Audrey Tang: We’ll be recording this. for example, here is a interview that I did with a BBC correspondent. And this is WCIT International Press, and the format would be like this. It’s basically everything that we say, and everyone can lay in context, and you’ll have 10 days to modify the transcript if the transcript was inaccurate or something, then you can edit it before we publish it. I hope that’s OK with you.

Felix Lill: Mm-hmm.

Audrey Tang: OK, great.

Felix Lill: You’ll have someone writing it down, and then, it’ll go up there?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Felix Lill: You’ll send it today...

Audrey Tang: Usually, it takes about 24 hours for us to get a transcript.

Felix Lill: I’ve interviewed a few ministers in different countries. This is the first time. I’ve never seen it before, but it makes perfect sense though.

Audrey Tang: I also do this for internal meetings with public servants. For example, all the meetings that we hold internally -- it’s 10 working days, not 10 calendar days -- everybody gets to review it and then send it to their staff.

Felix Lill: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: It creates an interesting atmosphere because previously the minister, when convening such meetings, can make unilateral decisions on behalf of everybody who attended. What happens is that the minister would get a credit if things go right, but the career public servant gets a blame if it’s not a good idea, even if it’s not what they proposed.

Audrey Tang: Because we record our internal meetings, it’s flipped around. If anything goes right, the journalists go and check who was the career public servant who proposed this idea, so they get a credit, not me. If anything goes wrong, like if I make a unilateral decision or something, then I get a blame.

Audrey Tang: It makes the public servants much more innovative because they are now willing to propose risky ideas because they know that risks get absorbed and the credit gets shared. Far as I know, I’m the only ministry-level person currently in the world to do this, so it’s a very interesting experiment.

Felix Lill: What do other ministers say about that? I’m sure you talk about this, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. They’re actually adopting it for controversial meetings, this kind of meeting where people enter with very different agenda. Once the meeting is over, three different journals interview three different attendees. It’s like three different worlds. Everybody has a different account of what has transpired in the meeting.

Audrey Tang: But because for journalist, if you have the entire transcript, of course you can add your own perspective, your interpretation. But the basic facts is shared.

Audrey Tang: For controversial issues such as determining the curriculum, in Taiwan, there was some controversy among our K-12 curriculum or for discussing cybersecurity principles and things like that where people tend to have very contested opinions, they now use the same method also to clear away any possible misunderstandings.

Felix Lill: Is there any case where you would not record?

Audrey Tang: No. There was a principle I established when I joined the Cabinet in that I will not attend any meetings that’s marked confidential, top secret nor will I accept any public documents that’s marked confidential or top secret. I exclude myself from those meetings, including military drills. Other ministers go to drills. But I don’t know even know where our bunkers are.

Audrey Tang: Out of principle, anything that I see is compatible through the information. This has no exceptions.

Felix Lill: Obviously there’s some vision of how the world should be behind this. You want transparency.

Audrey Tang: Also accountability, I want to take appropriate blame for the words that I actually said. I don’t want other people to take blame for the words that they didn’t say.

Felix Lill: Just thinking about the future, how this might be if this becomes the common standard someday, five years ago or so, just to take an example, there was a scandal in the UK of a politician. I don’t quite remember the case. But I was there. Something clearly private but it somehow got leaked to the public, it was...

Audrey Tang: Like a hot mike?

Felix Lill: Not even, although that happens a lot, too. But it was just a private video he had sent to someone. Then it got leaked. It got a big scandal although it was in no way related to politics and to his job. Yet it was a scandal. I wondered why because there’s no relation.

Felix Lill: If more things are transparent, do you think there might be less potential for scandalousness about not important things?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, because I think the case for rumors and scandals and misinformation in general is not that they’re untrue, but rather they’re out of context. For many public servants, the bane is to have part of the transcript leaking out and for other parts of the attendees not able to defend themselves to be taken out of context.

Audrey Tang: Just by establishing context, I think it makes the facts spread faster than rumors. People get misinformation or rumors because they want to know what’s happening and there’s no complete context. Once there is complete context, we find they consistently rank higher than rumors on search engines, on social media, and so on because that’s what people want anyway.

Audrey Tang: Also when people are curious about my job and they get daily access to what my job is doing, they lose interest in non-job parts of me. This is the basic idea.

Felix Lill: There’s the case against that, that if there’s a lot of information out there, you can’t separate the important from the unimportant.

Audrey Tang: But that’s logically solved by social media. People curate the parts that they think is important, which is why we make it very easy to have one website address to just one utterance that you think is useful. Then you just copy this and share it on Twitter, on Facebook. We see that becomes trending. But still, when you click into it, you can still click "show in context" and then show it in context.

Audrey Tang: This is best of both worlds. For people who have too much time or for artificial intelligence, there is the complete corpus. But for people who want to highlight a part of it, they can very easily do so.

Felix Lill: Have you ever doubted this system? Was there ever a point where you thought, "Ah, maybe not so good"?

Audrey Tang: For many people, this 10 days buffer is very important because the court reporter, the stenographer, may make typos. They don’t want those typos associated with their name or they use a lot of non-verbal information like a double message, a wink, or whatever, so it’s not meant to be taken literally. We try to put a F or wink into the transcript.

Audrey Tang: But it’s like theater place. It’s impossible to convey the entire non-verbal context.

Audrey Tang: The 10 days really is for people to look back at what they said and think, "OK, maybe it’s not the best way to put it." We do allow anyone to modify their own utterances as long as it still makes sense within the context.

