Audrey Tang: Do you want to press record?

Renat Künzi: Yes, of course. I’ll do. I have three parts. First part, just short. Just about you, some bio information. Second part is the main part about digital collective or collaborative democracy in your concept, your vision of this collaborative democracy. Third part, also a bit smaller again about the international impact.

Renat Künzi: Audrey, just short information about you as a person. How old are you? What studies did you do? Just the simple key facts…

Audrey Tang: …that you can look up on Wikipedia?

Renat Künzi: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s true. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m 38 years old now. I’ve been Taiwan’s Digital Minister for the past three years. Before that, I was also understudy of a previous minister for a couple years.

Audrey Tang: I joined to work with the government, not for the government on three conditions. That’s location independence, radical transparency, and voluntary association. I’m happy to explain those further.

Renat Künzi: Was there an initial moment when you became a civic tech activist or that you started to think in a broader way to work for the development of Taiwan? Was there some activative moment?

Audrey Tang: I remember when I was five years old, my parents were asking me, because there was a new party, the first party after the lifting of the martial law that was being formed – actually, martial law was just being lifted, it’s not wholly lifted then – the Democratic Progressive Party.

Audrey Tang: I remember being asked by the adults do I support the Nationalist Party or the DPP. Because I was just six years old, I know what a nationalist means. It means somebody who identify as a citizen of a nation, but I don’t know what progress means.

Audrey Tang: My parents tried to explain to me, as well as my uncles and so on, that progress is a lot of different directions. Whenever people feel that there is a social injustice, there’s environment sustainability issues, anything that people can identify that needs improvement, people go ahead and improve it. Inherently, there’s a idea of a pluralism in it. That was maybe my first understanding of politics.

Audrey Tang: A few years later, in 1989, my dad would travel accidentally, because he was just there to attend a conference, in the state, in Beijing, when the students went to protest. He covered the Tiananmen activities until the first of June before returning to Taiwan, which is very fortunate for our family.

Audrey Tang: He also covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and made sure that he wants to pursue a PhD to study the dynamic of the Tiananmen activities. Because his professor is in Germany, I travel to Germany for a year to study with him and met a lot of Tiananmen exiles.

Audrey Tang: A lot of them are just undergrad or graduate students, and they were finishing their schools that they could not finish back in the PRC, so continuing their study in Europe. I remember in the living room, just talking about democracy with lots of Tiananmen exiles. That’s maybe one of the moments for me.

Audrey Tang: Finally, after I returned to Taiwan and had a Internet account, I think that was in 1996 when I was 15 years old, I decided that maybe dropping out of junior high school is a good idea. I told my principal that my textbooks were out of date, that I’m able to participate in the knowledge creation just on archive.org, the preprint servers, as well as the open access community.

Audrey Tang: My principal says, “Sure, you don’t have to go to school anymore,” and covered for me. I founded quite a few start-ups. I think my real moment participating in democracy started then, because then I got to know this Internet community with IEPF, with the W3C. Those are those emerging governance structures where people are just practicing this idea of multi-stakeholder Internet governance.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first democratic system that I knew. It wouldn’t be another six years until I get my voting rights. At that time, I’m already very well-versed in this kind of directly participative democracy where all you need is a email account. Nobody knows that you’re just 15 years old, so it’s very inclusive for me at that time.

Renat Künzi: When you worked with the government, was this a change of role? How did you proceed this process?

Audrey Tang: If you look, my name card, which is a very good time to bring up my name card…

Renat Künzi: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: That was actually last year’s name card. This is this year’s one, but the front is the same. It’s just that back is slightly different, depending on the sustainable goals we’re focusing on. As you can see plainly on my name card, I’m not really representing anyone. I’m a lower-case minister. It means that I preach about things.

Audrey Tang: Because of radical transparency, people who interview me, like we’re doing now, people who come to lobby about something, internal meetings that I’m a chair, I make sure that, just like in Internet governance, there’s a radically transparent record of it so everybody can build on each other’s argument instead of just lobbying for their private interests. People under the circumstances usually have to at least care somewhat about the public interests.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that it’s a change of role for me, personally, because I’ve been always operating this way. Rather, this is a attempt to bring some of the legitimacy-building devices from Internet governance into everyday governance in the cabinet.

Renat Künzi: Last question in this bio part. Are you proud that you made this way, that you’re also a member of the Taiwanese government? How do you look at this?

Audrey Tang: I’m happy that the Taiwanese Cabinet is willing to give this collaborative governance a genuine try. This is something that is very rare. Usually, we get similar attempts. We have many people in this kind of network. In Europe alone, there is the DECODE project, the Horizon 2020 project. Before that, there was the Decentralized Cities.

Audrey Tang: There’s many, many projects that try to crack this nut of a inclusive digital democracy. Mostly, they work on the edge of the government, meaning that maybe they process one significant case, maybe a couple month, once. Maybe they get a political will by a mayor of a certain city, but once the mayor switches, then it’s gone.

Audrey Tang: We’re, just recently, having to work a governance mechanism for a very powerful software called Consul because the Madrid City, although they’re still using it, is no longer actively leading its development.

Audrey Tang: I think something that’s at a national-level that is less indeed regulated as a national regulation for both online participation, as well as the personnel required for online participation, that is very rare. I wouldn’t say I’m proud, but I would say it’s very fortunate that we get to have this lab for cutting-edge experiments in collaborative governance.

Renat Künzi: As you are the first minister for digitalization, I guess worldwide, what about your contacts on international level with other governments or other government bodies? Are there such international debates on this level?

Audrey Tang: The good thing about collaborative governance, or CoGov as the UN now calls it – It’s easier to remember, so I’ll just use CoGov I guess – is that it’s, by definition, not only something that ministers can participate. Some semi-sovereign entities, certainly governance such as Facebook or Google, they are also very active participants in this new dialogue of CoGov.

