainstreaming efforts. I have this whole community that is mainstream in the public servants to support me. It’s not like I’m in the minority, literally every public servant in the past 12 years supports my mission.

Chinasa Chukwu: Coming from that background that is, as you’re saying, working in that space that is more inclusive and hopefully supportive of kind of the end goal. Could you explain, because I read in one of your interviews that define yourself as a conservative anarchist.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Chinasa Chukwu: Those are two terms that I think would be dichotomous. Could you go into a little bit more detail about that?

Audrey Tang: To be a conservative is to respect a tradition. To understand that there are ways that people have honored their ancestors’ ways of doing things for hundreds, or even thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, this is very important, because while the west of Taiwan is more Western, the east of Taiwan is the indigenous nations.

Audrey Tang: We have more than 15 indigenous nations, and they share the same culture with the entire Polynesian population. The whole Australian nation culture originated from Taiwan, and the culture extends all the way to New Zealand. We have in our New Zealand economic agreement, the NZTech, a separate track for diplomacy between the Maori people and our indigenous people.

Audrey Tang: If I’m not a conservative, in the sense of conserving the tens of thousands of years of western, of our indigenous traditions, it’s very easy to introduce new digital policies that essentially forces everybody to just learn the very resourceful languages and cultures. It will contribute to the decimation of their culture.

Audrey Tang: Because I’m a conservative, I help the ministries of culture, of education, and so on, to make sure that whether you’re a ethnical Han or some other ethnicity, if you identify with any of the indigenous cultures and languages, you are actually capable of joining both physically and virtually, and to learn mathematics, learn physics, learn anything using the indigenous culture, not just their language.

Audrey Tang: By being a conservative…I just named that. I think an intergenerational solidarity is very important. The way that their ancestors have always do things should be respected, and this extends to other ethnicities and cultures that’s on the Taiwan Island.

Chinasa Chukwu: Yes. That definitely makes sense. I completely understand. Now shifting to radical transparency, just having looked at it and seeing the way the process works, it is something that I find particularly inspiring. Obviously, I don’t…not obviously, but I’m not necessarily a tech person, in the sense of writing code or anything like that.

Chinasa Chukwu: I just have a few questions about the way the actual process works. For you, considering that you’re such an advocate for transparency, would you say that there are any, have you found that there are any aspects, that there’s any data that’s off-limits to transparency?

Chinasa Chukwu: Are there any filters that you employ in deciding what should be available for public consumption, or is everything up for grabs?

Audrey Tang: Essentially, state secrets, top secrets and so on, I don’t even know about them. That’s my working condition. I just told the National Security Council, “Don’t tell me anything that’s state secret.” [laughs] My principle is that every meeting that I chair, every meeting with a journalist such as you, or a lobbyist, we are making it open but it’s not live-streamed.

Audrey Tang: We only live stream if you’re live streaming. We only do a video record if you are video recording, which for Skype is mutual anyway. Otherwise, we were just publishing a written transcript. Everybody actually gets 10 days to edit the transcript. For example, if you mentioned your friend’s anecdote, that friend may not actually authorize you to publish their story.

Audrey Tang: We respect other people’s privacy, other people’s trade secrets, confidentiality, and so on, and so everybody can edit their own words. I have encountered a journalist that consider, all the questions that she asked is company property. That transcript only has my answers, and all the questions are redacted, but you can infer the questions.

Audrey Tang: In any case, the limit is very flexible. What we’re doing really is to make transparency the default, and make it extra effort to redact, whereas the old bureaucracy is closed by default, and it takes extra effort to be transparent. That’s what I mean by radical transparency. It means transparency at the root. It doesn’t mean transparency in a violent fashion.

Chinasa Chukwu: Carrying on from that, obviously, part of the efforts of transparency is to have more public and civic engagement, and more civic participation. I know it started out being focused on budget matters, but it has extended further. As it continues to extend, are there any decisions that you think maybe shouldn’t be left to the public?

Chinasa Chukwu: Again, is that a flexible limit, or is that something that you hope in the long term that the public will be involved, in all state decisions?

