Audrey Tang: You can see that I’m wearing a headphone. I’m only recording what I speak, and when you say anything there is no recording. I’m recording one-sidedly.

Audrey Tang: You’re in the Internet Hall of Fame. You’re famous, too. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m still using “vi”, so yeah. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Excellent. What is your budget cycle? If you pass a law that institutes a new agency, but it operates in September, doesn’t it mean that its budget needs to come from elsewhere in the government?

Audrey Tang: Oh, really? Budget first and then agency next. That’s OK.

Audrey Tang: Oh, very nice. Very good strategy.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I read a figure, but I didn’t realize that it’s already active now. Excellent. Good work.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the Starlink.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It connects people, but not beings. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Of course. Typhoon, too. Tsunami.

Audrey Tang: Our telecom towers need to operate even when electricity grid is cut.

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly.

Audrey Tang: Reverse charge. Yes.

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely.

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. I’ve been to Okinawa too, [laughs] like a lot of Taiwanese people.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s common in Taiwan. We have that all the time.

Audrey Tang: The same in Taipei. I’ve lost my wallet like three times over the past 30 years, and every time it’s returned to me. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: OK. We’ve also been working for the next four years strategy of Taiwan’s DIGI+ strategy. We just finalized ours. We’re very happy to see we have the same values.

Audrey Tang: Our is called D-I-G-I, DIGI⁺, which covers the digitization, which is same as your idea of no one left behind, and innovation, which I’ll talk later, governance, which is more like the ethical part and then the inclusion, which is the accessibility part. Digital, innovation, governance, and inclusion, D-I-G-I – that’s our four pillars.

Audrey Tang: If we compare the two, there is one very large difference according to what you just said. You said ethical use of technology, but we say the digital competence for ethical innovation, and this is a little bit different. One is the consumer side, and one is the prosumer side, but otherwise, it’s the same.

Audrey Tang: Yes, in Taiwan too. I am in Kaohsiung right now. All the six municipality are self-governing, but the central government take care of the more rural places that are not municipalities.

Audrey Tang: Dark silos, like dark fiber but for silos. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s actually my specialty. [laughs] Today, I am in Kaohsiung. I am going to join the Kaohsiung city mayor, previously the Vice Premier, the second in the cabinet, who worked with me on the COVID issues has been elected the mayor of Kaohsiung. Chen Chi-mai invited me to be here, with the slogan, “Smart City, Smarter Citizens.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Smart Citizens is a very wide concept. Also, your institution is based on that idea of connecting citizens. My 15-minutes talk today talks exactly about how to solve this problem, but I can, of course, do a quick preview if you have 10 minutes of my talk.

Audrey Tang: OK. I’m sorry it’s in kanji, though not in Nihongo. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This part is very common, actually, in both sides, so I hope that this will work. I’m going to share screen. Let me see if the screen can be shared. Let’s see. This should work for some value of work. Here. Do you see it?

Audrey Tang: OK, all right. This is the case called data democracy in acute care. Data democracy means that all stakeholders have a governing interest can co-create the rules where data is used. The acute care part refers to a gas explosion in Kaohsiung many years ago. It killed and hurt, wounded a lot of people, but at a time the ICU in a different domain was not connected.

Audrey Tang: The EMT part doesn’t talk to the ambulance. The ambulance doesn’t know which hospital to go to. Everybody’s calling everybody, and this is very chaotic. This team, very professional, very good, but there is no cross-domain feedback.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, they, after the gas explosion, mapped out all the potential stakeholders. This is what they call the data heroes. They work with something like your high school students, I suppose, but they’re more like graduate-level students to find out the stakeholders there.

Audrey Tang: Then, they mapped out the injury side, the major trauma side, the EMT side, and all these different sides. They entered this very interesting mechanism called the Presidential Hackathon. In Presidential Hackathon, what we do is that we made sure that every year, the President, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen hands out five trophies to cross-sectoral teams.

Audrey Tang: Actually, each person here represent a different stakeholder, but they all received this trophy. This trophy is the shape of Taiwan with a micro projector here.

Audrey Tang: The micro project, if you turn it on, it shows this picture and with Dr. Tsai Ing-wen promising the team that whatever they did in three months, we will allocate, from the central government, the budget, the personnel, the law and regulation to make it happen next year.

Audrey Tang: There’s no money in this hackathon, but there is a presidential promise that we will do whatever it takes to make it real. That’s all I need to say because everything else you probably already know, after the Presidential Hackathon, we work with professional facilitators.

Audrey Tang: We map out the stakeholders. We did rough consensus workshops. Of course, introduced the EDXL – HAVE 2.0, TEP – Open APIs making sure that, for example, the proof of concept can find accessible interruptible unit deliveries.

Audrey Tang: This basically is talking about a very simple thing like the barcode, that can just connect the emergency medical service to the hospital EHR, which then enable the dashboards that enabled the immediate triage even on the ambulance, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that the national government doesn’t need to override the municipal government because this is after all a proposal by two governments, one municipal Kaohsiung, and one county Pingtung which is near to Kaohsiung. They have all the expertise, anyway.