Audrey Tang: There are also many people who think that maybe Wikipedia, of course, Mozilla Foundation, EFF, and the people who care a lot about human rights on the online space, because of this collaborative governance architecture, they’re also very instrumental in setting the norms.

Audrey Tang: That is what people accept as normal in this what we call cyber norm package, which is the set of passively agreed things that people agree that it’s worth keeping in the values of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: First, on your question, yes, I’ve been working also as a digital ambassador to those semi-sovereign entities, as well as those other digital ambassadors, which is actually not a unique thing from Taiwan. I think many Scandinavian countries, Australia for sure, many countries already have this role of a digital ambassador.

Audrey Tang: We work pretty closely, I would say, on issues that captures everybody’s attention such as how to manage the sovereign nation and coordinating inauthentic behavior that try to sow discord in liberal democracies. That’s something that people are very interested in and that we work very closely with other likeminded countries.

Audrey Tang: I would say that it’s two roles. One is to work specifically to be accountable to the Internet community, including the large platforms. The other one is to bring the norms that we have been forming in Taiwan and spread it to other nearby, as well as worldwide jurisdictions.

Renat Künzi: What about your links today to g0v, which you were a cofounder or a founder?

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the things about Internet rumors is that I have to keep saying that I wasn’t a founder at all. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The g0v movement…

Renat Künzi: [laughs] I was told by Jason that you were a founding member.

Audrey Tang: I’m an early participant, for sure. To be very pedantic, the g0v movement started in late 2012 and I joined early 2013. There’s definitely a three-month gap between [laughs] the g0v gets founded when I’m just a casual person on IRC helping them along, versus when I attended physically my first g0v hackathon and started spearheading one of the g0v projects, which is the MoE dictionary.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say I’m a cofounder, but I’m a very early participant, that’s for sure. Today, I’m still working with g0v projects. The vTaiwan project in particular still takes place every Wednesday evening. I’m no longer participating each and every meetup, but I’m usually around Wednesdays anyway.

Audrey Tang: I’m usually having some conversations with some participants in the meetup right before their meetups, buy them dinner, [laughs] or at least to guarantee them a stable working space. That’s one thing.

Audrey Tang: The g0v international task force is also one of the teams using the facilities of their startup hub, which is also part of the social innovation lab that I am helping manage. It’s my other office, which I wonder if you have time to go to. It’s like this, a pretty beautiful place.

Audrey Tang: Also, I would also say that other g0v projects such as the CoFacts project, although I don’t have direct connection, as in I don’t attend their meetups, but I also make sure that whenever they make a breakthrough or whether they need some collaboration for underlying platform and so on, I make sure that I amplify their messages.

Audrey Tang: I do that for other fact-checkers such as Taiwan Fact-Checking Center as well. It’s not because they are g0v, it’s just because my work also has some synergies with the work they’re doing. That’s about it.

Audrey Tang: I’ve also attended some g0v international activities. For example, Code for Japan, which is a roughly g0v equivalent in Japan, ran a co-workshop with the vTaiwan project.

Renat Künzi: What’s the name of this project?

Audrey Tang: Code for Japan.

Renat Künzi: Code for Japan, yes, thank you.

Audrey Tang: Ran some bilateral projects with the vTaiwan project in Japan. We held two workshops together. I joined as a participant, certainly not as a digital minister to the workshops and working on, I think it was one about teleworking, one about digital signature and how it works with the existing seal culture in Japan.

Audrey Tang: Many civic hackers come from Japan side came, but high-level officials from the Japanese cabinet also came.

Renat Künzi: What topic is right in the moment is on top of your agenda? What are you developing? Which project?

Audrey Tang: I have three main projects. One is the participatory officer, participation officer network, the PO Network. It could be seen on the po.pdis.tw website. The idea is that each ministry have this team of people who are charged to meet people where they are.

Audrey Tang: Instead of waiting for people to come to the streets or something, we actively, proactively discover the trending issues that people raise on the petition platform, or that people are just raising in general, and talk to people preemptively to make sure that people who care a lot about these things can actually have their input into the decision-making process earlier than usual. Meaning that they join at agenda setting process, not when the implementation is already being done.

Audrey Tang: In design thinking terms, they join on the left side of the first time and not on the right side of the second time. This is very important because then that gets people into this idea that people can have different values despite different positions, which is very difficult if you’re already at the implementation level. That’s one of the three things that I do.

Audrey Tang: The topics that we discuss every month, we select two topics to discuss. These are entirely citizen-led, usually through popular petitions. We just decided yesterday actually our topics of this month.

Audrey Tang: One is about a cultural, religious ritual that compares the weight of pigs and have the pig with the most weight win the competition. That involves during the feeding of those prized pigs, according to the petitioner, unethical treatment of the pigs because they’re too heavy to move. That’s one topic.

Audrey Tang: Another topic I think is about people who think that in the schools, when there’s sexual harassments or other kinds of abuse to the school children, they don’t trust the Minister of Education enough to handle it in a just fashion. They are petitioning for establishing a national-level council to handle such kind of reports. These are the topics of this month.

Renat Künzi: Now, let’s have a look at the toolbox of collaborative governance, digital direct democracy. I mentioned, or Jason told me about these two platforms, vTaiwan and Join. Are there other important tools that play a key role in this digital collaborative debate?

Audrey Tang: Join and vTaiwan are more about setting up a platform and have the conversation input into the platform. My other two mandates are social innovation and youth engagement, which we use different platforms with those. The social innovation platform, si.taiwan.gov.tw, is less about e-petition, this is more about getting people into the habit of looking into their voluntary local reviews or other SDG goals that their municipality or their community is focusing on based on the 17 global goals.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that people have immediate access to the partners, as well as people who are doing similar work like telemedicine, circular economy, and so on, and making sure that people have timely access to the ministries involved.