Audrey Tang: For example, in our referendum law, we spell out things that are not to referendum. For example, you cannot take away indigenous rights by a referendum, because indigenous people is maybe three percent or less of the population. If you put it to referendum, they always lose. The idea is not something like that.

Audrey Tang: We call them indigenous nations. The whole point is that it is a semi diplomatic relationship, truth and reconciliation, and all that. It’s not up for a referendum. It’s good if the indigenous people with their own tribal elders, their own ways of governance and so on, engage in a conversation just between state, a diplomatic relationship that includes both sides as an input.

Audrey Tang: It’s a consultative, at most a partnership relationship. It’s never at deciding as in the ethnic Han, overwhelming the population of indigenous nation, and forcing them to accept something because they are the minority. The democratic principle is very simple. If something is systematically in the minority, as defined by intersectionality principles, that should not be put to popular vote.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very simple idea. Also, in our e-participation, we often just set the agenda. It means that we’re not really going to referendum overnight. What we’re really doing is that to get everybody’s piece of the puzzles, of their take on a wicked problem, and then we share the systemic map.

Audrey Tang: We still leave the implementation to the career public servants, and/or the social sector, and/or the private sector. Everybody can commit to the thing that it’s best for them to do, and hold each other accountable. What we’re not doing is that we’re just counting the headcount and say, Oh, this is the private sector. It doesn’t matter. This is the social sector. It doesn’t matter.”

Audrey Tang: In desire thinking terms, to frame the best question of how might we find common values despite different positions, is more important than the decisional stage. If you’re asking the wrong question, no matter what you put to the referendum, the result will be terrible.

Chinasa Chukwu: Thinking about how this can be carried on, I guess to other countries, other communities, in another society, perhaps that doesn’t have the same group of like-minded people that came together to found g0v, how would you say individuals can push their governments towards more transparency?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s easier if you start with a level of governance that is smaller scale. If you’re just deciding for a local co-op of 200 people, that will be easy because everybody knows everybody, and you already shared the common values. If you start with a township of maybe 20,000 people, many of these tools we use scales very easily to that level.

Audrey Tang: Basically, I think Taiwan is just a larger municipality, geographically speaking. From the north most to the south most through high-speed rail, it’s just one and a half hours. We may have 23 million people, but it’s a really small place, and highest popular density, I think, or second highest.

Audrey Tang: In any case, the point is that if people share similar lived in experiences, you can always start there. In your city council, in your precinct, or even without the public sector, you can just run it in your co-op. This methodology works best if people don’t have to focus on very different lived in experiences, if people already share more or less the same concerns.

Audrey Tang: They’re just squabbling on the few ideologies that masks the common concerns. If it’s a federation that spends multiple time zones, just getting everybody’s common values would take a lot of time.

Chinasa Chukwu: I think what I’m getting from this, is that you approach policymaking very much from an empathy base, as well as from looking at commonalities. What would you say? I noticed that you added, or that it was added as part of the g0v platform, an emotion ratings added as part of the process. Can you explain to me why you thought that was important?

Audrey Tang: In the old policymaking process, usually people share the facts, public information, open government data and open data from other sectors, and then people will hold some brainstorm meetings to get ideas on how to improve gender dashboard, to propose a series of change.

Audrey Tang: Finally, people would ratify it into decisions that people act collectively. What’s missing here, is that there is no stage for feelings. What we have introduced, and is not originated from Taiwan, it’s invented in Canada, part of the focus conversation method in 2005, is that after objective stage but before the interpretative stage, the ideation stage, they added a stage called reflective space.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, on the same fact, you may feel anxious, I may feel happy. There’s no right or wrong about feelings. If people give ourselves a few weeks, three weeks, four weeks to check each other’s feelings, it actually makes it much easier to brainstorm the ideas.

Audrey Tang: The ideation, always the problem is how do we rank ideas? What ideas are better than others? If two of them are equally feasible but addresses different aspects and they’re mutually exclusive in some way, how do we arbitrate between the ideas? Usually, the criteria is arbitrary.

