Interviewer: First question, how did you decide to come to Korea since AYARF is not really an event focused on civic hacking? What is the story you are going to share?

Audrey Tang: My work currently has three focuses: Open Government, Social Innovation, and also Youth Engagement. By youth engagement, we mean engaging the young people so the young people lead the future. Each of our 12 ministry have two reverse mentors who are under 35 years old that decide what to raise, provoke the ministers.

Audrey Tang: For example, the reverse mentor for the minister of labor provoked the minister to join a WorldSkills Competition in Russia last year where Taiwan got the third place and proposed to the prime minister that the young people who won the WorldSkills Competition gets featured on the National Day Parade just like Olympic medalists.

Audrey Tang: This is a simple idea to let people see that people who are skilled can be their role models and introduce also these people into the schools to renovate the school as part of the community building even though they’re not professionally trained teachers.

Audrey Tang: Many ideas like this are proposed by our reverse mentors. We want new ways to think about how to make policy. Instead of the older people solving problem for young people, we want the young people to tell the older people how to solve the problem caused by the previous generation. It is this youth engagement facility that I receive the AYARF invitation.

Interviewer: Excuse me. What was the name of the competition, WorldSkills?

Audrey Tang: WorldSkills.

Interviewer: World.

Audrey Tang: Skills.

Interviewer: Skills Competition.

Audrey Tang: WorldSkills Competition. For example, in the National Day Parade, this is the champion for car painting. You can see them on the National Day Parade.

Interviewer: Based on my research, it seems you were more engaged in open source movement and government transparency projects, and so on. I’m curious about how you shifted your field of focus from these to youth engagement and other policies now you’re carrying out in the government, or you were interested in these issues from the beginning, and people just were not aware of it.

Audrey Tang: In 2014 Sunflower Movement, it is not only young people who occupy the parliament, of course, but it is mostly young people. And the people who see we can demonstrate a way for half a million people on the street to come to consensus instead of just protesting. It is a demonstration of a new way of forming policy conversations.

Audrey Tang: For many people in an open document partnership, which I introduced this idea in 2016, sharing our idea around Occupy movement, youth engagement in open document is intertwined. This is also because in Taiwan we only get to vote for president in 1996. That is also the generation that has the Wide Web and so on.

Audrey Tang: People who can vote in 1996 become the first generation to build democracy but also Wide Web. There’s no difference between these two because they arrived in the same year. At the end of 2014 I was a reverse mentor to a minister. I was under 35, I’m older now. [laughs] I was under 35 at that time. I was also a reverse mentor to a Minster Tsai at that time to work on what we call E-rulemaking.

Interviewer: E-rule…?

Audrey Tang: E-rulemaking. The vTaiwan project. That is how I begin my work with the cabinet, not for the cabinet. I was just reverse mentoring the cabinet. We continued this plan after Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became president in 2016. Instead of just two minsters having reverse mentors, now more than 12 ministers have reverse mentors.

Interviewer: Can you explain a little bit more about the reverse mentors?

Audrey Tang: Yes. In the cabinet, there are what we call Youth Advisory Council. And this youth advisory council is convened by the prime minister himself. Anything that gets decided in the youth council meeting become directly policy. It is not just a purely consultative function. It is an actual meeting, presided by the prime minister that has binding power to the minsters involved.

Audrey Tang: Instead of just one or two ministries related to youth, we have many ministries, each one choosing two people under 35 as their reverse mentor. These are people who already worked in some fashion with that ministry. As I mentioned, the World Skills one is when he proposed that idea he was just 29 years old, but already a social entrepreneur and respected by the ministry of labor.

Audrey Tang: This was our Minister of Labor. Then the Minister of Education also nominated his reverse mentor, Minister of Economy, also mentioned, and so on. So the Minister of Economy’s reverse mentor, one of it, reached the co-founder of Impact Hub Taipei.

Interviewer: Impact…?

Audrey Tang: Impact Hub Taipei. And a very active organizer of MPO Hub and the global Impact Hub network. Each and every of these reverse mentors already have the trust of at least one minister, but they work around Taiwan to convene local meetings to invite other ministries to their field of work and to brainstorm about how the cabinet can work in a new direction in a cross-ministry way.

Audrey Tang: They can convene such a meeting every few weeks, at least every month. And when they do so they surface new ideas to bring to the prime minister on the council meeting.

