Audrey Tang: Let’s get started.

Miriam Meckel: Yes, let’s get started. Thanks for having me.

Miriam Meckel: I thought you might like to talk about three things I’m really interested in. That would be under the overarching topic of hacking our worldviews, in a way — I’d like to talk a bit about reinventing government and public services. I’d like to talk a bit about we disrupt our ways of looking at things.

Audrey Tang: Oh, more recorders. It’s like three recorders now.

Miriam Meckel: Good morning.

Miriam Meckel: Now nothing can happen at all.

Miriam Meckel: Then a bit about the digital industries and the economic outlook, if this is fine with you.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Miriam Meckel: When I wrote to you, it was the first time in my entire life that I immediately got a response from you directly, not some offices.

Miriam Meckel: A day afterwards, I also got a response from your office. The office suggested I come on Wednesdays, when you have open hours. You had suggested already that we meet here on Saturday.

Miriam Meckel: I’ve just thought is this a tiny, little piece of example that’s difficult to introduce your radical ways of thinking government in a new way into existing structures?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, because I told the offices that my Wednesday is open for everybody, and my weekends are off limits. These are the time structure that we pre agreed on.

Audrey Tang: Because I think the topic warrants more than 40 minutes of conversation, which is what my Wednesday office hours are all about, I just short circuited that. It’s interesting because precisely, as you mentioned, the idea of having an open office hour. Here, it would be where we meet if we meet on a Wednesday.

Audrey Tang: It’s the Social Innovation Lab. It is pretty radical already, because people can walk in in the morning without having to have a reservation. They don’t guarantee any time block. It’s just whatever time I have.

Audrey Tang: In the afternoon, they have a booking system where they can book for 40 minutes at a time and a transcript or video recording, what kind of recording that they prefer.

Audrey Tang: Because the exoskeletal arrangements are already in place, it’s always easier for offices to say, "Here is the system. Go to register in the system, and you will find the chance."

Audrey Tang: Of course, there is always a competing need of saying, "Wait, this warrants more than the pre allocated time." I think both need to happen, but I do need to work on synchronizing with my team more. [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: Anyone can just walk in on Wednesdays and talk to you.

Audrey Tang: Right. That’s from 10:00 to 2:00. From 2:00 to 5:00, that’s the pre booking time where there’s an online system conveniently called AU.pdis.tw, which is my handle. You can already see clearly who is going to meet me on those time slots. There’s an English version, as well.

Audrey Tang: If you want to book, then it just says who you are, your email, would you prefer some kind of recording mode, and then you automatically get 40 minutes of my time.

Miriam Meckel: Everything is public, as well.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Miriam Meckel: So I have no chance to have a clandestine meeting with you.

Audrey Tang: Not at all.

Miriam Meckel: Don’t you think that arcane moments are important in developing ideas, in exchanging views that are not supposed to be public directly all the time?

Audrey Tang: Of course. We do have people who, after receiving the transcript, took out many parts that they considered premature or sensitive. Everybody’s free to edit, to co-edit, as I put it, for 10 days.

Audrey Tang: During those 10 days, sometimes people change their mind. Sometimes they, after talking to me, decide it’s not a good idea after all. Then, they went back, changed and, frankly, just delete entire parts of their speech, which is always allowed. We made it very clear, as well.

Audrey Tang: In the most extreme case, a journalist, who I will not name, considered the questions she asks as proprietary information. She went back and took out everything she said. In the transcript, it’s me monologuing. That is also accepted.

Miriam Meckel: That is very interesting, because it’s clear that it was a conversation between two people, and now you have just your answers. You still know who the journalist is when you look online, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but we don’t know what she asked about.

Miriam Meckel: I understand. That’s really interesting. Talking about competing interests, from a German perspective, I’m sure that a lot of politicians would say, "We have competing interests between transparency and security."

Audrey Tang: How is that?

Miriam Meckel: Have you ever experienced someone coming to you on Wednesdays and offending you or...

Audrey Tang: Not at all.

Miriam Meckel: Not at all?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. There’s people who advocate for building an embassy for extraterrestrial beings, the Rael Movement. There are people who are convinced that they invented a never ending machine, the perpetual motion machine, and there are people who believe in some kind of extreme views, but I was always very sympathetic to their views, and so it’s fine.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that if I start arguing, they’d become violent perhaps, but because I was just very sympathetic...

Miriam Meckel: I guess you know that in Germany, you would never be able to approach a minister directly without a whole formal process, showing IDs. I could walk in here without showing my ID.

Audrey Tang: No, no. That’s because I described you to security guard.

Miriam Meckel: So they knew about me.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Miriam Meckel: There’s the tiny little actions. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s the first thing I did this morning actually.

Audrey Tang: And then I’m always accompanied, of course, by a colleague or in the Social Innovation Lab by a security guard, so we’re not completely naive.

Miriam Meckel: Figuring out this transparent way of approaching new ideas of government, it means that people can observe if things turn out right, work well, don’t work well.

Miriam Meckel: If I imagine, being a bit familiar with the Chinese culture — having lived here for a year 30 years ago — and thinking of the country still being influenced by Confucius ideas, for example, how do you manage to implement something like a failure culture where you’re allowed to make mistakes and not be successful?

Audrey Tang: Or indeed encouraged to fail.

Miriam Meckel: Even encourage it, yes.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. In the Confucius culture, which all dates back to the I Ching, and I can talk about I Ching for days... [laughs] I will just say that in the I Ching there’s this idea of 蒙or the state before enlightenment. Usually it’s in conjunction with the child like 童蒙, meaning that someone who is pre teens and in need of enlightenment.

Audrey Tang: Confucius’ tradition always says that that is the state that has the most potential. When we frame someone as in that state, they’re allowed or indeed encouraged to explore.

Audrey Tang: Traditionally, when a child was really, really young, they have this ritual called 抓周, where they put all sort of different objects representing all the different trades and expertises in the world, and have the child climb over to whichever that they’re most interested in.

Audrey Tang: In that there is no pressure to succeed at all, because it is just seen as the way to seize out the potential of the child. When someone is in childhood, in the Confucius culture, there is absolutely no obligation for perfection and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Of course there is another thing called filial piety, which we will not go into, [laughs] but what I’m just saying is that it is perfectly OK to experiment if someone is childlike. This is what we capitalize on.

Miriam Meckel: We’re in the childhood stage of transforming ourselves into a new civilization?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. There’s a French professor, Stephane Corcuff, that describes Taiwan’s democracy as in the liminal stage, which is not quite childhood but the same thing, the liminal stage meaning that we’re not part of the so called the Continent, but we’re not quite Pacific Islands either.