Audrey Tang: I think that also improves the quality of meetings. Because a lot of those contested meetings, people come to speak, but they don’t come to listen. But during the checking of their transcript, they’re forced to listen to other sides again and find some insights. We see that happening, too.

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t think there’s any cases where I think maybe not the best idea to publish this.

Felix Lill: One more point on this, of course here it’s where document who is saying what. But in the digital sphere, there’s often anonymity as an important characteristic. What do you think about that? Because then you have sometimes more hazard of saying things you wouldn’t otherwise say.

Audrey Tang: Right, but anonymity or, as I prefer to say, pseudonymity -- because there is still a name, it’s just not associated with that person -- I think it’s still useful. For example, during even internal meeting space, especially on external meetings, we present what we call a Slido view. The Slido here...Just a second.

Audrey Tang: For example, I had this talk in London a few days ago. During my talk I asked anyone to use their phone to ask me anything, and then like each other’s questions.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, those are not real names. They’re K, or S, or CJ, or Cordelia. Maybe this is a real name. The idea is that these are generic nicknames. Someone chose their name as anonymous, [laughs] very fittingly.

Audrey Tang: Still, it’s useful because sometimes what we are interested in is the questions they want to ask. These things that they want to put to the agenda. Maybe they don’t trust the government enough to identify them self, or maybe they don’t want to go through the hassle of identifying themselves.

Audrey Tang: Whenever there is a pseudonymous way of expressing things it needs to be covered with two things. First, it needs to have a crowd moderation system. For example, this, as you can see, is voted, so the highest voted one are on the top.

Audrey Tang: I only answer questions until the time runs out. Basically, after this one from CJ, I ran out of time. This is good because I know that even though it’s not real names, when I answer the top question I also answer certain other people’s questions, so it saves time.

Audrey Tang: Also, it makes it easier for people in the lesser power. For example, if they attend a meeting, but as a apprentice, a underling, staff, or something, they often wouldn’t dare to raise hands, because their superiors are there. They would refrain from contributing.

Audrey Tang: We really want those contributions. A way for them to voice their concerns while having a moderation is a very good thing.

Audrey Tang: I’ll add to it. If I’m giving a lecture, usually I compete with students’ phones for their attention because they want to browse Facebook or they want to browse Instagram to press likes on each other, and so on.

Audrey Tang: If I confiscate their phones I become very unpopular. Instead, I ask them to go to Slido. Slido is designed so that it looks very much like any other social media site. You can still press likes if you want.

Audrey Tang: It addresses people’s addiction to like pressing, but it also takes over their phone so their phone won’t be used for something that’s not conductive to the lecture. It’s really the best of both worlds.

Felix Lill: It conquers the tool you would otherwise use for different things.

Felix Lill: Regarding policy meetings where you are in and other ministers or other people from the political sphere that would prefer to be not recorded, is there any clinches?

Audrey Tang: I only record for the meetings that I’m the chair. If I’m invited as, essentially, a consultant I don’t insist on recording it, but then that’s because it’s not binding, it’s not decision making.

Audrey Tang: The basic idea, just as in the parliament, the MPs may have any number of consultative meetings among themselves, but the one that’s binding must be recorded. That’s very important.

Audrey Tang: Also, most of the meetings that I attend are not confidential or top secret in nature. If they are, usually I hand a written response and I don’t even attend, if it’s marked as confidential or top secret, so there’s no clinches.

Felix Lill: Can you tell me how you were approached to take over this job?

Audrey Tang: To take this job, because there was no digital minister, so it’s not taking over. [laughs]

Felix Lill: Take it. That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Sorry, it’s me being pedantic.

Audrey Tang: Long story short, there was this Occupy Movement. The Occupy Movement in 2014 determined a lot of what people want from the political system.

Audrey Tang: Case in point is that it stem out of a trade service agreement, the Cross-Straight Trade Service Agreement. The trade service agreement, basically, the MPs said that they won’t deliberate it, or they won’t discuss it, because they consider it domestic, or something. It’s a technical issue.

Audrey Tang: Instead of just protesting, there’s people who went into the parliament and say, "If the MPs don’t deliberate it, we’re doing their job for them." This is a important part of the Taiwan’s current political climate, is that people don’t generally wait for government to do things.

Audrey Tang: If the government can do this, it’s great. People like it. If the government is lacking in some regard, instead of just protesting people go and say, "OK, here’s a better way of doing things."

Audrey Tang: My role during the Occupy is very simple. I was one of the first people who went there to support their Internet connectivity. That’s mostly my only job.

Audrey Tang: By Internet connectivity, eventually it extended to supporting the outside journalists. Here we have one.

Audrey Tang: Helping with the logistics. Helping with the international communication. Helping with the stenography, like taking account of what’s happening there.

Audrey Tang: It is a demonstration, but not in a protest sense. Really, in a demo sense, if we can involve more people in policymaking.

Audrey Tang: For me, that’s where I began. Of course, it builds on the work of more than 20 NGOs who are also pushing their agenda and coming to a consensus.

Audrey Tang: The Occupy teaches us one thing, is that people with very diverse agenda, the Labors, the Greens, the Separatists, when you involve enough people, when you keep everything in transparency, when you put everything in record, when you ensure no violence, because everything is being filmed, except for one day, everything is going to converge.

Audrey Tang: People generally converge on consensus, instead of diverging. In many other Occupy we see a lot of divergence. They eventually lose their agenda, but in this particular Occupy, after 22 days they actually converged on the set of very coherent consensus, and so the head of parliament really has no way but accepting it.