Interviewer: This is a very interesting story that was relatively less known compared to your other work in Korea. Can you provide more background of this youth activism that led to this power of young people institutionalized in the government? One Sunflower Movement is not enough for this.

Audrey Tang: The Sunflower Movement is just the beginning of people realizing that if the Cabinet don’t communicate with the young people according to the ways that young people prefers, then the young people don’t need a representative. The young people can just organize using hashtag. They certainly don’t need a minister to organize collective intelligence and collective work.

Audrey Tang: There was a national forum on economic development. That’s one of the demand of the Occupy. That was around mid-2014. At that time, many young people in the national economy forum has said there need to be two things done.

Audrey Tang: One is that there need to be a way for people, using petition or other online ways, to raise their voice, like stopping the trade agreement. Instead of occupying a physical parliament, people need a online space to solicit response from the ministries in a very short time frame, not four years. That’s the first demand, and it’s a majority opinion.

Audrey Tang: Another majority opinion is that instead of people who know the legislators or people who know the civic councilors and so on, like traditional representative way, there need to be people who are more working with the government not against, like on the street, but also not in the representative, like looking at the budget.

Audrey Tang: These are always important, but there need to be mediators who can speak the voice of the activists, speak the voice of the researchers, speak the voice of parliamentarians and so on, but meanwhile willing to work with existing ministers and point the direction.

Audrey Tang: Around that time, I think it was August or something 2014, there is a call for 青顧團, youth consultants. At that time, it is not across all ministries, primarily led by Minister Jaclyn Tsai and Minister Féng Yàn. They are the two ministers who are willing to try this reverse mentorship idea. It was a pilot, but then they formed a consultative group.

Audrey Tang: The binding power is only to those two ministers and their portfolio, and not to the prime minister. That went around 2015. The entire 2015 was the initial youth group but only consultative power. Then Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, when she was running for president, said as her platform saying that we will promote this consultative group into a decision-making group.

Audrey Tang: Premiere will hold the convening chair, meaning that it will become part of the cabinet. Because Dr. Tsai Ing-wen won the election, that platform need to be fulfilled. When I joined the cabinet in October 2016, the prime minister asked me whether I want to co-chair the Youth Advisory Group. I’m like, “Of course, I can chair this, but my condition, the same condition apply.”

Audrey Tang: It need to be radically transparent, meaning that all our work is published online. It is by voluntary association, meaning each ministry choose their own reverse mentor. Random people on the street, but actually people they already trust somewhat. Also location independence, meaning that we don’t just convene in Taipei, but we go around Taiwan to convene.

Audrey Tang: For example, the indigenous affairs, these are the two reverse mentors for the Council of Indigenous Affair. You can see that one of them is working on what we call worker’s co-op, a platform cooperative. This is important for indigenous people to have their own governance in the kind of work they do.

Audrey Tang: Also, make the other ministry, like economy, health and welfare, understand that not all workers have a capitalist employer. That is his main platform. Each of them have something to say about the direction of the country. It is our work to make sure that they point out the direction, and the older people can help realizing them.

AYARF staff: It seems your interview is longer and longer because you experience too much exciting and interesting. Either way, you can use the time until 3:40. Is 3:40 OK? Then at 3:40, we will come over…

Audrey Tang: We have another 40 minutes.

Interviewer: When it comes to youth engagement and open government based on data, what are the most important policies you are now focusing on?

Audrey Tang: There are two most important ones on open government, youth engagement, respectively. The open government, as you know, has a international partnership. It turns out that Korea is the chair for this year’s Open Government Partnership.

Audrey Tang: The OGP is interesting because it is both multilateral, as in people from every country send their delegate, but also multi-stakeholder, as in half, 50 percent, of the steering committee come from the civil society. It is a hybrid organization.

Audrey Tang: The main way they work is, each participating country write a national action plan to say how much open government work they are committed to do in both civil society and the government for the next two years for everybody else participating in the OGP to review them. That is how they work.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, as we know, probably, for now, cannot participate in the multilateral part, but we are already very strong in the multi-stakeholder part. We say, “What about let’s make not a two-year plan but a four-year plan?” This May, we will work with civil society and government stakeholders to write a new, and for the first time, a four-year-long national action plan and share it with the world.

Audrey Tang: We design it because we want our plan to be on the same term as the presidential term. The president who is freshly elected and will go to office in May, she can reveal the national action plan for four years, which will hold until she stops becoming president four years from May. That is a new design.