Audrey Tang: In the social innovation regional tour, I don’t actually wait for people to raise petitions. I use the office hour, which is every Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., where people can come talk to me, or the biweekly or so tours around Taiwan where I go to the most rural indigenous or offshore islands, and make sure that people who have a conversation locally with the co-ops, social enterprises, and charities have real-time access to the high-speed video link to the ministries in Taipei.

Audrey Tang: It’s still radically transparent. It shares the same transcript platform as the other meetings that I’m a chair of. It shares the same SayIt platform.

Audrey Tang: The key difference is that we’re not asking people to come to any particular website. We find people in their vicinity. We bring the tech to the people, for the people in those communities, it’s just a regular town hall meetings.

Audrey Tang: It’s just thanks to Taiwan’s broadband as human rights, no matter where they are, they are guaranteed 10 mbps link back to various municipalities where we can bring people together into a listening space. That’s social innovation.

Audrey Tang: For youth advisory group, we also have another website, the advisory.yta.gov.tw. Here, you can see all the youth counselors who are reverse mentors to ministries. The idea is that each minister can nominate one young person, usually less than 30 and always less than 35, to serve as a reverse mentor, much as I was a reverse mentor for Minister of Japan Tsai, many years ago, four years ago.

Audrey Tang: The idea here is that the young people are not only a understudy, they are actually here to lead the ministry into a more forward-looking direction. They have direct access to the head of the council, which is our premier, our prime minister, and helped along by yours truly, but also ministers of education, labor, and economy.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that every young person can also have this meeting regionally to talk about the work that they are focusing on. As you can see, there’s a wide variety of topics that they care about. We have an ongoing map of all the different policies currently in place for all different youth engagement, including the presidential promises, as well as the ministerial projects.

Audrey Tang: All the youth counselors can identify the missing points, the gaps within it. For example, one of the youth counselor recently proposed that we have a delegation to the WorldSkills competition, which is like Olympics but for skilled workers. Unlike athletes which always go on those national day parade, the WorldSkills delegation often don’t get any recognition.

Audrey Tang: He proposed that not only we should just include them into the national day parade, but actually we should work just as we look at the sport athletes and how they fit back into the education system. We should make sure that they integrate well with the education system not just as individuals, but rather as symbols for furthering our skills education and so on.

Audrey Tang: These are just passed very quickly by the prime minister. The prime minister just take those ideas from the understudies/reverse mentors and just bring them into the national discourse. That is the youth engagement part.

Audrey Tang: I would also say the social innovation is not limited to organizations, to well-organized charities, companies, or co-ops. It could just be a random assembly of people who are working together to solve one particular issue, like this team called Water Saviour from the Taiwan Water Corporation.

Audrey Tang: During the presidential hackathon, spent three months to work across sectors to boot a chatbot that can detect the water leakage so that a new leak takes two days, not two months as before to get detected. The presidential hackathon is by itself also a made-up platform for all those different innovation that I mentioned about in those different platforms to surface during April to July.

Audrey Tang: Every year, the president gives out five trophies to five teams that proved to the whole society that it’s actually a better way of doing things in public service. There’s no money associated with the prize, but there is a projector.

Audrey Tang: If you turn it on, it projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you, which is very useful for public servants. If their director general say, “There’s no budget,” you turn on the projector, there is budget.

Audrey Tang: If your minister says that it requires cross-minister coordination, you just turn the projector and there will be a cross-minister coordination, because it symbolizes the presidential promise that whatever it is the idea that’s proven in the three months, we are committed to make sure it’s become national policy within 12 months.

Audrey Tang: This is a very high binding power to all those emerging ideas that sprung out from the youth engagement, from the social innovation, or from the participation officer channels.

Renat Künzi: I’d be glad if you could send me in an email these links of this projects.

Audrey Tang: Of course, sure.

Renat Künzi: I think proves that it’s not just a nice talk, but it’s effective.

Audrey Tang: We’ve been running this for more than two years now. There’s many teams.

Renat Künzi: I have a very close contact in Switzerland to the most skilled journalist fellow in civic tech journalism. She asked me to ask you about a special platform Polis. She wants to know, is it still in use?

Audrey Tang: Yes, we are actively using it. Just a couple days ago, we concluded one of the most participated Polis conversations in Taiwan, actually. It’s the conversation around mountaineering. As you can see, all those five different aspects around mountaineering, whereby we open up the mountains, actually get a lot of participation.

Audrey Tang: As usual, when we look at any Polis conversation, we see that previously, if you only look institutional media, you tend to see just these divisive statements about, “If you open up the mountains, people will leave a lot of trash, we cannot trust the average tourist,” and so on and so forth.

Audrey Tang: If we just spend calories on these statements, we will never get the end of it. We made sure that there is what we call group-informed consensus. Meaning that no matter which side you are on, whether you’re for amateur or for professional mountaineering, everybody agrees on those things.

Audrey Tang: We made sure that we hold ourselves to accounts to talk about the top 20 group-informed consensus across those five different aspects. We invite everybody who proposed this idea to resonate with everyone to the face-to-face meeting, which is also livestreamed, to make sure that we collectively build the agenda for opening up the mountains. Polis is alive and well.

Audrey Tang: We’re exporting the use of Polis to Philippines, to Thailand, to many different places as well. We also contributed because of the digital dialogue that we’re running with AIT, the de facto embassy of US in Taiwan, we also made sure that Polis have good bilingual capabilities and that everybody can leave statements in any language and it’s automatically translated to the other language.

Audrey Tang: Some of the work is starting to be done from the Canadian government, but we finished their work so Polis is now really bilingual.

Renat Künzi: Is there something like a magic formula that you could tell me or give to other countries, other governments, what principles they have to keep in mind to implement a successful and digital direct democracy, these kind of collaborative democracy. Is there this kind of magic formula? What would you advise?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there are two necessary but not sufficient conditions. The first one is to make sure that you really take broadband as human right.