Audrey Tang: It was a victory, actually. They accepted it, and it was retreated peacefully.

Audrey Tang: One of the way to explain this mentality is what we call "Fork the Government," meaning that if the government is doing something that people don’t like, instead of blocking it or protesting it, you can, like a fork in the road, go some other way.

Audrey Tang: The movement that I participated at the time is called g0v.tw, embodies this on the Internet. For any websites that end in gov.tw, which are government websites, that the people don’t like, they build a counterpart, a shadow government website, if you will, that is the same name, but ends in g0v.tw.

Audrey Tang: You can very easily discover it. Go to the government website, change a O to a zero, and you get into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: Because we relinquish most of our copyright, so when the next procurement cycle comes, and if the government think it’s a good idea, the government takes it in as the official website.

Audrey Tang: We see this happening for a lot of websites. This is the first website before I joined gov-zero in 2012.

Audrey Tang: In end of 2012 there was this idea of people not able to understand the national budget. The government even made a advertisement about that, and then this was shown as a demonstration that, actually, people can understand it.

Audrey Tang: One of the point here is that it’s interactive. People can press like or unlike on budget items. More importantly, they can ask questions.

Audrey Tang: When Taipei City -- if you go to budget.Taipei -- adopted this system. Instead of just having the forum of people discussing specific budget items, they also brought the career public servants of all the departments and bureaus.

Audrey Tang: For three weeks every questions that was asked on individual parts of the city budget, the career public servants went on here and answered it. It’s a demo of some direct democracy where the City Council was essentially bypassed, and people directly answered their questions that the citizens asked.

Audrey Tang: This underlines the participatory budget, or any other related effort, because if people don’t have the whole picture they tend to propose something that’s already done by the government, but if the government’s working is very intimately known by the citizens they tend to propose creative solutions.

Audrey Tang: My role here is mostly to make sure that people in the civic tech, civic technology community, people in the NGO, in the activist community, people working in media and journalists share the same vocabulary, the same space, the same tools. I’m not actively involved in those specific project, but making sure that those spaces actually connect and people actually talk to each other.

Audrey Tang: At the end of that year, at end of 2014, there was a peaceful revolution. At the end of 2014 many occupiers, or pro-occupiers, get elected mayors. There’s several mayors who people didn’t expect them to be mayors, but they were, nevertheless, elected.

Audrey Tang: All the people who didn’t say transparency in their campaign lost the election in the mayoral election. Because of this, the prime minister at the time, Jiang Yi-huah, resigned. There’s a new prime minister, Mao Chi-kuo at the time, that said, "OK, from now in crowdsourcing and open data are going to be the national direction."

Audrey Tang: The occupiers, the civic tech people who supported them, were then invited as mentors and advisers to the public administration. From that point on I, as a consultant, or as a adviser, handled many cases, such as the Uber case, the Airbnb case, the closely-held companies, Internet liquor sales, many interesting cases, working alongside the different ministries.

Audrey Tang: At the time I was this independent consultant or adviser to the cyberspace minister. At the time, Minister Jaclyn Tsai, who worked in IBM Asia as head of Asian legal department.

Audrey Tang: She works closely with the deputy prime minister, and then afterwards prime minister Simon Chang, who was in Google as regional director of hardware. They speak the same language as the civic tech people, obviously, coming from multinationals.

Audrey Tang: They very much agree this kind of tech-oriented, or even AI-mediated discussion. We made many cases. I, along with other occupiers, we basically put training camps and taught thousands of public servants of this way of doing consultations, essentially.

Audrey Tang: Afterwards, there was a election. Tsai Ing-wen got elected, and she also campaigned on the idea of open government, and also...what was the slogan? "The government most capable of communicating." That was her platform.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s not just appointed people. The career public servant force must also be capable of communicating. It’s not sufficient to be willing to communicate. One has to be capable of communicate.

Audrey Tang: Then the prime minister at the time, Lin Chuan, asked me to find someone who would essentially serve minister Jaclyn Tsai’s role in the new cabinet. I asked around, and generally people don’t think it’s worth it to abandon their jobs to join the public service, and so on, but they thought that I would be a good person for this job. I wasn’t so sure. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: During August and September last year I had this public Ask Me Anything on ask.pdis.tw. All the journalists, everybody who want me to do anything, I will be engaged in this month-long process of online interaction of what people would like Audrey Tang to do.

Audrey Tang: A lot of the principles, such as my telecommuting, my not involving confidential meetings, radical transparency, all this wasn’t entirely my idea. It’s essentially what the crowd would like to see me do.

Audrey Tang: It’s a better way for me to say, "OK, I’m just a channel. I’m not speaking for any particular NGO, or whatever, but people want to see a different way of doing policymaking. I’m willing to experiment." That’s my mandate.

Audrey Tang: It’s most out of necessity that someone has to carry on the project and all of the political will to build a open government, open policymaking, and also the will of the crowd who want to see this experiment taken to its logical conclusion and see what happens.

Felix Lill: Ask Me Anything, have you rejected any of the ideas? Probably a lot, right?

Audrey Tang: It’s not ideas. It’s clarification of facts. If it’s people who express their sentiments, I, of course, accept their sentiments. On the other hand, if they get 5,000 people on the e-petition site, then it’s binding for the ministry to reply it point by point and meet in their neighborhood if they want.

Audrey Tang: If the petition was about a rural area, like HengChun or PengHu, we actually go there and have a town hall meeting.