Audrey Tang: We think it’s a better design because OGP, with two-year plans, sometimes they implement one year. There’s a change of cabinet, and the next year, the new cabinet is still bound by the original cabinet’s promise. That create a lot of accountability issues. We think our way is better.

Audrey Tang: We innovate and we will work with the international community to see if this new model developed in Taiwan works better also for other OGP countries. That’s the first important thing. For the youth engagement, one of the most important thing in the next few years is to use this structure of the reverse mentor but work with all the municipalities and cities.

Audrey Tang: That week we are going back to Taiwan, we’re going to join the event of, there was some county that opens a youth section.

Zach Huang: The Yilan Youth Hub.

Audrey Tang: The Yilan County, yes. We work with, so far, Taoyuan and many other municipalities who look at the reverse mentor model and think it works really well, it builds legitimacy, and it also informed the mayor of what the young people really want. More and more municipalities are building such a network.

Audrey Tang: For this year, what we are doing is that we asked the cabinet-level youth mentor what are the one or two SDG goals? There’s 17. Which 1 or 2 of the 17 do you want to focus on for the year? Maybe they will choose one or two from here.

Audrey Tang: Once they choose, we will work with all the municipal youth councilors or reverse mentors for half a year to work out a shared white paper, a shared design, by all the participating young people around that one or two particular SDG goals, which will be binding. It will be a part of the cabinet’s road map for development for young people based on the one or two things that they care the most about.

Audrey Tang: It is both building the grassroots structure, because anyone can host such a conversation, but also making sure that it becomes focused instead of spread around all the 17 goals.

Interviewer: In some municipalities in Korea have similar structures like the Youth Council, but it receives a lot of criticism from the youth themselves because those structures don’t have actual power or influence within the government. They’re just there in form. The Taiwanese example has binding powers if they become policy.

Interviewer: How is it possible? How are they viewed by the young people themselves?

Audrey Tang: Anything binding only becomes possible because of a presidential promise. Dr. Tsai made that promise in the campaign. The prime minister, of course, need to implement what the president has promised.

Audrey Tang: If you ask why President Tsai made that promise, I think it is clear from the previous cabinet, the Ma Ying-jeou cabinet, that the occupier who work with the ministers, like me, and the youths in a consultative committee, are two groups of people. Back in 2014 or ‘15, we don’t quite talk to each other that much.

Audrey Tang: The consultative youths are usually successful young people in a more mainstream sense. Their lines of thinking seemed to agree with what the minister has already agreed as important. The Occupier turned reverse mentors like me think in radically different ways. It naturally made it more difficult for the two groups to work very closely together. One is more establishment, and one is more radical.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, people generally see that as a kind of institutional opportunity to improve. When Dr. Tsai promised a cabinet-level Youth Council, we made sure that we included both youth councilors who are more advocacy-based as well as youth councilors who are more mainstream thinking.

Audrey Tang: This made sure that whatever ideas, they can build a common value about despite different position. If they can convince each other that this is valuable for both advocates and the mainstream people, then it is worth making it a binding policy. There is also a balancing act involved. By now, we are in the second youth councilor now because each council runs for two years.

Audrey Tang: We’re in the second Youth Council now for this cabinet. The second Youth Council’s members is now very balanced between the advocate part and the more establishment part. It’s also because each ministry can name two. It’s very likely that a minister will name one more focused on advocacy and one more focused on establishment.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is both are important, but you cannot silo them into two different units. If you do so, each of them will propose things that doesn’t quite lead the career public service. The career public service will say, “Of course, it’s too early to give them binding power because what they propose is not really helpful.”

Audrey Tang: Getting this balance right produced quality proposals, and that earns the binding power.

Interviewer: This was a very interesting discussion. Actually, I now have to go back to the prepared questions.

Interviewer: More about your open-data initiatives in the government. Are you still carrying out those initiatives? What are they?

Audrey Tang: What we are now saying is not just open data. We’re rolling out, across the government, the guidelines for digital government services or the GDSG. GDSG has its idea of open by default. It’s not just open data but also open API. It’s making sure that machine can read and write the same information that humans can read and write.