Audrey Tang: It’s easy to get to the point where it’s maybe 80 percent of people enjoying broadband. In Taiwan, we made sure that we look at it a couple of years ago, and we have coverage maybe 98 percent. But we focus very hard on those final 2 percent.

Audrey Tang: Now, even if you are on the topmost of Taiwan, which is the Yu Shan mountain, almost four kilometers high, or if you’re on the southmost Pacific islands of Dongsha and Taping, depending, your guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second, if you don’t, it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: I think that kind of zeal is needed because otherwise the more you introduce on those online platforms, the more people can say, but you leave systematically these people behind. But now we can say, no, everybody is online.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t have the tablets, they just go to their local digital opportunity center, the local library, and lend a new enough tablet as in the last three years new. Everybody have the same knowledge to access to broadband, nearly exceptions.

Audrey Tang: Very affordable, too, it’s around $16 US per month for unlimited 4G. Once you hit that point, there will be far less counterarguments about the digital divide leaving people behind or things like that, that’s a good thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that it’s always easier if you use online as a way to amplify the face to face conversations. Just as now we’re doing a face to face conversation, we’re not really using Skype, right? That means that the digital, the proper place for a digital, is to make sure that each face to face conversation carries on the previous agenda set by the previous face to face conversations.

Audrey Tang: This is the basic idea of bringing tech to people, not asking people to come to the website. If you ask people to come to the website, people who are proficient in writing, the people who are proficient in recording 15 seconds videos, people who are proficient in using cat pictures dominate the discussion.

Audrey Tang: But if we make sure that this is mostly just capturing, amplifying, distilling the previous face to face conversations as I just showed you, then there is far more motivation for people to participate in their local affairs knowing that they will be as collated and transmitted to the national government, but without asking people to come to a “national platform.”

Audrey Tang: I think this relationship between face to face and digital is also very important. Once you use digital only as a assistive, augmented or an amplifier of face to face conversation, you can’t go wrong.

Renat Künzi: Is there something like a highlight, a really good example that you can present to foreign governments or in you contact when you were telling about your vision? Is there something like your most favorite project that you like to present?

Audrey Tang: Well, that depends on the level of the government. Right? If it’s national government, we have a comic book in six language that I can get you a copy, that talks about how people re really mad about our tax filing experience.

Audrey Tang: But it’s through national petition, eventually people who care a lot and therefore blames a lot the government are invited into co-creation workshop, so now we’re end up with the tax filing system co-created with people that has 98 percent approval rate. That’s like a perfect story if you’re a national government.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a municipal government, you don’t quite care about tax filing and then maybe we talk about some more municipal-riented projects.

Audrey Tang: But yeah, I’m happy to share the comic books with you.

Renat Künzi: Thank you. Is there also something like a flop, something that didn’t work, a project that…?

Audrey Tang: Like a petition that doesn’t pan out? Well, there were a petition that want to change the time zone of Taiwan to the same as Japan, so from GMT +8 to +9. That, of course, did not pass, because as you can see, we’re still at GMT +8 now. But there was also a counter petition at the time, also 8,000 people strong, that talks about keeping Taiwan’s time zone at +8.

Audrey Tang: Because we don’t make decisions online, we use online arguments as a way to suss out their main points. Some people say change in time zone can save energy, increase tourism, reduce traffic, you name it. We made sure that we meet them in a factual basis to actually calculate that it won’t actually do all these things.

Audrey Tang: We have a quantified cost of one-time costs as well as recurring cost. Then we invited both sides to a face to face meeting to look over at those facts.

Audrey Tang: Once everybody identify and agree with those facts, the feelings start to emerge. The people who want to change the time zone said they want to do this, because they want people flying over from Beijing or Shanghai to have to change their watch, and so understand that they’re in a different jurisdiction or something like that.

Audrey Tang: But it turns out it’s not very effective. First of all, nowadays, the smart watch and phones just adjust, turns on by themselves, that there’s no conscious change. But also, there’s many larger countries with many time zones, and even Hong Kong has its own currency, and so it’s not a very effective way.

Audrey Tang: But the other side, after hearing their feeling, said, oh, we can identify the feeling of wanting Taiwan to be seen as more unique in the world. Why don’t we start brainstorming that if you were about to spend this money instead of on a significantly useless way, how about we spend it in a way that’s more useful?

Audrey Tang: Then they really started brainstorming that afternoon and said that we should make movies, TV series that talk about our human right, that talks about marriage equality, that talks about open government, that talks about all the contributions that Taiwan is doing to the world, circular economy on all sort of different things that really sets us apart from the PRC.

Audrey Tang: Then all the 16,000 people get the same copy of the reply from various ministries of how they’re planning to spend a budget roughly equivalent to changing time zone, but actually, to further their common value, which is making Taiwan seen as more unique in the world.

Audrey Tang: We actually run a conversation with AIT on exactly that, how to make Taiwan seen as more unique in the world. We have some really good discussions and one of them saying the US should send someone to the presidential hackathon, the AIT in the face to face consultation after the pol.is conversation, they just say, yeah, OK, of course, we’ll send someone.

Audrey Tang: A couple of weeks later, they just send someone to our presidential hackathon.

Audrey Tang: The point here I’m making is that there are many what we can lower hanging fruits. If people can identify their common values, instead of going all the way to change the time zone, people can nevertheless settle on something that is of common value to them. I think that is the really important part, even if the original proposal is a flop. But actually people really learned something from it.

Renat Künzi: It reminds me to the citizens of the people’s initiative in Switzerland. It’s only 10 percent of them are adopted, but they have a very important political and social impact. Not everyone, but even if they are rejected, so this, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I can see that also there is a kind of cross-generational and cross-cultural conversation aspect to it, because just like Switzerland, where a country with many different cultures and lineages, and what seems as natural for someone to propose may actually come across as not really acceptable for somebody from a different generation or from a different culture.