Audrey Tang: What the central government is doing is essentially just making the XML like EDXL and CAP and FAIR and FHIR protocols standard, and then finding the stakeholders and the political will to make it happen. This is very brief, but you do get the idea.

Audrey Tang: That’s the three-months incubation program, essentially. Every year, we receive like last year – well, this year, anyway – we receive more than 200 applications.

Audrey Tang: Each one needs to be associated with one or more SDGs, that’s the global goals. Out of the 169 SDG targets, each target will have many different proposals. That’s the first part because the common purpose is already defined by the global goals framework.

Audrey Tang: The United Nations in 2015.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, right. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: My role is basically making sure that the…You can call it infrastructure politics. People who work with Internet governance are, in a sense, politicians, but they…We are politicians only insofar as we can find rough consensus, so that people understand this is of common benefit to all stakeholders because we don’t have a Navy or Army. We can’t force people to do things.

Audrey Tang: My team are professional facilitators. The teams that run professional facilitation for working groups – professional editors, court reporters, like IETF multistakeholder forums, with real-time summaries and transcripts, things like that.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, any local team that enlist our support from the central governments, every year we choose through a new voting system called quadratic voting or QV, which makes sure that people vote, not strategical but truthfully.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, using the QV, we select 24 teams this year out of the 240 or something and give them this kind of design incubation for three months, so that they can form Data Coalition’s and the best five gets the presidential promise to make it reality.

Audrey Tang: That’s the same assumption as place-making. If you want to make place-making work in a region, I think the Japanese regional revitalization usually work with a local college to build the capacity for the local people to propose their place-making plans.

Audrey Tang: Also, setting the national agenda, because they then basically give a free pass to the presidential office access. Whatever their idea is, it’s as same as if the president has it as a campaign promise.

Audrey Tang: It’s very radical, but it’s very effective. We’ve been running it for three years now.

Audrey Tang: I read that someone who have successfully organized this kind of activities, of course, without presidential access but otherwise the same, [Japanese] , is now part of your government as well, of course, for Japan.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. [Japanese] who build the Tokyo Metropolitan COVID dashboard, I think he is now deputy or associate as CTO or something.

Audrey Tang: Yes, so he knows how to run this kind of stuff.

Audrey Tang: I’m supported by very senior teams, too. If it’s me calling people to action, the younger people respond, but if the more senior people call to action, the more senior people respond. It all depends on what kind of population you want to respond to your empowerment and call to action.

Audrey Tang: Of course. If you want to do this monthly, we can just set up a monthly call schedule or something.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think so.

Audrey Tang: Yes, because they need the approval. Yes.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: You can teach people to play quantum chess. There’s a video with Steven Hawking playing with the actor from “Ant-Man” about quantum chess. It’s very easy to understand. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: You’re having a digital day every October 10?

Audrey Tang: Oh, so possibly 10/10?

Audrey Tang: 10/10. That’s great because that’s our national day. The national day here is October 10. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That makes us a digital nation, I guess. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I’m interested. We also get a lot of request from the industry, that basically says if they want to transmit multiple terabytes of information through the public Internet, it’s very difficult.

Audrey Tang: This usage case, which is very, very high throughput but not so demanding on the latency, versus if we are talking about empowering rural people, then for tele-education and just for this kind of call, what we need is super low latency but not necessarily very high throughput. Putting these two both on the international scale, on the same Internet framework is going to be a challenge.

Audrey Tang: Ah, OK.

Audrey Tang: Oh, good.

Audrey Tang: Do you know Kenny Huang of TWNIC?

Audrey Tang: Of course, Kuo-Wei Wu, you probably already know. Kenny Huang, Yuh-Jye Lee, and Ching-Teng Hsiao who built the first search engine company in Taiwan, are currently all working on this, what we call the advanced Internet infrastructure project, which sounds very familiar to what you were just talking.

Audrey Tang: Maybe their team and your working-level team can have another biweekly or monthly call.

Audrey Tang: I just pasted to you a link to Nicole Chan’s profile; we intersected shortly in the cabinet for a couple of years, but she, after leaving the cabinet, became a Number Resource Organization member council in APNIC for a one-year term.

Audrey Tang: She is strongly connected to the TWNIC community that I just mentioned to you and the Digital Transformation Association Taiwan, people that works on the civic part of the strategizing of digital transformation. This is a very valuable connection to have, because she already have served one year, so she knows the ethnic culture.

Audrey Tang: Ah, good.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Audrey Tang: You’re selling your IPv4 allocations, that’s the idea?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: This is very, very creative. This is excellent. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: 43/9, yes.

Audrey Tang: I’m also part of the board of RadicalxChange, which is funded by Vitalik Buterin, my fellow board member. Vitalik, of course, created Ethereum. He is also upgrading Ethereum to 2.0. In this process, the upgrade is funded partly by him himself selling the Ethereum 1.0 tokens that he has. [laughs] This reminds me of what Vitalik is doing.

Audrey Tang: Good. If we need more frequent meetings, probably working-level will be better. We also need to get more people in anyway if we want to talk about specific topics. In the strategy level, I’m really happy to talk every month.

Audrey Tang: OK. Excellent. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Audrey Tang: It was great. Live long and prosper.

Audrey Tang: Bye.