Audrey Tang: It is open standards using standards that are already international instead of forming our own standards. Most importantly, it is open innovation, meaning that we share, whenever we have a good solution, around the world for people to co-create similar solutions. Just one example. We have a design called the Presidential Hackathon. That is our main open innovation event every year.

Audrey Tang: Every year, hundreds of teams, they could be public servants, private sector, social sector, propose anything that they think can use data to improve people’s lives. We only ask them to identify with one of the Sustainable Development Goals. That’s all it requires. Then we choose 20 of them to incubate for three months. Finally, five winner is chosen every year.

Audrey Tang: One example, two years ago, in the first Presidential Hackathon, there is a winner called Water Savior because they save water. They work with the people who repair the pipes. They listen to the pipe for leaking. Most time, they’re not leaking, but if they leak, they become creative and solve the leak.

Audrey Tang: On average, in the small area called Keelung, where they pilot, it took two months from a leak to happen to it being listened by the repair people. A lot of water gets wasted this way. They built a chatbot on the LINE system that used machine learning to analyze water pressure, water flow, and things like that in a cross-sectoral way.

Audrey Tang: Built a solution where the repair person can wake up and look at their LINE and find out the three most likely leaking place and almost always have something to work on every day. It also helps their recruitment because younger people want to do creative job not to listen to the pipe that are not leaking.

Audrey Tang: In many public-sector hackathons, this kind of idea often appear, but they don’t often go into the whole country. Sometime, a mayor likes it and try it for a year, and it disappear. That is what happened in most hackathons around the world. The presidential hackathon is different because when the president give out the trophy, the trophy look like this. It’s a micro-projector as its base.

Audrey Tang: It’s shaped like this. If you turn on the projector, it projects the image of the team receiving the trophy from the president. It projects the president, and it shows the president promising the team, “Whatever you have built in the previous three months in a small area, I promise to make it into public policy in the next 12 months.”

Audrey Tang: It is binding power at the presidential level no matter how much budget, personnel, or even regulation. We change the law for another team that want to build telemedicine for off-shore islands so that they don’t need fly the sick and hurt people to the main Taiwan hospital. They can do tele-diagnosis with a local nurse.

Audrey Tang: That was not legal but, because they won the Presidential Hackathon, we changed the law for the winning team. This is the most a social innovator can hope for. It is their idea becoming public policy and implemented across the country. Every time when we’re incubating the 20 team, they always form a tri-sectoral team at the end.

Audrey Tang: No matter which sector the idea come from, at the end, there’s always a public servant, a private-sector person, and a social-sector person forming what we call a data collaborative, making sure they can keep each other accountable at the end of it.

Audrey Tang: Even the 20 teams is selected by popular voting. We have a platform called Join, which has more than 10 million visitors, join.gov.tw, more than 10 million visitors in Taiwan. Taiwan have 23 million people, so a lot of people. Each visitor can look at a hundred or so of Presidential Hackathon idea and vote which one they want to be incubated.

Audrey Tang: We use a new invention called quadratic voting, or QV, for this voting. The voting makes everybody feel they have won instead of plurality voting, which many people feel they have lost. The quadratic voting gives everybody 99 point. Maybe you like the idea of using drone and computer vision to solve plastic waste in the sea. Maybe you think it’s a good idea.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you give it one vote, and that is going to cost you 1 point. Two vote will cost 4 point in total, three 9 points, four 16 points, so quadratic. With 99 point, you can only vote 9 vote, not 10, because 10 will cost 100, and you don’t have 100.

Audrey Tang: With 99 points and nine votes to this, you still have 18 left. Nobody want to squander 18 point, so they will look into another, for example, using a IoT device to measure water quality in agric land. Maybe it’s a good idea. You give it four vote, 16 point. You still have 2 point, so you will look at something else.

Audrey Tang: At this point, maybe you think, “Ah, this is a better idea than this one,” so you can do a seven and seven and so on. You can reflect your true preference on the thing you understand. At the end of it, most people vote five or six teams that they learn about. This is also a education tool about Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: When the top 20 gets announced, everybody feel they have won because they support at least one team that made it to the top 20, usually. If you allow everybody to vote directly just to one, most people will feel they have lost. This is what gives those open-innovation teams their legitimacy so that when they get into the top five, and we want to change a law, no lawmaker will say no to the idea.

Interviewer: It is impressive that these are not just good idea to be presented but actual policies with power. Two things to ask. First of all, was there any resistance from within the government or the political party itself about this policy? They don’t know which policy would be suggested and win this competition. Maybe the more conservative and existing politicians against the president’s policy?