Audrey Tang: This kind of collaborative meetings, the main value is just to get everybody on the same table and look at their common values despite their different positions.

Renat Künzi: You said broadband is…

Audrey Tang: Human right.

Renat Künzi: …is a human right. Does this mean that the participation is high? Is really, is this the condition, the sine qua non that this, your vision, it’s not only a nice idea, but it’s implemented, it’s filled with life, with ideas.

Audrey Tang: Yes, oh, definitely. If we are just looking at a join platform, for example, there’s, just in the administration level there is currently more than 100 petitions in process, more than 100 regulatory announcements in process, and almost 2,000 governmental projects that’s up for discussion. We can very clearly see people mostly care about long-term healthcare, sanitation, social housing, not surprising, and also is able to track its KPIs.

Audrey Tang: Actually, just last month, we decided as part of our government open data initiative to open up all our procurement data down to project level for anyone who want to analyze it for education and scientific purposes. This is almost never done.

Audrey Tang: If you look at our global open data index, no countries that’s part of the WTO publishes their procurement data to this degree. Mostly, they only publish the part that they guaranteed to the WTO that they want to publish, because everybody who do so first will be at a trade disadvantage when it comes to trade agreements conversation.

Audrey Tang: I think at one time only Greece has this data open. That’s because they were being overseen to use a polite term [laughs] for their fiscal policies. But Taiwan, we’re able to get this out because there really is a very strong demand from everybody, from the citizens of this conversation.

Audrey Tang: Just as in democracy, we’d say that literacy is a human right. If you have a democracy but most people cannot read, it’s not a really good democracy. If you have a democracy but most people don’t understand the language that you’re using in the parliament, that’s not a good democracy.

Audrey Tang: It’s the same in Taiwan. We are saying that we have the digital democracy, so broadband as human right is very important. For our participation platform Join, there’s unique users, not visitors, unique users number in over 10 million users. Considering Taiwan population is 23 million…

Renat Künzi: Is this in overall users, or in one year or…?

Audrey Tang: This platform is really new, anyway. This is new as of 2015. The petition only starts in earnest officially in late ‘15 or ‘16. It’s active users over the past three years. When we have almost half of population on a participation website, that’s why we don’t call it e-participation anymore. You just drop the E. It’s just like I’ll mail you something. It’s assumed that it’s email.

Renat Künzi: This is very, very impressive to see this, the high dynamic in developing and implementing it so that it really works. It’s this link between government and citizens so that citizens can have a say, right from the beginning can set the agenda.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Renat Künzi: This is very impressive. I wonder now, who is, in a way the engine, who keeps this motor, the engine, running? Is this g0v? Is this you, as in a way, the link between movement and government? Where does this energy come from? Where does it start?

Audrey Tang: Certainly, the career public service. If the career public service feels that it’s of value to them, as in that they can get due credit by helping people along, they can reduce the risk both for them and also for their ministers because they identify the challenges before they become a major issue, before people go to the street, basically.

Audrey Tang: Also, that it can result in some genuine good policy that people can agree on. I think the career public service now, instead of back in 2014 where there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around public participation, and perhaps because we’re doing this every other week or so, people are just starting to feel that, yeah, it’s just part of democracy.

Audrey Tang: This normalizing behavior, this norm-making behavior, is the real engine that moves it along. From time to time, of course, there are some star participants. For example, one of the cases, which I usually use if talking to not a national government but a municipal one, is around a year-and-a-half ago, there was a popular petition. It raised 5,000 people in no time.

Audrey Tang: Because we allow pseudonyms, the petitioner…What’s the name? I love elephant and elephant love me is a mystery how come that someone can just get so many signatures in no time. Their petition is to ban single-use utensils, in particular plastic straws, from circulation gradually.

Audrey Tang: The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Minister of Economy Affairs, and so on are prepared for the open collaboration meeting because it’s voted in the RPO meetings. Everybody expect to see a senior environmental activist. It turns out she is 16 years old, and that’s her civics class assignment, to find something that resonates with people, like Greta Thunberg.

Renat Künzi: I just had to say my idea. Taiwanese Greta.

Audrey Tang: It turns out she’s really good at using social media, and just gets people to really care about, I don’t know, sea turtles being choked or some imagery like that in no time. She’s able to get this conversation going. Instead of going to strike on Fridays, we meet [laughs] on Friday not with only the ministries people, but also with people who make those utensils.

Audrey Tang: It’s important because we have to work with the private sector if we’re going to change the material they use. Much to our surprise, we were hearing from many of them in their 60s now that the makers, the business operators saying that they entered the strike to make single-use utensils actually as social entrepreneurs 30 years ago because at that time, hepatitis B is really prevalent in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: People were really hurting from that epidemic. They make those single-use utensils to safeguard public health from the virus. Now, hep B is cured. Take a pill, it’s gone. There’s no longer a need for the social purpose. They’re also looking for new materials.

Audrey Tang: Just like the time zone, what you expect would be a zero-sum fight actually became a brainstorming session by the afternoon. People just brainstormed about the need for new materials. Nowadays in Taiwan, you can find not only paper straws, but also straws made of sugarcane waste that is zero or negative carbon in its carbon capturing.

Audrey Tang: There’s also straws made of straws, [laughs] natural straws that are reinforced so that they can withstand a bubble tea. I also personally switched my habit. I was just washing this glass straw as you came in, and so on. It really resulted in a behavior change.

Audrey Tang: It also made sure that the young person who got the scholarship of that, as well as their colleagues, don’t have to go to the street. They can actually begin a very fruitful collaboration with the business owners to market their new solutions, which may be initially a little bit more expensive.

Audrey Tang: Because of the organizing power of the young people, they can actually get their crowdfunding done in no time. It’s a win-win proposition. Now, we have banned plastic straws for indoor use. The moral of the story is not that the EPA isn’t doing this already, that the EPA is already moving in that direction.