Felix Lill: Let’s talk about startups and the attempt of Taiwan to foster that economy, right?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Felix Lill: Now Taiwan is worldwide, very competitive, and quite well known for its hardware production. I would assume that with your vision you’d like to have more software, as well.

Audrey Tang: Not necessarily. In Taiwan there’s a lot of software talent that works in tandem with hardware. For example, recently Google just built its largest mixed hardware/software team base anywhere right in Taiwan by, essentially, acquiring a huge team from HTC. That team has been working with Google for 10 years.

Audrey Tang: There’s plenty of software people there. They work within a hardware ecosystem. Their software is meant to further the possibility of hardware.

Audrey Tang: It’s always been Taiwan’s roadmap, since the PC days. The idea is that, for example, people buy a personal computer because they want to run VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3 on it. It’s important to have software, but on the other hand the software is there to advance this new form factor and the personal computer.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think Taiwan is suddenly becoming the software-only or software, even, as a prime sector, but we are, of course, encouraging young people who specialize in software or in AI to work within existing...not necessarily hardware. It could be agriculture. It could be manufacturing. It could be any kind of cases.

Audrey Tang: Because that’s the beauty of the current generation of software is that it’s not a specialized vertical anymore. You can add some AI as automation to pretty much any field.

Audrey Tang: What we’re encouraging is this kind of cross-discipline, cross-domain startups. We’re not, essentially, saying, "OK, a pure software development vertical is going to be incubated from Taiwan." We’re not saying this.

Felix Lill: I’ve looked a bit at what is being done, also, from the side of the government to support a startup economy. Some support is coming from the government, of course. Some is coming, also, from industry, from existing large companies.

Felix Lill: Epoch Foundation is one example that is quite large, right?

Audrey Tang: The Foundation?

Felix Lill: Epoch Foundation, which consists of a number of larger companies. Is this the best approach, to have large institutions supporting the development within their realms?

Audrey Tang: It’s too general to answer this way. I would say that there are things that only government can do, such as, for example, laws and regulations.

Audrey Tang: Last week, actually, we passed the Foreign Talent Act, where we give foreign talents a lot of incentives of staying in Taiwan. Not necessarily working for one particular job, but giving lectures, having digital nomad lifestyle, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s very new. Taiwan has never done anything like this that says, "OK, we want to be a friendly place." Of course, this is something only government can do. The private sector can’t do this.

Audrey Tang: Also, a law passed last week. We incentivized angel investors so that for every year for three million NT dollars a private VC can enjoy tax deductions when they involve their money in early-stage startup companies.

Audrey Tang: Many of those incentives are what the private sector needs. Previously the regulations, the regulatory body was seen as something that’s not helping, that’s blocking these market forces.

Audrey Tang: I will take another example. For example, this week we’re going to pass the FinTech Sandbox Act. The act is designed so that people say, "OK we’re going to have a financial instrument that’s not quite banking, not quite insurance, not quite whatever, but we’re going to break some regulations."

Audrey Tang: The act says, "OK, it’s good, and you can break those regulations for 6 months or 12 months." For this period you need to, of course, still keep consumer protection, cyber security, etc., in mind, but, most importantly, if this fails you need to write a post-mortem and have the society know why it fails.

Audrey Tang: If it succeeds, if the society think it’s a good idea, then it falls on the regulatory body to change their regulation. They now have an easier time doing so because the society have experience and know that it’s a good thing.

Audrey Tang: It shifts the government’s role from someone who regulates to someone who co-creates. We’re going to do this for driverless cars, also, and even for general Public Sandbox Act.

Audrey Tang: This, coupled with the new NDC, the National Development Council’s point that any startup or any innovative company who can identify a interpretation of the law that’s blocking their business model while not explicitly contradicting the law.

Audrey Tang: The law doesn’t say you can’t do this, but interpretation says you can’t do this. Case in point, in our Psychotherapists Act there is a thing that says that psychotherapists need to work in a specific clinic, but it doesn’t say whether the patient, the client, need to be on the same place as well.

Audrey Tang: For people who want to telecommunicate with their patient, like remote consultation, the act doesn’t say anything, but the Minister of Health and Welfare made an interpretation. Essentially said, "Maybe not the best idea."

Audrey Tang: This is clearly not authorized by the law, so now we are systematically, every week, reviewing these kind of interpretations and making them obsolete if the law doesn’t authorize it. Again, this makes the government a co-creator with the startups, not the regulator.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is the governance part in our DIGI-plus plan, this part is something that only the government can do. We’re taking up this job, but we understand that the economy, the innovations, we stop dictating what’s the best industry to thrive. We want the private sector to show us and break some regulations if they want.

Audrey Tang: Also, for inclusion for our reaching out to the last mile, to address digital inequality, we understand that, actually, local NPOs and local social enterprises are better than the governments to do this. We’re also working with them closely.

Audrey Tang: This is the basic plan, is that the stable infrastructure is something everybody shares, Internet, broadband as a human right. The governance need to change from regulation to co-creation, but the innovation part, the inclusion part we want the private sector and civil society, respectively, to lead and us to follow. That’s the basic idea.

Felix Lill: What are your indicators of success of this vision?

Audrey Tang: That’s a very good question. The indicators here, for the governance part...can you read Chinese?

Felix Lill: Japanese I do, so sometimes I get the kanji, but then sometimes I don’t.

Audrey Tang: Let’s switch to English slide.

Audrey Tang: The key metric at this point is whether it creates constituent value. How many and how wide, how deep, can we work with non-governmental channels. How much does it fit into the ingrained culture of each department and ministry, instead of just the CTO or CDO.