Interviewer: Second, how were you involved?

Audrey Tang: First one, we don’t face any resistance because mostly by the end of the incubation, the public service team embedded in the team will already shape it to be feasible. This is obvious if you have every team as tri-sectoral teams. They balance each other.

Audrey Tang: If there is a idea that makes sense to the social sector but will be a disaster for the public sector, during the three months, they will figure out something else to implement the original idea in a more feasible way.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if the public sector propose some good idea, but the social sector feel that it will take power away from the social sector and concentrate the power, they will also resist within the team and find a way to co-create in a data platform. The resistance happens in the three months of incubation not by the time we give out the trophy.

Audrey Tang: The five trophies only go to the teams that already achieve tri-sectoral common understanding. If they don’t, they don’t win the trophy. [laughs] That is the design. I’m involved in three different roles. First, I am the convener of the jury to make the final judge decisions. That’s the first one. The second, I’m also the convener of the international track’s jury.

Audrey Tang: Parallel to the domestic track, we also run the same thing but with international teams coming to Taiwan on enabling sustainable infrastructure. Last year, the winner was Honduras working on a collaborative review tool for ecologic impact of new constructions. That’s a good idea. Also the Malaysian team working to detect cartels during procurement, a good idea, too.

Audrey Tang: We work with the Open Contracting Partnership. I was a convener of the jury for the international track as well. Finally, I’m also with the accountability requirement to review every three months or so on what happens to the team that already won. Every day, we tell people what news, if any, have occurred in the 10 winners so far, five in 2018 and five in 2019.

Audrey Tang: At least every three months, we have a review meeting with the social innovation 12 ministries involved. The winning teams report how are they implemented and whether they need any help, especially around law or regulation change. No matter how good the idea is, they cannot implement it if it’s illegal. [laughs] We will take care to make it legal…

Audrey Tang: …to find a way so that their idea become legal. That’s my job, to help them and facilitate to make sure all of their idea become reality in the 12 months.

Interviewer: Listening to what’s happening there, I’m thinking is this really possible in Korea? You are a minister without portfolio who is working across different ministries.

Audrey Tang: Across sectors, too.

Interviewer: Yeah. We imagine such a post in Korea. Such a minister would have a lot of difficulties in getting the cooperation from other vertical ministries and government agencies. How is that possible?

Audrey Tang: My office is one volunteer from each ministry. By volunteer, I mean it doesn’t make sense to send people who don’t want to work in the open to my office. We don’t force people. We have 32 vertical ministries. So far, we have only 21 colleagues, meaning that more than 10 ministries never send anyone. The Ministry of Defense never send anyone.

Audrey Tang: I wonder why. [laughs] I don’t know anything about our defense secret or our Air Force and Army. I don’t know anything about that. The important thing is that I don’t force ministries to cooperate. When I say the 12 ministers, they have reverse mentors and so on, I’m also implying that there’s another 12 ministers that doesn’t have reverse mentors.

Audrey Tang: We’re not forcing anyone to do anything. [laughs] When the ministerial delegates sent to me, usually they are around the level of section chief. We also have director general level, so mid to high-level public service. All of these ideas, including the Presidential Hackathon, including the reverse mentorship, the social innovation tour, and so on, are not my idea.

Audrey Tang: These are idea done by the career public servant. Of course, they will not propose something that undermine their own political career. [laughs] They will not propose something for me to do that will put their minister at risk. It’s risk-free innovation. That’s the most important point. The second, equally important point is that this career public servant then get the credit.

Audrey Tang: In the vertical way, only minister get credit and the career public servant never get credit. Using horizontal leadership and facing the use of reverse mentors, face-to-face, they learn that the career public service is not only professional but is willing to be led by the young people. Their ministry may not gain the trust from the young people, but they get the trust from the young people.

Audrey Tang: This is important for their job satisfaction. Finally, they will also discover that there is many tools, mechanisms, and so on that has been tried and already work in another ministry. It’s just there’s no horizontal transfer of knowledge. By participating, they also learn something that save their time.