Audrey Tang: The moral of the story is that the activists and the private sector don’t necessarily have to be fighting each other, which is very easily the case if the public sector talk to them one by one. Through this open collaboration, people can identify the points of collaboration so that they become partnerships to our common goals. The public sector is much more relaxed.

Audrey Tang: That is what made the public servant from the fear of uncertainty and doubt into thinking oh, this is just one of the arsenals, one of the tool kits in our daily work in public administration.

Renat Künzi: When you see these examples, as you mentioned, by these 16-year-old girls, what can you learn from these young, very active, and skillful young people with good ideas and a lot of energy to bring a change? What can you learn from these?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, personally when I was 15, [laughs] I was also barred from traditional political participation. I don’t have the right to vote. I cannot elect even the township leader. The Internet and digital democracy gave me a way to connect to people who care about the thing that I care about.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, at that time, I think very few people care about, say, copyright extension. I think nobody in my immediate neighborhood care about copyright extension. Using the Internet and World Wide Web, I was able to find like-minded people that care about it. Even if it’s just 1 in 100 people caring about it, that’s a lot in Taipei City. Even if it’s just 1 in 1,000 in Taiwan, that’s still a lot of people. It provides a way for horizontal organizations to grow.

Audrey Tang: I think the public service can really learn, and that includes me, anyone can learn about the fact that we’re switching from a metaphor of there’s just a limited number of senior organizers in civil society and in the private sector, and the public sector’s role is just to make arbitration between those organizers.

Audrey Tang: This is a superseded idea because, nowadays, with the right hashtag - #MeToo, #ClimateStrike - anyone can be a organizer. There’s no need for traditional vertical organization anymore to represent people’s ideas. Any of these online platforms can represent people’s ideas with no loss in fidelity.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we have to switch to a different set of questions. Instead of asking, “Who are the organizers and how do we arbitrate?” we must ask now, “What are the various positions? What are their common values, and can we deliver innovations that deliver on everybody’s common values?”

Audrey Tang: This is how we formed the norm before we settle on the law. Because if the lawmakers don’t have firsthand experience of those emergent issues, then they’re very easy for them to make a law that just forecloses other possibilities.

Audrey Tang: If we make sure there is a sandbox, meaning a safe experimentation space, for each and every of those emergent ideas – for example, self-driving vehicles – it could be a really slow one that’s a tricycle that literally roamed in my social innovation lab that is open-source and open-hardware, so people can just change it however they want. Some people want it to be a shopping cart that follows people around.

Audrey Tang: This open hardware, you can just tinker it. All this made sure that a norm gets formed, and the policy followed. The policy then determined the code that finally gets absorbed into the law.

Audrey Tang: That is what we call the norm-design-first approach, which is a superior approach if you are going to tackle all the emerging technologies, because otherwise, if you start with the law, that dictates the code, that dictates the policy, that dictates the norms, you run into endless conflict when the people’s socioeconomic expectations differs from what their technologies impose on them.

Audrey Tang: Young people of course are the ones that see and form the norms the fastest, because there is no legacy. [laughs] They don’t have the habit of interacting with technology any which way. They can form a norm much quicker than the older people do.

Renat Künzi: What about risks and dangers for a digitalized collaborative democracy? We have these examples connected to the election of Trump, to the Brexit vote in Europe. In Switzerland, an example is that government had to freeze in the almost 20 year try to introduce e-voting now this summer.

Renat Künzi: Do you see any risks for this digitalized collaborative democracy?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there’s always a risk if the law makers ignore this norm design first approach and try to pass the law that dictates the codes, that dictates for the whole society.

Audrey Tang: Every time this happens, we see more polarization being done. It’s very hard to fix that if you started this path, which is why we keep saying in Taiwan, for example, we are not doing electronic voting for any candidates of mayorship or president, period. We are not doing that.

Audrey Tang: We can actually experiment with the national referendum because there’s no exponential return. If you use electronic voting for president, and the president has some power to change the rules around electronic voting, then the reward is exponential.

Audrey Tang: If you only use that for national referendum, which is the same candidate, the same issue across the nation anyway, you can very easily introduce first, electronic counter signatures, then electronic tallying. Then, after that, maybe electronic voting without harming the people’s norm expectations.

Audrey Tang: Once people get into these norms, maybe someday we’ll talk about election in the lower levels. There’s always this mentality of sandbox building norms and then building policies. I think this gradual idea is very important. Any rush to a top-down approach is actually the main risk in all the liberal democracies. If people want to impose some top-down approach for the sake of digitalization, people always risk leaving some people behind. They wouldn’t feel that they’re behind. They would feel that everybody else is doing the wrong thing. Then the polarization just deepens.

Audrey Tang: I would say any top-down approach to impose digital orders is by itself the risk to digital democracy in general, which need to be done in the basis of not just norm-first, but also giving people sufficient time to look at the collaborative thoughts and form their own feelings.

Audrey Tang: Setting aside time for feelings is also very important before we jump to the ideas, because as I showed time and again, if you leave time for feelings, the idea is to take care of everybody’s feelings. If you don’t leave time for feelings, people just start from here and say, “The time zone must change.” “The time zone must not change.”

Audrey Tang: Then you get a referendum and half the people feel they have lost.

Renat Künzi: There’s an actual debate in Switzerland about the introduction of a EID. The plan is that [laughs] the government, who is now a bit cautious, because there were fails, like e-voting, and they are cautious. They want to build up public-private partnerships, private companies would issue or give these EIDs to the citizens. What about EIDs in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: We already have EIDs for quite some time. We have a PKI card, the Citizen Digital Certificate, or the CDC. It’s a strongly encrypted card that has the same weight as signing a paper document. I think maybe one in four people in Taiwan has that card and uses that card.

Renat Künzi: Is it handed out by the state?