Audrey Tang: If now we have a stage dedicated to feelings and there’s no right or wrong, first of all, a polity is made by letting people understand, actually, most of the people feel the same about the same thing most of the time. It rebuilds the polity. The second thing is that we can direct ideas. The best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: That is an important insight in saying, if we let people share not only their feelings but also reflect on each other’s feelings, we always get better criteria to qualitatively ranked ideas. As a result, we may delay the policymaking for most ourselves, so that we recover this time cost by making people feel better.

Audrey Tang: Everybody feels that they win, or they can live with it, rather than if you just go straight to the referendum, where half of the people will feel that they have lost.

Chinasa Chukwu: I know a little bit about that right now. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m not mentioning any particular country. [smiles]

Chinasa Chukwu: While expanding on how the process works, because obviously, it’s predominantly an online process, how do you know that the people participating in it are representative of the larger society’s views? Some people are naturally more adept at being online.

Chinasa Chukwu: Some people even going beyond that. Some people feel a lot more native online. They feel a lot more comfortable and honest online. For the people that don’t engage as much online, what’s the balance point between those two representations?

Audrey Tang: First of all, what we’re making through our online technology is not we use them to replace face to face meetings. We never do that. For us, online technology is a way to amplify and to connect face-to-face meetings. It always starts with face-to-face meetings. All the collective feeling checking is actually done by face-to-face meetings.

Audrey Tang: We tour around Taiwan to bring technology to people. We’re not asking people to come to technology. You can think of our online part as what’s taking place between two face-to-face meetings. In a face-to-face meeting, we check each other’s facts. We make a handbook of the facts we have proposed.

Audrey Tang: We already know that sometime, down the future, like two months from now, we would have an ideation meeting, where, again, it’s face-to-face. We want everybody to know about these facts, so we use online platforms to broadcast it. When we’re broadcasting this, what we’re, essentially, asking is not representation. What we’re asking, a re-presentation of what people feel about these issues.

Audrey Tang: They may do this through, as you said, online voting, application, or a website, or whatever, but they can equally do so by holding their local town hall meetings and by doing any of those face-to-face conversations as long as they’re live-streamed or archived online.

Audrey Tang: This is important because, in Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of Jade Mountain, which is almost 4,000km high, we have 10Mbps broadband. Anywhere in Taiwan, if you don’t have 10Mbps, it’s my fault. You can talk to me.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, no matter where you’re holding this face-to-face conversation, it only takes one click using your mobile phone to make it also online. Once you make it also online, the technology kicks in. It can be summarized, put into a mind map, put into a transcript, and so on, ensuring that this conversation not only includes remote participants but is, in fact, archived to become the agenda for the next meeting.

Audrey Tang: We never ask people to come exclusively to the digital. Digital is just a way to determine the agenda and contribute more facts in synchronicity for the next face-to-face meeting.

Chinasa Chukwu: Considering you have this checks and balances process, I know that you travel every two weeks, do you ever find that the kind of feedback that you get is different when you do the face-to-face to what you get online or do they tend to have synchronicity?

Audrey Tang: 10Mbps is really important because 10Mbps enables 1080p. That is just a high definition video. High definition video means that, just as you are now looking at me, I’m looking at you, we can look at each other’s micro-expressions. Meaning that if you look lost or your attention is drifting and so on, I would know intuitively and follow your smile really quickly.

Audrey Tang: If all we have is less than 10Mbps, that is to say, that we only have 480p or 320p, then that means that we are pixelated and none of the micro-expressions are visible. What the brain does if you haven’t met someone and you already know that they are speaking about a topic but you cannot read their micro-expressions, the brain produces a gestalt, meaning that we fill in the details using our imagination just as in your dreams.

Audrey Tang: In our dreams, when we fill those in, it’s almost always wrong because those are internal psychological projections of ourselves. If we see each other as friends, I would project friendly gestures even if you are not doing any friendly gestures and vice versa. That actually hurts trust. It makes trust impossible because, then, all the messages you get are double messages.