Audrey Tang: We’re of course the ancestry of the Pacific islanders culture wise, the Austronesian culture, but we’re also descendants of the various different ethnic Han cultures with those of Japanese philosophy. In all these relationships we’re liminal, in the sense that it’s not fully developed in terms of our Taiwanese culture identity. In this stage, experimentation is indeed encouraged is what I’m saying.

Miriam Meckel: Confucius would have approved of how you approach public service?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Actually, the most often quoted part of Confucian thought by Dr. Sun Yat sen, which you see in the Sun Yat sen Memorial Hall, is a calligraphy rendering of 天下為公, "everyone for the public." There’s a famous chapter that says, "Everyone for the public," and describes a Confucian Utopia where everyone is for the public.

Audrey Tang: There is no squandered resources. When people see goods on the street, useful things, they take it up, but they don’t use it for themselves, instead for public benefit. It describes not quite radical transparency, but radical trust between the various stakeholders in the society.

Audrey Tang: The radical trust is really what I’m after, and transparency is one of the various instruments of achieving this public trust.

Miriam Meckel: I think you could argue that transparency is kind of undermining trust.

Audrey Tang: How is so?

Miriam Meckel: If I need to figure out everything on the basis of being transparent, it’s also a way of controlling and looking at everything to be sure that it’s in the way I would like it to be. While trust means that I just offer unconditional openness in a way because I think you won’t fail me and behave badly.

Audrey Tang: The difference, as you said, is control. Transparency is a way of instrumenting control.

Miriam Meckel: Especially how we handle it in the digital age. It sometimes seems to me as a means of control, taking over control, by checking each and every detail, which we can because transparency allows us to do. In the state of a trustful togetherness, you don’t need to do that because you just offer trust into people and what they do before you can check what’s happening. It’s just an idea. I don’t know.

Audrey Tang: It’s an interesting line of thought. In the Mandarin language, we’re having the hardest time translating the term "accountability." I think accountability earns trust. Nobody starts trusting a doctor, a lawyer, or whatever as acting in their best interests.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that kind of relationship develop over time by having that someone being accountable to you. Accountability doesn’t have a natural translation. We tried various other translations, but the one that I’m going with is 交代, not duct tape, which is the same sound...

Audrey Tang: ...but rather 交, as in giving, in communicating, in exchanging, crossing over, and 代 as in representing, so giving you the right to represent me. K父代also means, when I say 給個交代, to give an account, meaning coming clear of how one has or has not abused that trust relationship, which is crucial when we think about GDPR or the various rights.

Audrey Tang: It’s all about giving this kind of account. To me, transparency is one of the ways to build a culture where, when one asks for an account, one can readily give that account. It is not by default. We’re not live streaming this. We’re not recording our micro expressions or whatever.

Audrey Tang: This conversation is between you and me. It’s just we agree to co-author a paper afterwards [laughs] that summarizes the points that we made for the public benefit. I think having this co-creative relationship also builds trust. Whereas, if I insist on putting a hovering drone that is 360 recording our micro expressions, that would be control.

Audrey Tang: There is a limit above which it’s above the social norm that you will have for a friend. There’s a social norm under which you would describe as clandestine. I think there’s plenty of room between those two thresholds.

Miriam Meckel: For sure. You’ve made it perfectly clear, and I think we’re totally on the same page. I would prefer the term accountability as the overarching ideal, not transparency.

Audrey Tang: I totally agree.

Miriam Meckel: OK, perfect.

Audrey Tang: As I would say that when we do public participation, I always frame it as an instrument for inclusion, inclusion being the ideal and participation being the instrument.

Audrey Tang: If you have participation as the ideal, what it often means is that it excludes people who don’t have time, excludes people who don’t have the awareness, excludes people who prefer modalities that are non modal or are of indigenous culture, a different culture. Maybe you have inclusion as the primary goal and participation as the instrument. Then it actually goes much further.

Miriam Meckel: Interesting. I can relate to that. Taiwan is number one, according to the Global Open Data Index.

Audrey Tang: Which is not running anymore. To the ex Open Data Index, but yes.

Miriam Meckel: Last year, it was still running, wasn’t it?

Audrey Tang: No, they stopped running last year.

Miriam Meckel: They stopped already?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they stop. For the ultimate and penultimate rankings, we were number one, but they stopped running it.

Miriam Meckel: Germany was number 24.

Audrey Tang: Or something, yes.

Miriam Meckel: Together with Hong Kong and others, yeah. What recommendation would you give how to improve something like that, even if this index isn’t running any longer?

Audrey Tang: I would like to explain why the index is not running any longer. The index is just measuring the absolute minimal amount of widely agreed that these data should be open. It’s just like counting the availability of tap water or things like that. It doesn’t measure the impact, the relevance, the indeed citation, or anything about the data.

Audrey Tang: It just counts whether those data are there and whether they are open license, and so on, which is all good and well, but it creates an incentive for the government to instead of viewing trust as the primary goal and accountability and inclusion as the foundational value, and transparency and participation as the just the instruments.

Audrey Tang: It basically says, "We just put out exactly this amount of open data, and then we can rank really high," which is, frankly speaking, exactly what Taiwan had done.

Audrey Tang: We were good at exams. If you’d been here 30 years ago, you know how the culture is like. If we know that these things are going to be tested, then we just open these things. Not to derail or demean the national effort in 2014 to have a concerted strategy to place number one on that particular ranking, because I was part of the initiative, not to demean that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It does lead to open data for open data’s sake. It does lead to a lot of effort being put on those data, but the public information is still being published in another format. These are the ones that are actually relevant and to be consume and find the granularity. Open data ones are really there just for the Open Data Index.

Audrey Tang: If we optimize for scoring, then you study exactly what is to be scored, and that’s how Taiwan got there. I’m being fully accountable here, [laughs] and I was part of that team.

Audrey Tang: After I become the digital minister, one of the first things I did is I took out all of the quantitative KPIs when it relates to open data. It used to be that the ministries and agencies were rewarded by the number of data sets that they publish.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] And toward all the open data, Open Knowledge Foundation, scoring indexes, so we will look better in the barometer and the index.

Audrey Tang: It was really counterproductive. We see agencies publishing their yearly reports as 12 data sets, each for one month. This is not useful at all. It actually increases burden by data scientists, but they score higher if you look at the quantitative index.

Miriam Meckel: That is totally irrelevant for inclusion, for example, for people being able to use the data.