Audrey Tang: Saving their time, reducing their risk, and improving the trust, these three are the main tenet of my office. We never trade one for the other two. We always say, first, do no harm. Then we improve on one of the three in a piecemeal fashion.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, I think most of the ministries that didn’t participate in the beginning, like the foreign service, after a year, they learned, “Oh, this wouldn’t hurt the minister.” The foreign service starts sending delegate to my office on public diplomacy. Of course, not around secrecy.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know anything about secret diplomacy, but I know quite a few things now about public diplomacy.

Interviewer: You have been working like this for several year so far.

Audrey Tang: Three and a half.

Interviewer: Do you see any change in the mindset of the public servants and also the young people in the way they view the society?

Audrey Tang: In the beginning, in 2014, especially after the Occupy, if you tell the career public servant about public participation, about 5,000 people on a petition, they have a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The fear is about, of course, being occupied again. Uncertainty is about whether there’s anything useful or just noise.

Audrey Tang: The doubt is about, “Even if my minister agree with the young people, is it even possible for the ministry to deliver?” so doubt about their capability. Also a physical fear of being occupied…

Audrey Tang: …that is why, when I tour around Taiwan in the social innovation and youth engagement missions, I make sure that it’s only me that talk with the local people. The public servants are in Taipei or in one of the municipal Social Innovation Labs looking at a fishbowl video link.

Audrey Tang: If they say something that really resonates with the young people, the young people likes them, loves them. If they say something that upset the local people, you cannot hurt people over a projector, so they are safe. I’m the only one at risk.

Audrey Tang: There’s far less fear now in the public service. As for the uncertainty about the ministerial power to listen at scale, we show that, with the right design, we can let the people moderate themselves. We only respond to the sentiment that people have a broad consensus. The divisive issues are acknowledged as divisive, but we don’t talk about that in the agenda.

Audrey Tang: We only talk about things that people already have some consensus. The noise is separated from the signal. The day we go back, I will start holding a diplomatic conversation with the AIP on how to promote people-to-people ties between the US and Taiwan. As we can see, there are consensus items, but there are also divisive items.

Audrey Tang: One of the divisive items says Taiwan should make English the primary language of work. Even France has done this. It’s very provocative. If we start by talking about this, we’ll never get to the other statements. We will just fight. [laughs] We table this. We don’t talk about it.

Audrey Tang: Instead, we talk about things that people already have consensus on, like how we need to be quickly moving to or becoming a bilingual nation. This is softer version of the divisive statement, so that solves the noise problem.

Audrey Tang: Finally, when the ministers say, “Oh, of course, we can implement because the president agree to give budget, to give personnel to the social innovations outside of our scope,” like Presidential Hackathon. Then for the career public service, that’s their chance to get more resources. That does not make them over-work with existing resources.

Audrey Tang: In a Presidential Hackathon, we see some social-sector proposal that looks like official document. It seems like maybe a section chief wrote them. If they brainstorm for three months and go nowhere, they can say, “We’re only working with the social sector to brainstorm.” If they win the trophy, the section chief come out and say, “I wrote that proposal.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It is a risk-free way for innovation within the public sector.

Interviewer: How about the changes with the young people, their mindset, their way of viewing the system?

Audrey Tang: I answered about the young people in the government. [laughs] Now I will answer about the young people outside of the government. The young people outside of the government usually see our participation platforms as a way to build their case, to mobilize. Most of our participants does spend a lot of time, the 10 million visitors.

Audrey Tang: If you look at the time they spend, the most active group is around 15 years old, and then around 60 to 65. These are the two most active age group. I think because they have more time on their hand, obviously, but also because they care more about the next generation, not just about their own family, but about the planet.

Audrey Tang: For the 15-year-old, this is even more the case because they cannot vote. There is no voting right. Two years ago, we had a petition, and we allowed pseudonym, so we only know the petitioner is called I Love Elephant and Elephant Love Me. They petition we ban plastic straw. We banned one-use food stencils, even for bubble tea. This is very controversial obviously.

Audrey Tang: They say, we must reduce the carbon footprint. We must not disturb the ecosystem around the sea. The biodiversity is to be respected. They have photo about sea turtles choking on plastic straws of bubble tea I’m sure, and so on. They’re good at mobilizing.

Audrey Tang: When we meet them face to face, because 5,000 people can summon a cross-ministerial meeting, when we meet the petitioner, she is just 15 years old at that time. She said, “This is my civics class assignment.” Her civic class teacher say there’s a new Join platform, so find something. She just find a resonating topic. She eventually, I think, got a scholarship for proposing this idea.