Audrey Tang: How diverse is the source of service. It’s not just government created, or academic created, or private sector created. Preferably, the same service has different channels and each catering to their needs.

Audrey Tang: The KPI we’re currently using is the number of data-driven services. We’re firmly on this part, but we’re not all the way there yet.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan has scored extremely well on the e-government metric. The previous Cabinet has worked hard on the open government metric, but now we’re switching, or advancing, to the data-centric paradigm. This part is what we’re now using as KPIs.

Felix Lill: Will it be OK to get those slides? Is it possible for me to get to those slides?

Audrey Tang: It’s all in public. I’ll send you some.

Felix Lill: That’d be great, because it’s very hard to take enough notes and then still be listening. That’s great.

Felix Lill: We have about a quarter of an hour left. Yesterday I was talking to the Austrian Trade Commissioner. He said that in order to foster more startup development, one benchmark is the 1970s, 1980s entrepreneurial generation. We want to be like them again.

Felix Lill: Is their generation different? Is it the same thing?

Audrey Tang: I was minus 10 years old in 1970. [laughs]

Felix Lill: You can see how that generation is today, how their circumstances were, the conditions under which they grew up, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I can talk with my parents, of course.

Felix Lill: You can do that.

Audrey Tang: I can do that. There’s something fundamentally different, though.

Audrey Tang: At the time, it was before the world Web and before the Internet. Any solutions or any innovations they spread in a matter of months or years, but nowadays when anyone anywhere in the world has innovation it becomes known the next day and the entire developer community benefit from it.

Audrey Tang: It’s a fundamentally different thing, especially for software. There really is no time difference between a theorist in software thinking of a new solution and a practitioner implementing it. Often it happens in a 24-hour period and with the two people in different time zones.

Audrey Tang: What we’re working with is not entrepreneurship. It’s not local anymore. What’s local is the local social needs, the need to be soft, which is why we now focus on social innovation, the Taiwan Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: Because that’s really the only thing that binds an entrepreneur with their local community anymore. Otherwise, their minds are in other communities that’s entirely virtual, the scientific and technological community.

Audrey Tang: It’s not about building a science park or anything. Previously you need a science park because there’s no Internet. There’s no fibers. Now GitHub is the science park.

Audrey Tang: Our strategy at the moment is to identify local social needs. Again, working with social enterprises and NPOs to identify it, and have the young entrepreneurs try to tackle those local problems, and maybe export their solutions worldwide.

Audrey Tang: Through this they’re much less likely to be attracted by some superficial reward mechanism that’s purely profit seeking, because the pure profit-seeking motive doesn’t actually create innovations, other than in the financial domain. It repurposes people to work for what’s hyping or what’s trending. I worked in Silicon Valley for many years, so I know how it’s like.

Audrey Tang: Our current startup strategy focuses on solving real, local problems and creating sustainable business models and solutions. In this regard it’s like the ’70s and ’80s, also, because ’70s and ’80s, other coin side was the first wave of democratization that culminates in the lifting of the press ban in ’89.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, but at the time it’s also to solve a pressing local need that’s not even being talked about by the political system because there was no freedom of speech. That’s the basic idea.

Felix Lill: Having this in mind, what are especially promising startups these days coming from Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: There’s plenty. I’ll talk about AI Labs. It’s a startup, literally, because it’s 2017. It’s very new.

Audrey Tang: AI Labs is one of those rare startups that’s pure software. Again, they are pure software in the sense that they don’t work with any particular hardware vendor. When they work on solving medical issues, orchestrating drones, or do whatever, they still partner with local hardware people. It’s they picking their hardware partners, not the other way around.

Audrey Tang: This is what we’re seeing in the new wave of startups in Taiwan, in that more and more the software people and hardware people are peers, are equals, whereas in the ’70s and the ’80s the hardware people definitely dominates the discussion and hardware people are subservient to them.

Audrey Tang: Again, we’re not billing this as software not talking to hardware. It’s not in Taiwan’s DNA. It may be in some Valley companies’ but it’s not in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: AI Labs is interesting because it’s founded by Ethan Tu, who founded the largest social media site in Taiwan, the PTT. PTT, still, is a nonprofit. Its venture as a nonprofit created a absolute freedom of speech environment that’s not so easy to maintain if you’re a profit-seeking entity.

Audrey Tang: Tu also, in his day job, worked as director of artificial intelligence research, A-Pac, Microsoft. He also has a profit-seeking side working at Microsoft, but then he quit his job in Microsoft and started a company here.

Audrey Tang: This year his company, AI Labs, is seen as something that’s very new, because it’s certainly well backed by NGO money. It retains and is able to get a lot of top talent in Taiwan, but yet it’s not controlled by any specific hardware agenda. It’s focusing on developing AI, pushing the state of the art.

Audrey Tang: They also have a good relationship with the media because they have a lot of pilot projects, such as the news.PTT.cc, where they use artificial intelligence to crowdsource from PTT, essentially like Reddit, but formatted as news.

Audrey Tang: The Chinese name is literally 記者快抄, "Journalist, Take a Copy of This." The AI writes journalism. [laughs] Writes news stories and says, "OK, the journalists can just..." All those pictures and all those titles are created by AI algorithms.

Audrey Tang: Of course, this is more of a show, but this shows the possibility of working across many different domains, a cross-disciplinary innovation model, if you will. It’s all open source, so I even contributed to some of its source code.