Audrey Tang: No, not at all. It is not participatory either; nobody asked for that. It’s just to be higher on the quantitative score. I put an end to that. [laughs] Instead, they were rewarded by the quality of their data, both machine assessed and also citizen assessed.

Audrey Tang: We put on a co-creation annual event called the Presidential Hackathon, held by the President herself, where the co-creative approach from the civil society can ask for data. With the President’s blessing, 20 cases each year gets all the support that they need to fulfill a social impact need. We completely shifted to a scoring, also very Confucian, post Han Dynasty, anyway...

Audrey Tang: ...mentality to a citizen driven mentality. That would actually be my recommendation. The local indexes stopped running by the Open Knowledge Foundation was also because they commissioned a study to assess how exactly impactful the Open Data Index is to the local and national strategies.

Audrey Tang: The impact may be positive or negative. They did a really honest assessment on the various parts, on some parts where it’s not the international norm to open yet, like the procurement data and open spending, because it has repercussions on world trade.

Audrey Tang: If you open all your procurement, and the person you are fighting across the table in a trade negotiation doesn’t, they have much more access to how your procurement looks than you do. They can ask for far more precise demand when it comes to trade negotiations, so it’s not the international norm.

Audrey Tang: I think only two countries score sufficiently on the Open Data Index when it comes to government spending. I think Greece is actually the top one, but that’s because they’re bankrupt and the World Bank manages their public procurement data.

Audrey Tang: Other than these very extreme cases, which we’re not going there, it is very much not the norm. For these things, the Open Knowledge really did some good. It forces each country to evaluate to which extent is it OK. As statistics? As maybe only to local researchers or whatever? That they can open the data to a degree. They did good that way.

Audrey Tang: In other parts, where it is already an international norm, then it leads to this kind of quantitative competition.

Miriam Meckel: Very interesting. I really didn’t know that. Let’s stick with the government hackathon for a moment. You’re doing it once a year?

Audrey Tang: Yes, the Presidential Hackathon.

Miriam Meckel: It’s one whole day, the Presidential Hackathon?

Audrey Tang: It’s three months. It’s an abuse of the term hackathon because it’s not really a hackathon in any sense at all. It is rather a series of hackathons, and there’s an English version. Every March, around the Open Data Day, we start getting the submissions. Last year, we get more than 100.

Audrey Tang: These submissions were then selected. Around early April, we select around 20 cases that has social impact, feasibility, and innovative. Then we reshuffle the other 80 cases’ crew members to join those 20 teams. The 20 teams can, of course, ask for more expertise.

Audrey Tang: It must be cross sectoral, in the sense that each team — this year, we really ratify it — that each team must have at least one career public servant, one person from the civil society, and one domain expert, so, at minimum, three people each team.

Audrey Tang: Then they start workshops which are collaborative meetings, what we call open collaboration meetings, which we can get into later. Actually, we have a comic book to explain that in six languages. [laughs] This is a gift for you. It’s all six languages.

Miriam Meckel: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: It’s the same thing, just different indigenous languages.

Audrey Tang: Through collaborative meetings like that one, we identified stakeholders’ real needs. We make sure that if the data are currently being collected but not shared, that it is shared. If they are being collected but belonging to different ministries and agencies, we make sure that the formats are compatible, the usual sorts.

Audrey Tang: If there’s regulatory changes needed, we work them around, all because the President herself is a project manager. The political will is absolute.

Audrey Tang: Then the 20 cases co-work for more than a month, I think six weeks, to develop the initial proof of concept of how to creatively apply those data for the common good. There’s a demo day, and then, out of the 20, we select 10. I personally head a jury committee.

Audrey Tang: The 10 then went to the President’s office building and do a one day finalization. By that time, all the code or whatever is already prototyped, so they mostly work on their presentation, on the pitch. They pitch the President and the...

Miriam Meckel: The 10 pitch the President?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, pitch the President. Then the President, along with the jury, chose five to win the hackathon. There’s absolutely no monetary reward, which is surprising. They have a trophy, which doubles as a projector that projects their photos and memories with the President.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what they get really is a presidential guarantee that by the next fiscal year, their idea will be part of public service.

Miriam Meckel: That’s a really great idea. It was yours?

Audrey Tang: Can’t really take all the credit. The person who initially propose it, we all call him CK, 劉嘉凱. He did this in New Taipei City and Taipei City before as his part of the Data For Social Good, or D4SG project. The National Security Council, President’s office, and, of course, yours truly really liked the idea, so we invited him as our advisor to bring this on the presidential level.

Miriam Meckel: Gorgeous. A really, really nice project.

Audrey Tang: We’re starting next month for this year’s round.

Miriam Meckel: One example what has been achieved?

Audrey Tang: The five winning teams. There’s many, but I don’t know which one you really care about. The Water Warriors is very interesting, Data for Child Protection also. On the importance of environmental protection and water reservation.

Audrey Tang: Maybe I’ll just talk about the Water Warriors. The Water Warriors is a bunch of folks from the Taiwan Water Corporation who manages, as a single corporation, the largest amount of pipes in the world. Many of them are plastic pipes. They leak. Because of climate change, Taiwan has a recurring water shortage issue. We’ve been very fortunate the past couple years, but it’s coming.

Audrey Tang: At the beginning of the Presidential Hackathon, from the time that a water pipe leaks to the time that it gets detected, that’s usually two to three months. There’s a limited amount of expertise who use things like a stethoscope — of course, they don’t call them stethoscope — to listen to the water pipes, figure out where they leak, and repair them.

Audrey Tang: With the granularity that is really broad, that’s not so great. They spend lots of time diagnosing. Taiwan all have the SCADA data to automate the collection of water pressure, water flow, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They say, "We’re sitting on this trove of data, but we really want machine learning experts to help us figure out new water leakage based on different patterns, of course, so that when our professional repairers tour around Taiwan, they can get an instant message saying, ’Today, you really want to look at these three spots,’" which have a resolution of less than 100 meters, which means they can resolve within a single day.

Audrey Tang: They get a lot of interested machine learning experts, someone building chatbots, and people from the National Chengchi University, the Institute for Information Industry, and even one MIS lady from the Executive Yuan here. Her office is just next building.

Audrey Tang: She manages our internal portals and so on, but she’s actually a computer science PhD doing machine learning research on the side. She also joined the team. They collectively reduced the time to 1/10th to detect and reduce the resolution to, I think, 1/20th or so. You really solved a really pressing issue in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: After three month of collaboration, demoing to the president, and getting honor, there’s an accelerator in Wellington called the GovTech Lightning Lab who noticed this, because we invited all the diplomats to the President’s office because of the President’s evaluacy.