Audrey Tang: It’s like Greta, except without going to the streets every Friday. What she did is just to mobilize with people who care about the same issue. Then we work with people who manufacture those one, single use utensils. They are older. They’re like 60 years old, 65. They say, “When we were young, we joined this work because we were social entrepreneur.”

Audrey Tang: This was at a time that hepatitis B, hep B, is a public health issue in Taiwan, so they made those utensils to shield the public from the virus of the liver. Now hep B is solved. It’s no longer a problem in Taiwan. They’re also looking at a higher margin way to make their own straws.

Audrey Tang: They brainstormed about, for example, using agricultural wastes like coffee beans or even reinforcing straws and things like that in a carbon neutral or even negative way to produce through circular economy straws, or design things so that they don’t require a straw, and so on. The young people then promote the new ideas from these vendors.

Audrey Tang: The vendors understand that they are here not to attack them but rather to think new innovations that can make everybody feel better. Last year, we actually banned plastic straw for indoor drinking, including milk tea and bubble tea. We see this as a victory for inclusive participation from 15 and 16 years olds.

Audrey Tang: I think one of the textbook vendors even wrote that into their textbook, literally a textbook case because they don’t have to wait until 18 to participate in a referenda or 20 to vote for president. They can start mobilizing 5,000 people. If they don’t get their idea across, at least they have 5,000 friend. They can initiate through their more senior friend a real referenda, which will be binding.

Interviewer: We are running out of time, so I’m going to ask three questions at the same time. First, you separate the more consensual ideas from the more divisive ideas. Sometimes, divisive ideas require social discussion. How do you deal with those ideas? Second, you have some backgrounds of working in the US as a civic hacker and so on.

Interviewer: You have about four years of government work, career. How did that change you and your perspective? Third, usually politicians like to talk about their political vision or long-term direction. It seems you focus more on the data and evidence, especially in answering these questions. Is it your approach in policy making or problem-solving, or is that just part of your personal characteristics?

AYARF staff: I found it really interesting.

Audrey Tang: For each divisive statement, you can find five more concrete statements that, together, makes into that statement. I already show the example about, “Let’s make English the working language.” You can soften it into five components.

Audrey Tang: For example, when we talk about Uber, we didn’t start saying, “We want to talk about platform economy,” or, “We want to talk about sharing economy.” That is very divisive. We talk about, “How do you feel about someone driving to work, picking up someone that they don’t know through the app on their way to work, and charging them for it without a professional driver’s license?”

Audrey Tang: This is like a small story that everybody can understand. This is maybe one percent of sharing economy. If we talk about sharing economy, it’s too divisive, but for this specific case, everybody…

Interviewer: It’s like you’re inviting more people to participate in social discussion.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s called overlapping consensus. No matter which ideology you hold, if this is a very specific example, people can still agree on common values. That’s the answer to your first question. The second question, for myself, I’m constantly amazed by how innovative public servants are. Before I start working with the Cabinet, I have no visibility into the career public service.

Audrey Tang: Like everybody else working in the Silicon Valley, we think the career public servant as lagging behind the technological innovations. Especially we are on the cutting edge of innovation, and we think we’re leaving the government behind. When I joined the government, I discovered they are as innovative as the private sector and social sector. It’s just they’re required to be anonymous.

Audrey Tang: They cannot talk about it. The main thing I’m trying to work with, is to make sure that we can talk about ideas in the public service, publicly, even when they’re just ideas, even when they’re just drafts, even if they carry no decision. In Taiwan, we have a saying of losing face. You lose face if you admit your initial idea is wrong. I’m the minister of losing face. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I absorb the risk if the career public service think of a really bad idea. I’m the only one in the vicinity of the rural or indigenous place that has to say, “Oh, I’m sorry, but we really don’t know what we’re talking about. [laughs] Please give us a better idea.” When somebody is willing to absorb this risk, the public servants become very innovative. They brainstorm a lot of ideas.

Audrey Tang: They know that it doesn’t hurt them. It doesn’t hurt their career if the ideas don’t work out. It’s like a sandbox. It is safe. The experimentation is safe. That’s your second question. The third question, I do have a vision, [laughs] but this vision is a more abstract one. I don’t prescribe. As you very astutely observed, I don’t prescribe anything. I describe. This is something that I wrote.