Audrey Tang: This symbolizes this decade of new startups that’s remarkably different from the previous ones. There’s many like that. It’s just very photogenic.

Felix Lill: I read that you launched your own first company...

Audrey Tang: When I was 15.

Felix Lill: ...which was a search engine for songs.

Audrey Tang: It’s a search engine. It’s not just for songs.

Felix Lill: Is not just for songs?

Audrey Tang: No.

Felix Lill: Is it still online?

Audrey Tang: No.

Felix Lill: You took it off?

Audrey Tang: We push it out in 1996. It continued operating. Intel invested -- I’m not a shareholder anymore -- in 2000. It dissolved in 2001.

Felix Lill: Because you decided so?

Audrey Tang: No, I was one of the three co-founders. I quit after two years, and then they got the Intel investment and become, essentially, the highest profile software company in Taiwan, certainly, but perhaps in East Asia.

Audrey Tang: It was the dot-com days, so there was a lot of bubbles, and interesting hypes, and so on. A lot of software companies went out along with Inforian, with the company, at the turn of the century. At the time I’m already in Silicon Valley, so I’m not involved in the later part of those things.

Felix Lill: What was the domain of that search engine?

Audrey Tang: The company? It started as a search engine. I started it as a meta search tool. It’s like Spotlight nowadays in Mac, where you can search for anything in your computer. It’s like this.

Felix Lill: That’s what it was?

Audrey Tang: Right, but it also searches different search engines, like AltaVista, or Lycos, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: It also does a lot of other things. We branched out into one of the earliest C2C auction sites. It’s like eBay, or more like Craigslist, but you get the idea. Then, also, a instant messenger. That’s after I quit the company.

Audrey Tang: There’s many other things that Inforian did around the time. There’s a social media-like site, a proto-Facebook, if you will, and many other things.

Audrey Tang: It was mostly exploring what Internet can do at the time, once we have a local community. It never really specialized on any specific part. They tried a lot of different experiments. Some successful, some not so successful.

Felix Lill: If it’s OK, I would like to talk about you as a person, as well. I don’t know, how much time do we have left now?

Audrey Tang: Six minutes, but it’s OK.

Felix Lill: Thank you very much. You’re still doing Hackathons, right?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Felix Lill: Still, now?

Audrey Tang: Every week.

Felix Lill: Can you manage, time-wise?

Audrey Tang: That’s the other thing. I negotiated my work so that every Wednesday and Friday I work outside of the administration, and now, also, every other Tuesday.

Audrey Tang: It’s part of my job to work with civil society, work with social enterprises, work with hackers.

Felix Lill: Wednesday and Friday, that’s the days?

Audrey Tang: Every Wednesday I’m in the Social Innovation Lab. It’s near the JianGuo Flower Market.

Audrey Tang: There we have a space that’s dedicated to social innovation that’s co-created by a lot of social innovators and social enterprise that was just opened last month. It opens until 11:00 PM every day, including weekends. It’s a very good place for people to gather and share their ideas.

Audrey Tang: I have my office hour every Wednesday morning there so people can randomly come and talk to me. Afternoon we have a gov-zero project called vTaiwan, where people have their weekly Meetup there. I attend whenever I can.

Felix Lill: What do people want to know when you have your office hour there? What do they talk to you about?

Audrey Tang: They want to know a lot of the directions of where the social innovation strategy is going. They sometimes bring their own specific cases, like the tele-psychotherapy thing. We actually talk about it in one of the Wednesday meetings.

Audrey Tang: Mostly they want to see the regulation either relaxed or clarified. They want to know what the latest development is, and they want to contribute their ideas.

Audrey Tang: Because all those transcripts and recordings are online, anyway, so people come with the ideas of previous discussions already in mind. Everything is subsequent. I don’t have to explain from scratch every time.

Felix Lill: "Al Jazeera" a year ago or so titled you, "Meet the First Transgender Minister in the World," which is probably a fact, right?

Audrey Tang: It is.

Felix Lill: You’re probably the first.

Audrey Tang: Wikipedia claims it. The English Wikipedia community think it’s true.

Felix Lill: When was it? Last year or so, I did a story about the labor market performance of transgender...It was unfortunately only trans women, because I didn’t find a trans man in the Philippines. Compared to my home area, which is western Europe, and it was incredibly good.

Felix Lill: I fairly easily found a banker, an academic, and also a politician. But she was a local politician. At that point she was the first local politician, which is not the same as minister. Do you think it’s a compliment, or is it annoying if being transgender is always associated with, "Wow, she’s the first," and so on?

Audrey Tang: The fanfare has largely died in the first couple months.

Felix Lill: It’s not really a big issue anymore?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not.

Felix Lill: Do you think that the digital age helps in promoting this, or making it known?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because the computer doesn’t care about your gender.

Felix Lill: This is how you, growing up, felt comfort in...

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Not only the computer doesn’t care about your gender, but also, when I was first embarking in world Web, there’s no Instagram. People mostly just communicated through words.

Audrey Tang: Again, it doesn’t really matter. The Internet developer community cares about your contributions. Of course, when it merges with some offline meetings, conferences, and Instagram...I’m not picking on Instagram, but picture-oriented...

Felix Lill: Do you use it?

Audrey Tang: No. [laughs] Picture-oriented social media, there’s more and more gender stereotyping and so on going on.

Audrey Tang: A bunch of friends of mine in the open source community started this Geek Feminism Wiki that talks about how to be conscious of such issues when you walk out of this bubble of online software makers who don’t care about ethnic or race or gender anyway.