Audrey Tang: They were like, "We really need that," because New Zealand didn’t have a water shortage problem. But because of climate change they are now starting to. They’re later than Taiwan, but there are surfacing these problems.

Audrey Tang: They invited the whole team to Wellington, and shared with them this same SCADA data for the public water corporation. They also co-created a solution to reduce the water leakage. This is better than any bilateral agreement, because to share this kind of raw data to a foreign digital service is a sign of enormous trust.

Audrey Tang: Also, the appropriate technology is not some proprietary licensing, or something. It belongs to both parties. The stack that they use is open source. I think it is a really good story. The five stories are all great, I just...

Miriam Meckel: It’s kind of a part of predictive maintenance, I would say.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Miriam Meckel: Gorgeous. That would also be a good recommendation to the German government, by the way.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Yes.

Miriam Meckel: Two things regarding reinventing government and public service. One is somewhere I read something about making policy personal. What do you understand by that?

Audrey Tang: Where did you read that?

Miriam Meckel: It might have been...

Audrey Tang: In which context?

Miriam Meckel: In the context of explaining how policy can be more relevant to the individual person.

Audrey Tang: That’s the three key literacies — hard to translate — characteristics of the participation officers’ team. You see in each ministry we have a team of POs or Participation Officers that are charged with the duty, by regulation, to engage with random stakeholders over the Internet, surfacing a difficulty in public service.

Audrey Tang: Every month we meet and select what needs to be discussed within this network of 32 ministries, each one with their team of PO network.

Audrey Tang: The three core skills are what we call translation, which is making policies personal to citizens; facilitation, which makes citizens’ ideas not just heard but also synthesized; and recording, which is giving an account of policy making and contextualize it as part of everyday democracy, or what we call "Continuous Democracy."

Audrey Tang: We have specialized training material and everything for the three core skill sets. To contextualize is to put it in the terms of everyday citizens. The case that this comic describes is a petitioner through our e petition system petitions something that says the tax filing software is explosively hostile to use — a very negative emotion.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, two years ago in May, the vibe was really negative. There was a technology called Java Applet and Oracle after buying Sun deprecated that technology in that year, but for Mac and Linux our tax-filing system was written in that technology.

Audrey Tang: When people started planning their taxes they start working. They have to disable the security checks. They have to allow pop ups, otherwise they say, installing Java components. Please wait a while. Then nothing happens, because it’s broken.

Audrey Tang: One MP sat there and waited for four hours and nothing happens. [laughs] Of course, it’s a PR nightmare. Now, if only have parliamentary officers or media officers, all they can do is apologize and maybe explain the problem a little bit, and maybe put the blame on Oracle...

Miriam Meckel: ...which never helps.

Audrey Tang: Because we have a Participation Officer, he basically wrote personally on the e petition platform that says, "Anyone who complained..." which by that time, according to sentiment analysis, over 80 percent was highly negative. They called for the resignation of the financial minister.

Audrey Tang: They said that there must corruption going on with the vendor. Also, there’s gossips, and the usual thing. Then 楊金亨, the PO at the time said, "Anyone who complained about our Minister of Finance..." — including the 10 percent of people who said, "But if I use Windows, everything works very smoothly..." — Anyone who posts anything at all gets invited a few weeks afterwards to Taipei to the financial information center to co-create the next year’s tax filing system.

Audrey Tang: It’s a simple invitation. Then I immediately posted saying, "As the Digital Minister, what the PO said is true. You automatically get an invitation."

Audrey Tang: Suddenly, from that point onward to the day of the participation meeting, 80 percent of people offered constructive criticism. Only a few people still said, "Someone should have resigned." Nobody cares about that anymore.

Audrey Tang: The point here being to put them into the language of the people is just like a judo, or depending on your inclination, aikido move, that says we used the citizens’ language — actually their complaints — to describe what needs to be fixed.

Audrey Tang: This is user journey. It’s a standard designed thinking form that describes what happens before the tax filing, during the tax filing and after the tax filing, what the users’ actions are, what are their needs. Or the problems they see, how it affects their emotions and possible solutions.

Audrey Tang: An overview map is the first thing we did after engaging people online. Even if 500 people post about the same thing, it’s just one post-it note. It means that this is not telling the number of people. This is not voting. This is not representative democracy at all.

Audrey Tang: This is just cataloguing the diversity of responses to the problem at hand. We use exactly the language that people use. This petition says, the words are explosively many and there’s a tendency in public service that we will harmonizes it into more acceptable forms, maybe not to anger their bosses.

Audrey Tang: Then the people on the net who feel they get betrayed if you rewrite their words, actually their words provoke outrage. These are the words that cause to action, anyway. If you harmonize that, they lose their capacity to provoke action. We keep their words. We take out the exclamation marks...

Audrey Tang: But we can use their words. The decoration is so poetic that people get lost in the maze, and so on. It is very poetic. During the tax filing at some points at the time a mascot pops up and says, "Thank you for your contribution to the society," which is great. It’s a great sentiment anywhere else. But during tax filing, it doesn’t really...

Audrey Tang: ...do that. And you have to wait for five seconds for it to pop up there. Someone said, "Don’t try to cheer us up. It’s impossible to cheer someone up who’s filing taxes. If something is painful, make it quick," [laughs] and so on.

Audrey Tang: Even for things that are challenging the frame, which is posted here, it’s not part of the journey per se but it’s challenging the framework which we are thinking about eternally, right? Afterwards, when thousands of people post their opinions, there’s only this number of questions. The issues are just this many.

Audrey Tang: It gives people a kind of feeling of certainty. It’s not explosively that, it’s just this bad. If we tackle each and every one of these it will be better. We invited people who complained the loudest...It turns out the petitioner is a professional user experienced designer. When he sees something that is off by one millimeter or something, he will already feel really upset, like a typographer.

Audrey Tang: Things that are otherwise acceptable, he doesn’t feel it this way which is great, because then he is the expert we need.

Audrey Tang: We invite anyone who complained this much into the kitchen, that is to say in co-creative meetings. We held four meetings to talk around those opposing notes, the issues we identified.

Audrey Tang: Even though these people made many unfriendly and harming and personal attacks on the vendor and the Minister of Finance, when they are on the same table sharing food and pizza and composing notes, it’s impossible to be vicious. They actually became friends very quickly, because they care about the same thing, after all.

Audrey Tang: Over the course of four meetings we redesigned this into this which is completely different, aesthetics wise.

Audrey Tang: This part which we launched for Mac and Linux users last year, has an approval rate of 96 percent which is unheard of. Also, more than twice as many people chose to file taxes online because of this, which is great. It’s a great story.