Audrey Tang: You would hear people say something but you cannot read their emotions and your brain feels something that is contrary to the thing that they’re talking about because of psychological projections. It actually decimates trust.

Audrey Tang: What we have found is the audio quality is very important. Video, also important. If we have these two figured out, we can connect to even five different municipalities. In my tour, right now, I basically always bring with me people in Taipei, in Taichung, in Taoyuan, in Kaohsiung, in Yuanlin, and sometimes, in Taitung as well.

Audrey Tang: All these different places, we will start by making a round of self-introduction. If the sound or the video doesn’t work, we just drop the site because dropping the site and having people following the transcript afterward is better than people waiting for a lagging, pixelating, feels really bad projection of ourselves.

Audrey Tang: What we have discovered is as long as it’s bi-directional high-speed live streaming, then it’s good. In Taiwan, we say [foreign language] . Face-to-face builds 30 percent towards trust and live streaming in high definition maybe builds 20 percent. If it’s not high quality, then it’s negative 20 percent.

Chinasa Chukwu: Carrying on with this then, how far do you see this type of transparency going? Do you imagine a world, one day, where every country has this level of transparency or even a higher level of transparency and all the platforms are linked, so it becomes a mass, global, collaborative process when it comes to policymaking?

Chinasa Chukwu: Is that something you envision? Do you think there’s an endpoint at which, this is now the level of transparency that we’re aiming for and that’s it?

Audrey Tang: Many countries judicial branches already work that way. The judicial branch builds its legitimacy by making the educations, the judgments, the rulings, and so on, free of copyright. In many jurisdictions, lawyers cannot claim copyright on their work exactly because it’s a literature not only about the law itself but of how people perceive the law over time. That is to say the norms around the law.

Audrey Tang: If you get proprietary in charge, everybody – the kind of things that elsewhere, not targeting them – but charging the publication or journals subscriptions, then you don’t really have a society anymore. You have fragmented law practitions.

Audrey Tang: The judicial branch saw really early on, especially in a common law system but also in our continental law system, you really have to be radically transparent, barring, of course, some exceptions such as underage court or whatever. Barring those things, you need to be radically transparent to build the legitimacy of the law.

Audrey Tang: In many countries, the parliament is now following this course. In Taiwan, the national parliament, even during the party negotiations, we publish the entire live stream.

Audrey Tang: In campaign donations, we publish down to every record of campaign donation and various political advertisements, as well, because people are seeing, otherwise, money finds its way into policymaking through campaign donations, through advertisements for politicians, and things like that. It’s unaccountable.

Audrey Tang: Again, for a different purpose, not legitimacy but accountability. We’re seeing around the world, there’s a trend now for the parliamentary, for the legislative branch to adopt radical transparency including beneficial ownership of the council members and so on. I think it’s only a matter of time for the administrative branch to follow suit but the two branches definitely lead the way.

Chinasa Chukwu: In terms of the online participation and civic participation through digital platforms, is that something, as well, that you…Because I think Taiwan is quite unique in that particular aspect.

Chinasa Chukwu: Is that something that you would like to see continue on in other countries and then, become something that’s linked altogether? Is that, again, something that you can all stay quite disparate to each country or you’d like to stay quite disparate?

Audrey Tang: I think we, for the technological layer, I’m not talking about policies and politics, for the technologies, we actually invent very little. The e-petition system design we took from Better Reykjavík. That’s from Iceland.

Audrey Tang: The Pol.is system is designed in Seattle in response to the Occupy movement actually. The participatory budgeting, the budget partner you just mentioned, we took it from council. That’s from Madrid.

Audrey Tang: What I am getting at is that I think Taiwan is unique not in any particular technological contributions but on how we can operate it not on the fringe of the governance apparatus but actually at the core of the governance apparatus.