Audrey Tang: If you want to see my vision, this is my vision. A trans-cultural republic of citizens where the trans-culture is not silo multiculturalism. We see many jurisdictions that put people with different religion, different ethnicity, different culture, in different living quarters. They don’t quite talk to one another. Although they respect each other’s culture, they don’t make new culture out of existing cultures.

Audrey Tang: The social innovation work that I just described, whether it’s across the reverse mentor, across ministries, or across the indigenous, rural, and municipal Taipei, all this means that we’re looking at the culture we’re brought up on. When we were a child, of course, we have our own culture.

Audrey Tang: When we become 18 years old and so on, we can step into the shoe of another culture through this mechanism and look back at our original culture, our home culture, from the viewpoint of the other sector, the other religion, or the other ethnicity, and make something new that makes sense to both cultures. If you keep doing this, then the main identity of this polity will be the democratic process.

Audrey Tang: This is what we mean by republic of citizens. It will not be five MPs representing a ethnic group, seven MP representing another ethnic group, and so on. It will be everybody co-creating new culture out of existing cultures using day-to-day democratic tools not just voting. This is what I mean by a republic of citizen, Mínguó, which is, incidentally, shared in the name of your country as well, the Minguk. That is the original idea of Mínguó anyway.

Interviewer: Two last questions. First of all, you are empowering the young people under the voting age to participate in policy making…

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: …and giving them actual power. Can I say you are making your democracy more diverse that way?

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely, and more inclusive not just diverse. Diverse is like silo. A lot of silo is diverse, but inclusive means they are trans-cultural.

Interviewer: You’ve been visiting Korea several times. What has impressed you about Korea? Do you have advice for Koreans?

Audrey Tang: To be honest, this is my first visit with the youth engagement portfolio. I’m here to learn. I don’t know anything yet. My previous visit, for example on CodeGate with the Best of the Best and so on, that I’m really impressed. At the time, cybersecurity was not seen in Taiwan as a private sector focus.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, cybersecurity is seen as something that the critical infrastructures must do, the public sector must do, the schools teach. It’s like general awareness and things like that, but it’s not a branding that says, “If a software or hardware system is made in Taiwan and that has survived the cyber intrusions, then it’s battle-hardened like Israel,” [laughs] and become a international brand.

Audrey Tang: At that time, in 2016, early ‘17, it’s not that strong a brand in Taiwan to build a cybersecurity like center of excellence around the world. It’s obvious when I visited Korea that you’re very advanced in that thinking in that you want to build cybersecurity not only as one of the career options but as a very special career option that carries prestige. We adapted that idea from Korea.

Audrey Tang: Now, we are building our cybersecurity center of excellence based on very similar ideas. We even invited 10 different countries, white-hat hackers, on a drill last year to attack our financial system, [laughs] to work together to empower each other’s cybersecurity skills.

Audrey Tang: International collaboration based on the real cases of cybersecurity, and now, of course, also disinformation and all sort of different cyber threats, I think that became a priority. That is what I learned from Korea. This time, we’re also going to visit, for example, the KITRI, K-I-T-R-I.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s one of the main places where we want to build more relationships around everything cyber not just cybersecurity. Korea has a really good plan. This is the website, kitribob.kr. I attended some of their event through telepresence, but I haven’t been physically there. I look forward to learn from the Best of the Best. That’s their name, right, [laughs] the Best of the Best.

Interviewer: Real last question. What do you want to focus on? What’s the area or issue from now on as a person or a politician or a minister?

Audrey Tang: Of the 17 goals, my personal interest is definitely at the 17, which is why I put it in the middle. Acting towards the goals relies on reliable data so as to build trust, effective patnership, so that each sector will not monopolize the work but, rather, work across sectors to form collaborative.

Audrey Tang: Even more importantly, the idea of open innovation must not be only within a country. It must be across countries. Even as digital minister, I’m also board member of international social-innovation NGOs, such as RadicalxChange. That is so that Taiwan is only one of the places which will try out those new ideas, like the new voting system.

Audrey Tang: When other jurisdiction, like Colorado, also try that voting system, we can instantly form a research-activist relationship [laughs] between those two jurisdictions without relying on the old bilateral, multilateral way of diplomacy. These three SDG goals are going to be my focus in the coming years.

Interviewer: If there are a few more questions I’ve…

Audrey Tang: …just email me.

Interviewer: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.