Audrey Tang: When it’s more casual, when it’s on a chat room, when it’s on a conference, there’s many skills that people can learn.

Audrey Tang: I also worked and donated on this movement promoting gender awareness online. Transgender or transphobia is just one part of the general misogyny or whatever thing that was tolerated, certainly not promoted but tolerated, in some aligned channels. But I think it’s normal.

Audrey Tang: Usually people are now much more aware that are not that concerned of eventually getting to the point where people are generally just respecting of diversity and not seeing it as a big deal.

Felix Lill: You’ve worked in the Silicon Valley, in other words, US. You’ve seen many countries. Compare Taiwan with the world regarding openness towards gender diversity. Is it very pioneering?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is certainly no San Francisco. But, again, not many cities are San Francisco. But I think Taiwan is generally very tolerating and even promoting of diversity, not only in the Asian or East Asian context, in which case of course Taiwan is the top country for legalizing marriage equality and everything, but even worldwide comparing to Western and American countries.

Audrey Tang: There is a strong emphasis on tolerance and consensus, those Confucian, Buddhist values, in Taiwan. We never see Buddhists initiate holy wars. It’s one of the peaceful attitudes around those things. It’s very interesting.

Audrey Tang: Also, I think just by mainstreaming gender, mainstreaming transgender, or mainstreaming these things, by not making it a big deal, it also helps the Taiwan society to just tease apart the gender politics versus the deliberative politics. I would think Taiwan is one of the most tolerant society when it comes to a politician that’s transgender.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying of course we’re having all transgender people the equal pay or that they don’t face harassment daily or anything that people still struggle with. But just for the realm of a transgender politician, I think Taiwan’s one of the most forward places.

Felix Lill: Is there harassment still? Do you experience any?

Audrey Tang: Online harassments definitely, but I have a way of troll hugging that’s troll control that’s very effective. People generally don’t see the point of harassing me anymore.

Audrey Tang: In general, there’s online harassment, not just to transgender but for people in general. It is a problem on social media sites. That’s why we’re working with the K to 12 curriculum to build media literacy, to build ICT literacy into every field so people can grow up learning that there’s effective communication and there’s misinformation and harassment and how to deal with those.

Audrey Tang: We’re taking this into curriculum. We’re, again, the first place in Asia that designed this into the curriculum that’s going to take effect the year after next year.

Felix Lill: Can you say two sentences about what that is about?

Audrey Tang: When we’re designing the new curriculum that’s taking place a year and a half from now, we design so that it’s character based, instead of skill based or capacity based as in previous curriculums. It’s a large break from what East Asian curricula usually do. Usually East Asian curriculum’s designed so that people learn specific skills. They specialize eventually.

Audrey Tang: But in the new curriculum, we’re saying we can’t predict the world 12 years from now. Eventually any specific field may be made obsolete. They may merge with another field. They may change.

Audrey Tang: We think the three fundamental characters -- being autonomous, autonomy, interaction, being able to communicate, common good, being able to think in a larger picture -- remains important humanistic values no matter the world or AI changes.

Audrey Tang: As part of the three main characters, the communication one, the interaction one, we design a part called ICT and Media Literacy, [Taiwanese] . This literacy is not designed to have just two-hour every week. It’s not a class.

Audrey Tang: It’s a way for textbook makers, for teachers to design their education methods so that, again, just like what I mentioned about regulation, the teacher is now a co-learner with the student rather than a lecturer.

Audrey Tang: The lecturer doesn’t work anyway because the students use their phones to check Wikipedia while the lecture is going. We give up the idea of the teachers know everything.

Audrey Tang: Rather, the teacher’s going to learn with the children with online resources, fully knowing that online, there’s misinformation. There’s harassment. There’s everything. The teacher also shows how to navigate in spite of those issues and show how to do critical thinking.

Audrey Tang: For this curriculum to work, there’s two prerequisites. First, we need to have even very rural or aborigine, indigenous areas to have broadband access. We build a special budget to ensure that everybody has broadband everywhere, all the schools in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Second, the teachers need to be able to respond to parents, some of them still expecting a more authoritarian teaching style, and say, "It’s not going to be good for your children if they just obey specific commands. It’s not going to be good for your children."

Audrey Tang: For the state examinations, the parents’ relationship, the local curriculum committee school working with local NPOs and social enterprises, all of this needs to happen which is why we’ve been busily preparing this year and next year before the curriculum takes effect.

Felix Lill: It’ll take effect by 2019.

Audrey Tang: It’s 2019. It’s the first curriculum that the review board includes those K through 12 students themselves.

Felix Lill: Would you wish you would have had that kind of a curriculum as you were growing up?

Audrey Tang: Yes, certainly.

Felix Lill: You dropped out of school at a young age, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Felix Lill: Suppose if you had such a curriculum, would things have been different, or not much?

Audrey Tang: Before I was an official minister, I was a member in the curriculum committee, so I literally helped writing that thing.

Audrey Tang: Of course, Taiwan is special in that for the past decade or so, we had a tradition of alternative school -- the Wad of Shula, the Montessori, all those different educational paradigms. We’re, again, one of the first places in Asia that it’s legal and even encouraged to set up alternative schooling system and home schooling. It’s legal.

Audrey Tang: Just like the FinTech sandbox, it’s essentially educational sandbox, that’s all around Taiwan for the past decade. To be honest, most of the alternative schooling system has their own shortcomings. Some of them are outright failures.

Audrey Tang: The good thing about sandbox is that some things actually stood out and proved to be very useful, like this co-learning with students, autonomy, communication, and direct access to Internet, media literacy, and so on.