Audrey Tang: For many different crowd law initiatives, people pick and choose which regulations to go through this process. In Taiwan, it’s all the regulations, no exceptions is up for public commentary for 60 days.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the UK, there’s the Policy Lab, which uses very advanced methodologies of design thinking, ethnography, beta, and so on, to help policymaking. Again, they have a limited throughput of only handling a few cases every year.

Audrey Tang: Our office actually recruited people from Policy Lab UK from IDO actually, and so on, from the top design firms because they’re attracted to PDIS. Not because we have more budget. We probably don’t have more budget than Policy Lab and definitely a fraction of IDO but the social impact we can make is at the core of the policymaking process.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, we have teams in each and every ministry. Not just a few ministries that decide to try a few cases but every single ministry has a team that is crowdsourcing this collaborative policymaking. I think most people join PDIS, join my office, for impact and not for anything else.

Audrey Tang: We would, of course, like to see more buy-in but it really took an occupy of the parliament in Taiwan to create a political atmosphere. I’m not saying that you should occupy your parliament or that people should go to the street to rebel for extinction events, although I do support them in their platforms.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m getting at is there needs to be a corresponding sense of urgency from the career public service. It’s not only for the advocacy. It’s just also for the people who are running the political apparatus to fear that is simply business as usual simply cannot go on given the democratic pressure. If you don’t have that, you don’t usually have that mandate.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s what Indy Johar calls the silent revolution or the boring revolution. I think he calls it the boring revolution, is that just to make public servants understand that it’s actually for their benefit also.

Audrey Tang: Once you have that buy-in, then it becomes possible to do things in Taiwan. That’s why we always aim for the cultural change in the public service. The career public servants, not the ministers. I spent far more time with the career public servants than the ministers.

Chinasa Chukwu: Then, I know another aspect of your work has become battling disinformation. Have you found the current prevalence of disinformation has affected implementing this level of transparency? Has it made any difference or not really?

Audrey Tang: It makes transparency more urgent. If you see a disinformation campaign and you do not transparently address that within an hour, then it’s lost. The memetic coverage of the disinformation would prime the population so that no matter how detailed the response is a week after, it’s simply irrelevant.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, what we’re saying is that within an hour, we’re guaranteed to produce something that’s less than 20 words in title, less than 200 words in this body, and at least two images and all of them will fit a portrait mode on a mobile phone.

Audrey Tang: If we have each ministry capable of producing this in real-time, we are working with the platform providers to make our clarification messages reach more people and faster than the disinformation. Only then, people become vaccinated so that when the disinformation reaches them, they can at least think in a balanced fashion.

Audrey Tang: We’re not saying take-downs. We’re saying once you see the disinformation, you’re already equipped with the literacy to tell it from the sourced inputs from each ministry and from the press. Also, to make investigative journalism easier to make. If an investigative journalist spends most of their time to get a scoop from the administration, then they always lose to the content forums.

Audrey Tang: If we have real-time, ready-to-use narratives, and indeed, transcripts of all the policymaking context, then investigative journalists can actually be faster than the content forums in their initial fact-checking and things like that. I think it really motivates more transparency work within a ministry exactly because there’s an adversary that is resourceful, that is as quick as we are, and is very intentioned in sowing discord.

Chinasa Chukwu: In talking about that, especially, as we said, disinformation has become part of the day-to-day social landscape, why do you think, considering that Taiwan has been able to come up with this kind of process of producing counter-narratives, why do you think or do you have any thoughts on why other countries, perhaps, haven’t implemented this as well?

Chinasa Chukwu: Haven’t started doing that considering that it’s been, I imagine, quite successful based on what you’re saying, in giving people some perspective when they are encountered or when they do encounter disinformation?

Audrey Tang: You said other countries. You didn’t say other liberal democracies.

Audrey Tang: There’s always a faster way out is to give up becoming a liberal democracy. You can always impose draconian take-down rules on the online platforms. You can strategically disable the Internet. You can install firewalls and censorship machines. All of them are actually faster, easier, cheap, compared to the counter-narrative work that we’re producing.