Audrey Tang: Even those four percent of people get serviced by the people who actually got into the co-creation workshop. These people now feel it’s like a baby that they didn’t give birth to, but they helped giving birth to it. This is a new thing. People don’t have the habit of using it, so we get a lot of volunteers on social media and so on, voluntarily helping people because they helped in creating it.

Audrey Tang: The customer support is great. The Windows users say, "We want that." This year, Windows users are also switching to this web based software. The point here being to translate something into what people can understand is to contextualize it with as many and as diverse a set of professionals as possible.

Audrey Tang: If in a room you have people from five professions, for each of their professions they are capable of explaining. But for every other four professions, they were just kids. They are no different from lay citizens. They are professionals. They understand that their misunderstanding could be corrected.

Audrey Tang: By recording and making public the transcript and the mind map during those cross examinations and conversations between the five professions, it makes everybody understandable. That’s our approach.

Miriam Meckel: I was wondering all the time why a country like Germany, for example, other European countries, don’t manage to head in the same direction and really understand the basic idea of using technology to allow people to participate and to co-create something that turns out to create a better result for everybody, which is really not happening in other places.

Audrey Tang: Also, I like to give credit where credit is due. This whole methodology starts in Policy Lab UK. We have a Taiwanese designer, RCA service designer graduate, who works in the Cabinet office in the Policy Lab and she brought this back to Taiwan. Of course, we improved it and established it a bit.

Audrey Tang: Policy Lab in particular and the whole UK system, they really are good at doing this. We started with their toolkit.

Miriam Meckel: The UK is an exception, yeah. They’re really far ahead of...

Audrey Tang: The Europe? [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: In this regard. We’re not talking about Brexit.

Audrey Tang: No, not at all.

Miriam Meckel: We’re not talking about that. Let’s switch to the second round. Thinking of ways to disrupt how we look at the world and how things work out, I’d love to challenge you with some frames or some ideas. Maybe we’ll start with your basic value system. What components do you think are vital for your value system, making this...

Audrey Tang: Partnership for the goals. It’s what I... [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: Partnership for the global goals. OK.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the sustainable development goals, or the SDGs. The SDGs is a new universal spirituality that I’m sure is compatible with all major religions, because the UNDP checked with each and every one of them. [laughs] The 169 goals sorted into 17 categories is for the first time, that the UN adopted it.

Audrey Tang: I like the immediate goals, the idea that sustainability is not just about the environment. It’s about society. It’s about the economy. To cap it all, it’s not necessarily the antithesis to social equality. It could be used for social equality and so on, and so forth.

Audrey Tang: This whole bottom line thing is kind of clichéd by now, because everybody says it now. I think in 2015 when they really crystalize it as saying, "When we say cross sectoral partnership," we don’t mean that for climate change we do all those sectors.

Audrey Tang: We mean for people who are working on climate change and people working on solving hunger, and people who work on LGBTQIA+ rights, their inter sectionality is what it means, to have a real partnership with their goals — meaning that all these main goals are a holistic thing instead of trade offs between the social forces.

Audrey Tang: The illustration that I usually use for this is that whereas before we liked to think of the ministers as the touch points for various economic or environmental, or whatever, forces to lobby and the career public service being the anonymous string that fuels all the tension...

Audrey Tang: ...that the career public service always loves it when I explain it that way. That’s really is their life. [laughs] We switched to a collaborative mindset. The career public service is just creating a space. They provide the link between the disciplines. But various social forces can add and not detract from the co-creative field.

Audrey Tang: We do whatever it takes, despite our different positions, to find common values. Once we discover common values, then everything become an addition to the common value, whereas before we assumed that values are opposite. We never reached a co-creative solution. That’s what I mean by partnership for the goals.

Miriam Meckel: I think it’s a hard way to go. In fact, everyone was talking about it. If you really mean what’s in that setting, then it’s lot of...

Audrey Tang: No, it means taking all the sides.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah. It’s very transformational, in terms of mindset.

Audrey Tang: That’s why I hold office hours. When someone who comes with a radically different world view as I do, a die hard capitalist or someone who is a rough sleeper who literally sleeps on the streets, anyone can come to my office and have 40 minutes. I really have to take their side. I’m not used to taking some of their sides.

Audrey Tang: But as time goes by, it’s almost two years now, I’m now pretty adept at taking all their sides.

Miriam Meckel: What about open source government? Is that an idea that can or should overall work out?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. It’s already working. We’re working right now. In Taiwan, the open source had two translations. Now we mostly say 開源 now instead of 開放原始碼. Source can be translated as like a source of a stream, an input source like origin.

Audrey Tang: It could be translated as a 原始碼, a raw form of programming languages instead of the compiled binary form for the machine to run. Translated this way, it is really just a technical term. It talks mostly about the licensing, and mostly about the technical part.

Audrey Tang: Translated as 開源, it goes also a Confucian idiom called 開源節流 to open up your sources and conserve your spending, to conserve your downstream. It refers to sustainable management of the environment. Translated this way it basically means, be sustainable, to be open in the input sources that you receive from the world. To be multicultural, and things like that, which is also part of our basic culture.

Audrey Tang: It is not a mistranslation, because to be open source even in a technical sense means that you don’t care about the ethnicity or the nationality, or whatever, of your contributors. We judge the merit of the contribution based on the contribution itself, and not on whatever types, classes or roles that person plays.

Audrey Tang: It also has this part. By translating it as 開放 we emphasize this part more than the technical part. Currently, we’re working on the 43rd collaborative meeting case which is a challenge to change the referendum act so it cannot systematically deprive a minority people of their human right, which is directly in response to past referendum result, by the way.

Audrey Tang: The petitioner is a senior high school child and a student and, I think, one of the most impactful petitions, so we choose it really seriously.

Audrey Tang: It can be compared to one of the last year’s star petition, which is to ban the use of plastic straws, plastics anywhere, one time use anywhere, for takeouts, which is, again, an assignment of the civics class. The petitioner, she was also a ninth grader or something.

Audrey Tang: The teenagers are leading the world now [laughs] , because they can really find a memes that resonates with the netizen and maybe a choking turtle or something — I forgot the memes they used, but they were very quick in mobilizing the petitioners. We really had to listen.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m getting to is that when anyone from all walks of life, especially teenagers, get to be a part of the agenda setter of what the cross ministries’ meetings are talking about, to me that is open source. That means the source of democracy comes from the freshest point, even though they are too young to vote.

Miriam Meckel: Radical transparency we talked about. I found something about correlations — that you’re mistrusting correlations in the...regularly...