Audrey Tang: It’s handed out by the state. The software is written by CHT, the Chunghwa Telecom, which is a almost state-owned but not quite telecom operator. People generally trust the CDC, but because it’s opt-in, if you don’t want a digital certificate, you can use other means to file your tax. There is no mandated requirement that you get a EID. You just get one if it suits you.

Audrey Tang: There’s a plan starting next October to start rolling out the paper ID. With a EID built in, but you still have to activate it. What we’re saying is that if you feel like, you can have your EID and your paper ID and essentially stick them into one. If you don’t feel like, you don’t have to activate it either.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the people who have the EID after the new EID rolls around will grow from maybe one in four people to maybe one in three or one in two people. We’re certainly not saying that everybody have to mandatorily enable the EID.

Renat Künzi: At the end, is there something like a short message that you could hand out to Switzerland, to traditional democracy and other countries in the world? Why should they develop and also be courageous to go, to follow, in a way, your example of digital democracy in Taiwan? What does it bring to them? How could they benefit from your example, from your experience in this field?

Audrey Tang: First of all, it’s not a race. There’s no fast or slow. I would much rather people get the broadband, the broadband as human right, to media literacy, critical and creative thinking, the curriculum based on the students’ needs to be curious and solve problems instead of any standardized answers or anything like that.

Audrey Tang: Once you have the culture as Switzerland obviously does, then you can use digital to enhance the humanity, the connection between people, but never digital for digital’s sake. My main message, which is really short, is also my job description.

Audrey Tang: I would say that instead of thinking about Internet of Things, we should make an Internet of Beings. Instead of building virtual reality, we should build a shared reality. Instead of focusing on machine learning, we should focus on collaborative learning. We shouldn’t ask about user experience, but rather human experience.

Audrey Tang: Whenever any vendor tells you that singularity is near, please keep in mind that the plurality is here. Instead of smart cities, smart citizens. A smart city plan only works if it makes smart citizens. If it makes dumb citizens, that’s the wrong kind of smart city.

Renat Künzi: I’m coming from Switzerland from this traditional but a very well-elaborated, direct democracy. Is there anything that you can learn from our Swiss example?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Our referendum system, which is really new, is designed to be inspired by the Swiss model, but we made a big mistake of tying it to the national election day. Turn out no matter how much deliberation before a referendum topic, if we tie it to the same day as mayoral election, everybody forget about [laughs] the deliberation that have went through and just fall into partisan thinking.

Audrey Tang: That is also because some mayor candidate are also petitioner of referendum. It makes the whole representative versus participatory line very confused. Now, we must learn more from Switzerland.

Audrey Tang: Now that we have made mayoral election a year and then referendum, and then presidential election and then referendum, and so on. Alternating years, there will be representative and deliberative democracies. That gives each deliberative topic in the referendum a lot more runway a year, or more of runway, to have a really nationwide deliberation.

Audrey Tang: It also makes citizens’ initiatives much deeper because, otherwise, people would just associate it with the closest presidential or mayoral election and fall back into this winner-loser thinking. I think our process around referendums can really make a lot of improvements. Switzerland is obviously the world leader in that.

Renat Künzi: One of the last votes in Switzerland was about a people’s initiative about cow horns, that there was a farmer who launched this initiative because he loves his cows. A lot of cow breeds are born without horn. He wants his cows to have horns. He asks for some money for all those farmers who have…

Audrey Tang: That are not dehorning.

Renat Künzi: Yes, exactly. There was a lot of smile and making other countries made fun of Swiss democracy. How did you see this debate? Is there something like limits of issues and topics that should not be discussed or should be done with democracy? Should it be open to every topic?

Audrey Tang: In our Referendum Act, I’m sure there’s similar considerations in other countries.

Audrey Tang: For example, the indigenous nations’ rights must never be subject to public referendum, because indigenous nation may be subject to a lot of the rights decided by their nation nowadays, because after the transitional justice and the president’s apology, we’re now working with the indigenous nations much more peer-to-peer like Canada relationship.

Audrey Tang: If we go back to national referendum, indigenous populations may be three percent, and that wouldn’t make sense. Systemically taking away rights from people who are just in the minority, that wouldn’t work, obviously.

Audrey Tang: Cows is very interesting because they don’t have voting right to begin with. Whether they’re a minority in democracy or they’re unrepresented people in a democracy, that is a very interesting debate that I’m sure people in deep ecology can argue much more passionately than me.

Audrey Tang: I do learn from, Latour, Bruno Latour, who argued that there should be people designated as speakers for the natural elements that cannot yet participate in a human understandable manner.

Audrey Tang: I think this is important because for all its issues and the funds that it got made, it actually gets people, including people in Taiwan, to really read about what roles horns play in animal’s metabolism. What in the ecosystem, do they hurt other animals, do they not hurt other animals with that, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think it genuinely increases people’s horizon of what citizenship means, of what people means. Because Taiwan, unlike say Germany, don’t have the animal’s right of life into our constitution. We have to rely on constitutional amendments in the future to take care of the rights of animals as a constitutional concern, at a moment that they are just assets.

Audrey Tang: Because of this constitutional mismatch, I think referendums is a really powerful advocacy tool to get people to understand why, for example in New Zealand, in Māori, they have a river made person. They can sit on a boat of a company. Somebody from the Crown and somebody from the Māori represents that river. If the river gets polluted, they can sue for damage and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a bad fiction, certainly not worse than the corporate limited liability as a legal fiction, [laughs] as a legal personhood. I think these referendums serve as bridges that brings us from a more limited adult only – and I care about it a lot because I participated as a teenager a lot in politics – adult-only democracy [laughs] into one that take care of not only the really young people, but also people in the next generation, also the environmental factors, as well as the biosphere that will collectively decide the sustainability.