Audrey Tang: The result, of course, is a less informed citizenry, what some jurisdictions consider is a worthwhile trade-off to make. I’m not just talking about the states that are police states or authoritarian states in the beginning. I’m talking about the fellow Indonesian governments that struggle really hard against that impulse and they finally decided that producing counter-narratives is actually more empowering of the citizens.

Audrey Tang: I was just in Thailand and I talked with the Thai people. They’re struggling between the Singaporean model and the Taiwan model because the Singaporean model does have a kind of allure. You can, at the cost of not empowering your general citizenship, easily take down or, at least, correct things and, by the way, also make the opposition party weaker. So, why not? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This philosophical struggle, we see it in every other nearby jurisdiction in the Indo-Pacific. My mission is just to say that the Taiwan model is not only cheaper amortized but also cheaper up-front. It actually takes less energy if you can work with the social sector, who are very much willing to volunteer the fact-checking work and the work spreading the clarifications and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think many governments were unable to do that perhaps because they have less of a mutual trust relationship with the social sector or perhaps, they were wary of empowering the social sector too much. These, too, I think, are the main psychological fear, uncertainty, and doubt but based on my experience working with our nearby jurisdictions, they do come around, which is why I’m optimistic.

Chinasa Chukwu: I’m just going back a little bit to thinking about transparency and citizen participation. As a proponent of radical transparency, do you have any thoughts on China’s social credit system? Do you think this is a form of radical transparency or is it something else?

Audrey Tang: What we’re doing is making the state radically transparent to the citizens. What they’re doing is making the citizens radically transparent to the state, so I guess they’re both transparency [laughs] but working in completely opposite directions, almost like mirror images of each other, that’s what I would say.

Chinasa Chukwu: I’m now talking about going from being with the Sunflower movement, essentially on the opposite side of the government. How has it been to go from being “anti-establishment” to, now, working hand-in-hand with the establishment? What has that process been like?

Audrey Tang: Buckminster Fuller said it best, “Instead of fighting against an old system, make a new one that makes the old one obsolete.” That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m making a new space for experiments on alternative governance systems that may or may not work.

Audrey Tang: When they do work, like the e-participation platforms, the collaborative meetings, and so on, it takes root in the public service itself, so it doesn’t take me personally to run it. People genuinely think that if you invite more stakeholders earlier in the stage, it actually produces higher quality output.

Audrey Tang: People generally see that if you use AI to help people to look at each other’s feelings and produce common understanding, it actually results in a much better process than if you have to file the incoming mails by hunt and overwhelm the public service and so on.

Audrey Tang: For them, it’s risk reduction. For them, it’s also improving their efficiency so they can actually get home earlier and spend more time with family. Also, they get due credit. We don’t always introduce things that improve on all three fronts but we introduce things that improve on one of the fronts without sacrificing the other two, meaning that it’s Pareto improvement.

Audrey Tang: Just by rolling up Pareto improvements that are genuinely new and help the public service, they are now seeing that these new way of working does make the old way obsolete. In a sense, I’m not changing the system. I’m just making new governance possibilities that people everywhere around the world, including the Taiwan public service work.

Chinasa Chukwu: On the g0v website, I noticed that it describes itself as a “liquid democracy.”

Audrey Tang: Correct.

Chinasa Chukwu: I find this kind of precept really encouraging. I do have a question about how you hold each other to account without a hierarchy. Not necessary in terms of your overarching aim, but more even for the more pedestrian things like project deadlines. How does that work, when there isn’t anyone necessarily that’s above anybody else, checking in?

Audrey Tang: Right, so the freestyle of our movement introduced this important idea called forking. Forking means that you have a project and somebody else like your project but don’t like the direction it’s going. They can take whatever you have on your project and make it to grow in a different direction without getting your permission.

Audrey Tang: That’s what the free software is about. Free software means the freedom. First, that you can use it in the way not anticipated by its creator and second, that you can…Based on the way you want to use it, you can just look at how it’s done to improve the work.

Audrey Tang: Finally, you can share the work that you have improved with other people and when you reach the freedom three, that is actually forking meaning that it’s now growing in a different direction.