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah.

Miriam Meckel: ...like gross national product, all those kinds of...You talked about KPIs before.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and GDP.

Miriam Meckel: Can you point that out a bit?

Audrey Tang: Our first conversation is about the quantitative measurement of open data. That is one particular good example, because as a proxy, everybody who see, "Oh, 500,000 datasets — it means something." Even though it means nothing really. It correlates with nothing. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: If you have good statistical training, you can always make it correlate to productivity, whatever. [laughs] Global warming, numbers of pirates. The famous one in the Spaghetti Monster religion.

Audrey Tang: Anyone can do [laughs] correlation. Because of this tendency of measuring what is really systemic and multi layered, and inter subjective as one single linear dimension, it necessarily...Do a perversion, I think, of categories.

Audrey Tang: I don’t mean this lightly. It means that we can look at the output, the shares of a company or whatever, and [laughs] morph it. We see terms like encouraging investment, or to stimulate corporate governance, the market is feeling a depression, and so on. These are dangerous terms because these are, strictly speaking, terms that we only describe on the memos.

Audrey Tang: These terms don’t actually make sense outside of the mammalian sympathy and empathy circuits, other than we metamorphosize and make companies into this category because they get compared to the height of people, or whatever. We use the same words for these.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, we use words like...I don’t know, "human resources" and "deployment of strategic personnel," and basically words that we only use to describe rocks and other inanimate objects. But then we use it to describe people as if they are replaceable.

Audrey Tang: Both are because we use a linear, simply quantified kind of unit free way to say, "OK, these are two scalar numbers. You can always compare them." This mindset led to this progression of categories. It’s really, really dangerous both philosophically, and also mentally, to think that way. I reject any kind of scalar comparison without a systemic or moralistic context.

Miriam Meckel: What about individual anarchy?

Audrey Tang: That’s my old badge, now I call myself a conservative anarchist.

Miriam Meckel: Your old badge.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, when I was 20 years old or something. [laughs] At that time I mostly mean that reality is just another window. It’s a good summary of the individual anarchism, that alternate realities can always be shaped. Alternate futures can always happen through adopting a different worldview and sharing it widely as much as possible.

Audrey Tang: It’s a I guess still very poetic way of taking on things, though I’m not particularly of that stance anymore. I can run that simulation in my mind, but I’m no longer like that anymore.

Miriam Meckel: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: How’s that?

Audrey Tang: It turns out the new norms that I thought that I’m making or that is channeling through me — it is not a new norm. When I went into the nations of indigenous Atayal or indigenous Amis or indigenous Paiwan, which is the President’s lineage, by the way — President Tsai is one part Paiwanese — they don’t need words like sustainability. They think like that for 6,000 years. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They don’t need words like third wave feminism or gender equality. The Paiwan Nation never had any gender stereotypes. It’s not a new word. Rather, it’s just a restoration to the conserving tendency of the indigenous culture and their relationship with nature.

Audrey Tang: I’m not romanticizing indigenous culture. I’m just saying there’s some aspects that I thought that needs a novel or innovative approach could be simply done by witnessing everyday culture of our indigenous neighbors, which are just 30 minutes away by car anyway and they’re living here.

Audrey Tang: At which time I stopped using the word individualistic, because there’s nothing individualistic there. It is just a norm that they have conserved to this day.

Miriam Meckel: It’s a different way of interpreting conservatism than a lot of people probably understand it.

Audrey Tang: The conservative means that there’s a tradition. It’s going on for 6,000 years at least, and we’re respecting and keeping that tradition. We’re not getting the indigenous wisdoms disappearing just by saying that they need to be indoctrinated with the latest digital trends.

Miriam Meckel: It’s not a word of political meaning.

Audrey Tang: It is also political.

Miriam Meckel: It’s also political?

Audrey Tang: You can talk about the Christian tradition that’s being conserved. There’s also what’s called Christian conservativism and the tradition has been going on for 2,000 years or so, right? It’s just, we’re conserving something else, but...

Miriam Meckel: That’s an interesting intercultural thing. I’m misinterpreting it in terms of political party perspectives.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but parties are really like recent thing. [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: I’m coming from Germany. I have to say it again and again. That’s different there, unfortunately, but I totally get your interpretation.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In Germany, sure, you have conservancies.

Miriam Meckel: Yes, of course we do.

Audrey Tang: Natural conservancies. I mean conservatism in that sense.

Miriam Meckel: Got it. Talking about post gender, you said, Taiwan has never had something like gender discrepancy in a way...

Audrey Tang: I meant it in the programming or software industry.

Miriam Meckel: Ah, OK. How do we transform that into your overarching view of how things belong together?

Audrey Tang: I just don’t think about it much.

Miriam Meckel: Other people do?

Audrey Tang: No, not really. Not really. I think one of the good thing about the language we use, which is Mandarin, but also in Taiwanese Hakka and Hoklo, it’s not a gendered language. Just by saying 你我他, there’s no gender in any of the pronouns. I think the "tā" with the "she" actually is an invented word, just a hundred or so years old, because they need to translate to Russian novels or something. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The core language is not a gendered language, and I think that really helps. As opposed to I had an interviewer from Israel writing in Hebrew. He had the hardest time writing about me. In English, at least you can use singular they or whatever. In German, at least you have the neutral noun. In Hebrew, there’s no choice. Every verb has a gender inflection.

Audrey Tang: He ends up writing is a piece with alternating male and female inflections. When referring to Audrey, it’s he this time, and then she, even in the same sentence, just to protest against a lack of post genderism in the Hebrew language, with all due respect.

Audrey Tang: That’s the most extreme case I ran into, but I don’t usually think about it. When I think in English and in Mandarin, these are not gendered languages.

Miriam Meckel: Right. What do you think about singularity in the context of your worldview you’ve been pointing out to me?

Audrey Tang: You’ve read my poem, didn’t you?

Miriam Meckel: Yes, I did.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] When I think of singularity, I keep in mind that the plurality is here. The singularity, I think it is a kind of determinism writ large. Meaning that it’s an ultimate form of linear vision, such that the line is condensed to a point. It’s a dimensional reduction attack, as described in the great sci fi novel, "The Three Part Bodies."

Audrey Tang: There’s just so much dimensions in the pluralities. Everybody who feels anyone can see that there is just a wealth of dimensions. Now people want to take one, cognitive computing, whatever, and reduce everyone to that linear speed and say, "Oh, by the way, machine learning can recursively automate that one," which is great.