Audrey Tang: Maybe democracy, as we practice it, the traditional representative democracy, just like the business as usual for plastic straws, maybe it has a social and environmental negative externality that are not felt until two generations or three generations later.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, with participatory democracy, even with cow horns, I think that gradually makes people conscious that the democracy doesn’t have to only work with the current generation, but also for the future generations.

Renat Künzi: So?

Audrey Tang: We’re good.

Renat Künzi: We’re through. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: I’ll send you the slides.

Renat Künzi: Can I take some pictures of your detailed…

Audrey Tang: Drawing.

Renat Künzi: Yes, this is really crucial because it shows the difference of the approach.

Audrey Tang: Of course. Do I just randomly…

Renat Künzi: The process, these I’d like to…where you, with a norm.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Renat Künzi: This is crucial.

Audrey Tang: Norms, design the norms, implement the norms, making sure it’s reflected in the code. This is especially important for self-driving vehicle. Every place, the tolerance and the social expectation is different.

Audrey Tang: The MIT Media Lab people who brought this into our attention discovered that, in Taiwan, people would much prefer they yield to the elders first, then handicapped people, then pregnant women, and finally children, but in Boston, where they’ve made a first prototype, people care about the children, not at all about elders. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Every place has a different norm. If we start from the law, and impose the norm, intense conflicts are much more likely.

Renat Künzi: You had another drawing, with…

Audrey Tang: This one?

Renat Künzi: Exactly. I had this in mind.

Audrey Tang: Let’s take away this, making sure that this is the starting point. Start here.

Renat Künzi: The norm would be, as you made the example of the 16-year-old girl, to abolish plastic straws.

Audrey Tang: Plastic straws, and they would articulate this norm and interact with the market people who would set a policy for how many volume they would switch to sugar cane. That would then be code, and the code would be coded into regulation or municipal code, and finally made into national law. If we start with the national law, all hell breaks loose.

Renat Künzi: Yes, you have…

Audrey Tang: Conflicts from everybody.

Renat Künzi: Conflicts, yes. Make this different between code…These are [laughs] new categories for me. Make the difference between code and law.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Essentially, for example, in Taiwan, national people have a national ID. The national ID all begins with a letter symbolizing the city you’re born in and the number signifying the gender. Someone would be A-1-2-something-something. Somebody would be A-2-3-something-something.

Audrey Tang: For foreign people, even after they get a permanent certificate for residency, they would have another numbering. They would have A-A-something and A-C-something. Everybody can see very easily that these are nationals and these are foreign people who may have permanent residence.

Audrey Tang: Many systems, for example ordering movies, ordering train tickets, and so on, only check for this format, and not this format. Essentially what it did is that it made sure that the nationals can always get reservation, but for many services if you’re a permanent resident, but you’re of a foreign passport, you cannot use these systems at all.

Audrey Tang: This is not only digital systems, but also physical systems. It’s not a law, there’s no law that says we must discriminate foreign people versus local people. It’s in the code, and the code is both represents the architecture like in software code, but also just the coded forms. Anything that is something that restricts the possibility of a flow of service is code. This is what Lawrence Lansing called a architecture. The architecture precludes these people form participating.

Audrey Tang: What we’re now doing is starting next year also, the foreign people would get a different numbering, what used to be AA would be A8, what used to be AC would be A9, for example. Because of this, they are now of the same code, and they can get a service. We do all this because the norm changed, and then there’s a market policy of being inclusive about people with residence, so we changed the code. It involves no change in law at all.

Audrey Tang: When we change the code, we will run into the issue, for example, people in Australia, they have this idea of non-binary gender. What should they map into? We decided they should map into A7, but because of the existing A7, our code must now handle non-binary gender without changing the law to allow for non-binary gender, just by the virtue of recognizing foreign people, they must now accommodate for non-binary gender.

Audrey Tang: Once everybody is comfortable with that, maybe we change the law to say that people like me can get a non-binary gender. But at that time, the norm policy and code would be all ready for it, so there would be little fuss. If I started top-down way, saying that we must allow non-binary gender in the law, all hell break loose.

Renat Künzi: Yeah, it starts.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Renat Künzi: Cool. Before I forget it, I have some…

Audrey Tang: Gifts?

Renat Künzi: Gifts, yeah.

Audrey Tang: I’ll get some gifts.

Renat Künzi: All right, so, you know what this is?

Audrey Tang: A knife, yeah?

Renat Künzi: A Swiss army knife.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Of course.

Renat Künzi: So, thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Here is the manga for you.

Renat Künzi: Yeah, cool. It’s a…

Audrey Tang: It’s six languages.

Renat Künzi: Cool.

Audrey Tang: There’s no copyright, so feel free to contribute more translations and stickers.

Renat Künzi: Stickers, if you ever come to Switzerland.

Audrey Tang: OK, excellent.

Renat Künzi: Please use this, you can have this. I have…Thank you, oh, this is cool, I like that. Yes, yes. I did a piece with a similar person to you in Switzerland, his name is Hernâni Marques, his parents are from Portugal. In fact, he still, he’s not Swiss. He’s one of the big promoters of digital democracy in Switzerland, but he has no right to vote.

Audrey Tang: Oh.

Renat Künzi: There in Switzerland, it’s very strict. We have 25 percent of the people living…

Audrey Tang: Residents.

Renat Künzi: Residents…

Audrey Tang: That cannot vote.

Renat Künzi: …that are excluded, they pay taxes, everything, but they’re…He was very interest, I said, I told him that I go to Taiwan, I’m going to meet you, and interview you, and he was, “Yes, yes, yes, I want to invite her to Switzerland.” I think there is an event you wrote me, by the end of November, but is it OK when I leave…

Audrey Tang: Just forward my email address to him, of course.

Renat Künzi: Yes, is it OK?

Audrey Tang: Of course. I will actually be in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Berlin, around mid-November, but maybe yeah, we can just figure out something.

Renat Künzi: Yes, yes. OK. I’ll link you together, and…

Audrey Tang: All right. So, thank you.