Audrey Tang: A lot of innovations in the free software and the open source movement is to make sure that even if you forked a project, it can be merged back into what we call the main line or the trunk if people later on see that this off-shot actually works better.

Chinasa Chukwu: Right.

Audrey Tang: Forking and merging used to be a very expensive operation, but because of improvements in the theoretical understanding of the so-called conflict-free replication of data, you can now use like GitHub to provide what we call poor requests, which essentially is a small fork with the intention to be merged.

Audrey Tang: This is not just for software development. We’re seeing it in the development of foundation of mathematics, of text of Wikipedia, of journalism actually. We’re seeing a new generation of journalists that kind of work with groups like Bellingcat and so on to crowdsource the fact-checking part, crowdsource the information producing part, and so on.

Audrey Tang: All with the promise of if you don’t like the direction I’m going, you’re free to take this material and make your own interpretation and indeed, your own journalistic output.

Audrey Tang: G0v is based on the idea that each project can potentially be forked into many projects. If you want to impose a deadline, you take whatever work is already there, impost a deadline, and see if you can recruit people to join your vision. That’s how it works. It’s like a rhizome or something.

Chinasa Chukwu: Then, you’ve spoken about finding a common cause and pushing forward with that beyond approaching it from different perspectives as it applies to policy review. How easy or how difficult have you found this to be in practice?

Audrey Tang: It’s always easy. Instead of aiming for a consensus, you’re aiming for something that people can live with. The interesting thing is that in Mandarin, we say [Mandarin] , which can be described as a very fine consensus or a very rough consensus that simply we agree to disagree or that we will live it.

Audrey Tang: Because [Mandarin] literally only means common understanding so how fine or rough is this common understanding? It’s something we can work on over time. The important thing simply is to not leave the table.

Audrey Tang: If we keep meeting, then at some point, we will reach something that we at least agree to disagree, something that at least both agree is factual. That’s the foundation of conversation.

Audrey Tang: We are not even saying that what we’re doing is deliberative. We’re far from that stage. What we’re saying is that we’re just checking the common understanding in the collaboration. It’s easy to get to that point, but that becomes the seed at which to grow the deliberation potential.

Chinasa Chukwu: Then, speaking a little bit about social innovation, which is social benefits and business profits coming together, you’ve said that you’ve given preferential treatment to companies that do offer social benefits.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Chinasa Chukwu: How has this worked with the government? Have they been particularly receptive to it or has it been more of a kind of push and pull process?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, many of the publicly listed companies have already embraced I think more than any nearby jurisdictions the global reporting standard on sustainability. For the publicly listed companies this is a no-brainer, so to speak, because if they want to get investment from say the pension fund, or whatever, they have to plan a long-term sustainable report. Sustainability is built in to many publicly listed companies.

Audrey Tang: My main work is just to make the non-public companies that are maybe just 5 people or 50 people in their employees, to also convince themselves to declare as part of their company charter what they’re trying to do that can help the society, and the environment, and the wider business community not just their own proprietary business. Open source would actually fit into that category.

Audrey Tang: In the Western world this is sometimes called not social entrepreneurship, and rightly so it’s called something like a benefit corporation, a B-Corp, or a B-Lab. As you declare your scorecard, you may look actually really bad, but you’re still a B-Corp because you’re willing to disclose how bad you’re are in terms of environmental and social contributions and the negative externalities.

Audrey Tang: The honesty in reporting, or simply accountability, is what we’re aiming at, so because of this, we actually get a lot of buy-in simply because people now see that they don’t have to get to zero waste, zero carbon, zero plastic overnight, it’s simply impossible for many companies.

Audrey Tang: If they want to get this “preferential treatment,” all they have to do is declare how bad they are at the moment, and what kind of annual efforts they’re making to integrate into the circular supply chain.

Audrey Tang: They collectively become better year over year. Again, we just use these standard reporting on the bare minimum that people can live with. People are free to make higher standards that are a subset of our sustainability reporting. It doesn’t exclude anyone, the corporations can register but also can do charities, the foundations, the co-ops, the credit unions, why not?