Audrey Tang: Let it do so, but it doesn’t mean that the entire society collapse to that one point. It makes absolutely no philosophical sense. I think there’s many good part of the trans humanism spirituality — don’t want to call it a cult — but singularity is not one of them.

Miriam Meckel: I sometimes get the feeling that, in appreciating all the positive implications of the technological transformation, digitalization, there’s one specific interpretation that strikes me as odd. I got the feeling a lot of explanations turn to use the binary code to put things in binary orders. That’s, in a way, a bit of machine thinking or how you put it.

Miriam Meckel: That’s probably totally controversial to your view of technology.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. Actually, digital translates into 數位 here. I’m sure that 數 is number, but 數位 means numerous, like plural, plurality, numerous. In French, it’s numérique, so it’s the same thing, but numérique meaning pertaining to numbers. 數位 here means just plural.

Audrey Tang: There’s a running joke when I become the digital minister, "So there’s many ministers now." 數位 means 不只一位, more than one. It simply means a wealth of ministers, a plurality of ministers. I took that pun, that meme, and run with it, saying, "Yes. Now, with radical transparency, everybody can see what I see every day. Now everyone can be the digital minister, so we have not just 數位, but 數十位、數百位...

Audrey Tang: "...hundreds and thousands of digital ministers." I think it carries by this translation the concepts of plurality, of abundance, and of the numeric technology making the society more numerous rather than making it just zero and one, which are the more boring numbers.

Miriam Meckel: Would you agree that nothing is binary, in a way?

Audrey Tang: Things could be made binary. This is what we call coding. When we take a photo of you and me, for example, it is a binary coding of that moment. We do so because it’s easier to share, and to share is human.

Miriam Meckel: The moment itself is not binary?

Audrey Tang: The moment itself, of course, it’s not binary. Also, by turning it binary, it means that it is a pale reflection of the authentic interaction that we’re having. A lot of categorical mistake is to take that binary coding and view it in a Platonic ideal sense like we are just the projection of the photo. Some people make that mistake when they use Instagram too much. [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: Yes, right you are.

Audrey Tang: Plato would not have approved of that, neither would Socrates.

Miriam Meckel: Great, I like that. Coming to the third part, not taking too much of your time...

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. I don’t have anything afterward.

Miriam Meckel: ...for keeping you so long.

Audrey Tang: No, we booked this time precisely because we can have more than 40 minutes.

Miriam Meckel: Perfect. Just talking about a few economic and industry topics, economic growth is difficult in lots of parts of the world, also in Taiwan. I think it was 1.85 percent, 2018, outlook for...

Audrey Tang: In an Index that I reject, but yes.

Miriam Meckel: In the index you reject, sure, unmasking. Let’s try to rephrase it. In terms of the flow of economy, what’s your perception of the year 2019? How do you think of boosting the flow in good ways?

Audrey Tang: I reject the GDP, but I don’t mean that we don’t need a better improvement. In fact, actually, the group that I’m part of just published a position paper how to replace that.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s Global CXI, the Council for Extended Intelligence, which has published our first position paper about how to do three things — to see AI as assistive intelligence, coupled with collective intelligence to form extended intelligence; to have democracy by design instead of surveillance capitalism or surveillance authoritarianism, which are the two ruling ideologies at the moment.

Audrey Tang: Also, to have enlightened indicators which is the post GDP stream. It’s all in the report, but I can summarize it. What I’ve been witnessing is that the increase of use of local [foreign word] how do I translate that? Good exchange. It is the term that we use here that is not currency, [foreign word] .

Audrey Tang: There’s a very subtle difference. When we talk about currency, we mean something that can interoperate with the fiat money. But when we say [foreign word] or good exchange, it could be a local currency. It could be something that is recognized like likes, stars, or kudos, or something, or reddit stars that really has no counterpart. You cannot redeem it back to the fiat.

Audrey Tang: This [foreign word] , good exchange, we see a lot of use in Taiwan. The Mayor of Kaohsiung just announced that he is having a Kaohsiung B or the Kaohsiung good exchange, the Kaohsiung point, which is not going to convertible to the new Taiwan dollars.

Audrey Tang: Indigenous people of Tao in Orchid Island, based by a Blockchain Etherium technology, has already issued their [foreign word] tokens, which again, is a form of local currency world economy token that can only be used in a natural preserving way. Or it’s loud or legitimate use it’s the one that you can clinically spend it on are by default use good, or at least not bad for the environmental sustainability of the Orchid Islands, and so on.

Audrey Tang: To use a very early term now, there’s colored coins which nobody uses any more but I still like the term. Colored coins means that these are economic incentives, but they are designed so that one gets nudged into social and environmental contribution when one used it.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s not to say that the capitalist world doesn’t have equivalents. We have carbon tax, right? We have trading of carbon related stuff. We have green energy license credits which will go just by the bunch in Taiwan, the first one being in Asia, and so on. We do have counterparts in the capitalist world.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that because the tool to design an economy is now democratic, we see lots of people designing economies in a way that is completely unimaginable if you want to convert to fiat.

Miriam Meckel: This view is still playing a major role in major parts of the political world. There are...

Audrey Tang: Of course. Taiwan still does trade and import and export using fiat. I’m not saying that world doesn’t exist. But what I’m saying is that we are now using the sustainable goals in an indexing kind of way. Case in point, the CSR report for all the major list companies starting this year are going to be SDG indexed.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a regulation, it’s just a norm that they are voluntarily adopting. Also, starting this month, all the universities doing social responsibility programs, the USR program, as sponsored by the Ministry of Education, are also using the SDGs to index their work. The college is not just for students, but also for the community.

Audrey Tang: Starting this year, the National Development Council is saying, if any locality, any region that could be a district or whatever, could form their collaborative vision for the development of that region with maybe shrinking population or whatever.

Audrey Tang: If they can prove that it’s truly a multi stake holder — meaning that it involves the private, public and the social sectors — then they get a free pass to access to the national allocation of budget that is cross ministerial.

Audrey Tang: Previously, the schools applied for the MOE education budget, the Research Institute for Scientific Knowledge, the local associations for Ministry of Agriculture or Culture, our local private industry, the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Audrey Tang: But when they get that money to do their projects, everybody else actually is just their contractor or whatever. They set the vision and the other sectors play along. Now, with the regional revitalization plan which starts this January, it’s the other way around.

Audrey Tang: The local people hold a citizens’ assembly. They set a common vision. They don’t have to propose concrete projects yet, but they have to prove that they did it in a deliberative way with professional consultation.

Audrey Tang: Now with that, they get a shortcut to the National Development Council, which then assigns up to financially at least 10 percent of those involving agencies’ money to foster this local system. This is the same as the regional revitalization plan in Japan, which has been going on for some years now.