Audrey Tang: During my work in the curriculum committee, we harvest the part that actually works in the alternative schooling system and made it the basic education. Of course, I wish I would have that when I was a student.

Audrey Tang: The way we do this is by forking the government, setting up alternative schools, making sure that some of those ideas actually worked, and then convincing the curriculum committee, "OK, now we’re just mainstreaming this." That’s the basic strategy.

Felix Lill: As we’re talking, you seem to be very calm and so on. Is there anything that drives you mad?

Audrey Tang: No.

Felix Lill: [laughs] Never?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Felix Lill: Serious?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m physically incapable of feeling anger. I was born with this heart defect, that whenever I get upset...Until I got the surgery at 12, my hardware, the body is not capable of feeling very strong emotions.

Audrey Tang: Whenever I get upset, my face turns green. There’s no sufficient oxygen. I would faint, so there’s a conditioned response for me not to get upset.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, it means that I can’t experience ecstasy or a very strong sense of joy as well. After the surgery at 12, I practiced how to feel positive emotions in large doses, but never really consciously trained myself to feel anger at large doses.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, my emotional circuit is wired such that I can’t feel anger.

Felix Lill: You don’t remember the last time you felt anger, sadness, or [non-English speech] , ache, you know?

Audrey Tang: Sadness, of course, certainly.

Felix Lill: That is possible?

Audrey Tang: Because it doesn’t send my heart racing. It’s a hardware thing.

Felix Lill: Right, so excitement, anger, joy?

Audrey Tang: Anything that pounds the heart.

Felix Lill: When it happens, nevertheless, you’ve got to tone yourself down?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, automatically, it’s like a reflex, take a deep breath, and so on. When it’s too much, I literally just faint, when I was a child.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have the circuit for that. I’m sure if I train it, I could still experience it. Now that I’m physically capable, I don’t see the point in this.

Felix Lill: Regarding anger?

Audrey Tang: Anger, yeah.

Felix Lill: How about physical activity?

Audrey Tang: Exercise?

Felix Lill: Yeah, exercise.

Audrey Tang: I practice tai chi and some other softer, slower exercises, and that’s it. I learned a little bit yoga and pilates, and whatever, but I certainly don’t do marathon.

Felix Lill: That’s essentially those sports where you’re rather calm, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Felix Lill: Do you think that helps everything that you do, not being too excited, not being too mad, and so on, [laughs] in your job and so on?

Audrey Tang: We can ask my colleagues.

彭筱婷: [laughs] What? Excuse me?

Audrey Tang: Do you think that me being physically incapable of being very angry or upset help the work that we do?

彭筱婷: No. [laughs]

Felix Lill: No?

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Felix Lill: Some people are afraid of a boss that is sometimes...

Audrey Tang: That shouts at people?

Felix Lill: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know, it may be a useful management skill, right?

彭筱婷: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. If my colleague doesn’t think so, I don’t think it’s the case. It’s just a peculiarity.

Felix Lill: Thanks so much for taking time, on such a short notice.

Audrey Tang: No problem. I’ll send you the slides that I showed today and a transcript.

Felix Lill: That’s great. It’s been a really interesting talk to me, very interesting.

Felix Lill: One thing I forgot, though, in the hackathons, of course, now you compete with much younger people, right?

Audrey Tang: It’s not a competition. The hackathons that...

Felix Lill: You can win and not win, right?

Audrey Tang: No, no, no, the g0v hackathons are not...It’s like our new curriculum. We don’t compare student’s scores against each other in the same class anymore.

Audrey Tang: People show their pictures. People do their work throughout the day. At the end, they show their work done during the day, but there’s no award, no prize, no gold thing.

Audrey Tang: It’s not one of those competitive hackathons. It’s more like a collaborative hackathon. Since the beginning, there’s always awarded, like the Sun Microsystems hackathons, and the non-awarded, like the Berkeley hackathons, and so on, the bootcamp or Barcamp hackathons. We’re strictly in this non-competing part.

Felix Lill: Do you feel like the new generation of the...probably you have 20 and teenagers there. Are they much faster or more creative, because they just overtake you already?

Audrey Tang: No.

Felix Lill: Not much?

Audrey Tang: It’s not about speed. This is, again, a point we’re making is that instead of saying "young entrepreneurship," we’re now saying cross-generational entrepreneurship. The best ideas, the best teams tend to be not just cross discipline, but cross generation.

Audrey Tang: We do need people who specialize in domain knowledge, which may take 10 years, 20 years to obtain, and people who bring a fresh pair of eyes, and are not restricted by old solutions, as well as people who are trained in academic skills like computation, or science, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: We need all those different people in order to form a useful team. It’s true for my office as well. It’s generally what we see in hackathons. The most successful teams are the ones that are cross generational and cross discipline.

Felix Lill: Do you mind if I take a picture of you sitting there?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Yeah, it’s fine.

Felix Lill: It’s easy...

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Felix Lill: Smartphone picture, but if it’s small enough on the page it would still work, I guess. With the computer, it would...

Felix Lill: For the sake of transparency...

Audrey Tang: Will you send it to me? [laughs]

Felix Lill: Thank you so much. I’m meeting Garage+ now. You know that, right, from Epoch Foundation?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Felix Lill: Start-up space. I don’t know what it will be, but we’ll see.

Felix Lill: What do I do with the cup...

Audrey Tang: Just leave it. Just leave it there.

Felix Lill: Thanks so much.