Audrey Tang: Universities, and because it’s all inclusive, I think we don’t meet with much resistance because it’s just a bare minimum of being honest and accountable for what you’re doing to the sustainability of society and environment.

Chinasa Chukwu: Then I’m going to ask some quick-fire questions, but I just wanted to ask, obviously you came in with Jaclyn Tsai, and she came with the more kind of progressive government. How do you think future governments will engage with your office, and your systems policymaking? Is that something you think about with future governments or no?

Audrey Tang: Minister Jaclyn Tsai is actually the previous cabinet, I was her understudy and reverse mentor. That was in 2015, actually late 2014. This government is, again, Doctor Tsai Ing-Wen.

Audrey Tang: Again, Doctor Tsai, so Doctor Tsai’s government I think succeeded in making not only selected digital economy issues subject to public nationwide debate, but not shying away from debating the most difficult part.

Audrey Tang: Like how to transition our energy profile from a linear carbon outputting energy profile to a renewable one, or how do transitional justice across the different cultures including but not unlimited to the indigenous. How to reform our pension fund.

Audrey Tang: The very high level, very difficult, I think the UK people call them wicked problems. The president is not shying away from putting it to national-wide deliberation and debate. I think that set a really good example in saying that if we can survive doing these, there’s no reason why the citizens shouldn’t demand the same of any government that’s afterward.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like in the 2014, the late that year, the mayoral election put everybody who ever cared for open government such as Mayor Ko Wen-je, Mayor Ko Wen-je into mayorship, and put everybody who are advocating for more technocrat or bureaucrat, closed-door meeting of the mayorship and mayors start doing open government work on a smaller scale.

Audrey Tang: They set a standard so that no mayors in this election or the next or the next would retract from that because people are just getting used to participatory policymaking on a city level. What we’re now doing is at an administrative level.

Chinasa Chukwu: OK. Thank you so much. Now, I’m just going to ask some quick fire questions. Well, the first one perhaps not quite as quick fire. What would you say, if anything, has g0v taught you about society as a whole?

Audrey Tang: I joined g0v about half a year after its founding. I think g0v taught me that a simple domain hack that is changed an O to a 0 in the URL is itself a social innovation. A social innovation changes the society by making everybody reimagine some part that were closed to public participation to something that everybody can contribute.

Audrey Tang: It’s social in its input and socially beneficial in its output. We think of social innovation as something grand, something that takes a theory of change, and things like that. Sometimes, it’s just a domain hack. With the domain hack, kind of subliminally people just think, “Oh, if I don’t like the government, I can do better.” That is the origin of the empowerment.

Chinasa Chukwu: Then, what keeps you awake at night?

Audrey Tang: I sleep eight hours every night.

Chinasa Chukwu: What gets you up in the morning, then?

Audrey Tang: I suspend my judgment during the day, and I do all my value cleansing work to find common values to the positions that I have led during the day in the night during my sleep. When I wake up, I always wake up with some new ideas that could unite the different positions that were worrisome in the day because I don’t pass judgment during the day. I just listen to all the sides.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes, I find it difficult to take all the sides so I just put everything to sleep. When I wake up, first I discovered that I can actually take all the sides and second that there is some unifying value. If things are really complicated, if there’s many, many sides, sometimes I overwork and sleep for 9 hours or even 10 hours.

Chinasa Chukwu: That’s amazing. Thank you so much. That’s it. Thank you so much for this interview. That’s all my questions. I don’t know if you have any questions for me.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Are you OK with publishing this video to YouTube or would you prefer a transcript instead?

Chinasa Chukwu: I would prefer a transcript instead.

Audrey Tang: I’ll make a transcript and we can edit it collaboratively. We can also embargo, as in publishing after you do, if you would like.

Chinasa Chukwu: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Chinasa Chukwu: Thank you. Bye. Have a good day.

Audrey Tang: OK. Yes, have a good local time.

Chinasa Chukwu: Thank you. Bye.