Audrey Tang: We add to it two things. The first is that deliberative citizens’ assembly nature. The second thing is that we ask people after they propose these visions, to present concrete cases that are entered into what we call TESAS, the Taiwan Economic and Social Analysis System — I hope I get it right — which is another SDG indexed kind of map.

Audrey Tang: This means that if you work on any of those SDG topics, very soon you can find your natural allies in the map of Taiwan, of the projects near you that you can count as natural allies. The SDGs are designed that anyone can only add to it. When you work on any of these things it automatically reinforces each other.

Audrey Tang: Coming back to your question, I think this kind of economic prosperity means that the capitalists can do this with a clear conscience. There’s many regional revitalization workers. There’s one working...Anchor Taiwan, which I think she just visited in my office last Wednesday.

Audrey Tang: She said she used to be a banker or hedge funds, or something. In 2008 she lost purpose of life. She has been thinking about redeeming her life. She did a lot of research on internal investment and things like that.

Audrey Tang: She finally found that only by building true partnerships across the environmental social and economic way can she regain this purpose of life that was kind of lost 10 years ago. She’s not alone. We met a lot of people, highly trained, skilled people working in the capitalistic regime, shifting to this kind of thinking now in Taiwan.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah, that’s really important that this will happen and go on happening. Just to challenge you, if I look at the world and the basic situation, especially looking at China for example, that’s not at all reflecting what you are talking about.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think they do. I don’t think they do. China had bought into this GDP narrative, not necessarily out of China’s own violation of how the WTO and the other economic forces are judging China’s worth, or net worth on. I’m not saying PRC is without flaws. Far from me to say that.

Audrey Tang: What I say is that all the statistical tricks that they pull, the outright fraud that they did on the GDP and so on, they don’t do it for fun. They do it because the dominating ideology of the international trade order looks at those numbers. But I don’t think they enjoyed it.

Miriam Meckel: The idea of the whole open government development, what I perceive — and maybe I’m wrong, if they’re implementing a totally different system...

Audrey Tang: A lot of surveillance.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Authoritarianism.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: That’s true.

Miriam Meckel: I just wanted to make sure that’s...

Audrey Tang: That’s true. But that’s not for the GDP.

Miriam Meckel: No, that’s not for the GDP.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Miriam Meckel: That’s another aspect of sustainability and a wholesome view of how you can build...

Audrey Tang: For sure, yeah. For sure, they also signed the SDGs. Especially around the 16th they also promised to have a fully accountable justice and constitutionally protected equality. The situation is a little bit like feudal...I don’t know, empires, where the empire rests on the fact that the emperor is never wrong.

Audrey Tang: We still do know some jurisdictions that work that way. In the PRCs case — that’s the CCP — the CCP is never wrong. Actually, I still remember in Taiwan before the martial law was lifted, that the KMP was never wrong. It’s the same thing, right? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s why within KMT, there are people working on what we will nowadays call "inclusion" and also on accountability. It’s just they operate under the assumption that the party is never wrong. But individual factions within the party may be wrong. Individual party members may be wrong.

Audrey Tang: We still have to honor this kind of an audit of external separation of powers, and so on, but all within the umbrella of a party that is never wrong.

Audrey Tang: It’s basically the story of Chiang Ching kuo, really, at the end of the KMP’s martial rule. I wouldn’t say it’s entirely incompatible with a party that is never wrong. At the moment, yes. They are dabbling in state surveillance.

Miriam Meckel: My question goes more into the direction of whether it’s the basic ideas, getting rid of KPIs like GDP, open source government ideas, not in terms of data but in terms of...

Audrey Tang: Of resources.

Miriam Meckel: ...understanding resources, those kinds of ideas. They will be really convincing in that moment when they show up in the traditional KPI system in terms of economic relevance.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. That’s why we’re developing and co-developing, really, the ideas like the social return of investment or SROI, which is also very popular in the UK, by the way.

Audrey Tang: Also, the sustainability index for stock markets, which is what part of our labor and pension fund is using to invest. Which beats the mainstream market, by the way, at looking how sustainable the stocks is when you hold it for, not just a decade, but a generation or two generations. If you look at a stock market in that way, then you make different investment choices.

Miriam Meckel: Totally, yeah.

Audrey Tang: But then, that’s what the pension funds are for, right?

Miriam Meckel: Indeed. That was what the financial crisis was about, right, that we didn’t...

Audrey Tang: Right, exactly, exactly. Long term thinking is, by definition, a good thing for the next generation. I mean, it’s a tautology, right?

Audrey Tang: It is, I think, just a confusion of temporal interval that we use short term, year to year or quarter to quarter language to describe something that really should be generation to generation. There’s nothing, really, in the capitalistic philosophy that says it should quarterly. Back in the time of Marx is not quarterly.

Miriam Meckel: That’s degenerative.

Audrey Tang: It’s degenerative capitalism. I’m, of course, working very diligently on translating these in terms of the things that could be quantified, just not quantified and commeasurable with the old, I think, obsolete linear quantities. It’s still quantified, but it’s not defined in terms of quantities.

Miriam Meckel: OK. Understood. Let’s quickly talk about the whole future of mobility.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure.

Miriam Meckel: Autonomous vehicles, for example, integrative mobility systems.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, self-driving vehicles.

Miriam Meckel: When I walk around Taipei, a lot of things have changed since 1990.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, very much so.

Miriam Meckel: The air is much better. You have the MRT, which is working greatly. Still, I got the impression that this could be a wonderful place to really implement very, very innovative concepts of a future mobility system.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, yeah, our mobility is...I think the very interesting thing is that, you actually already see a lot of autonomous vehicles. If you visit the Social Innovation Lab, which I just show you, we have those self driving tricycles running around all the time. It’s the first iteration. Nowadays, it looks like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s based on co-creation, it’s open hardware, open source. These folks are from MIT. Based on co-creation, we first show people these self driving tricycles, and then they comment on it, saying, "OK, it looks like a cyclop."

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t really integrate with the rest of the science.

Audrey Tang: Taking a page from the movie, "WALL E," I think, they now have two eyes, they blink, they make eye contact, they can do all sort of nonverbal signature gestures. They designed those user journeys around what’s really happening around Social Innovation Lab.

Audrey Tang: Like there’s the Jianguo Flower Market just near the SIL, the lab, and elderly people went to the Flower Market, chat with their friends, pick out some orchids, and so on. At some point, it will become too heavy for them to carry, maybe something, them carry a luggage box and so on, but even that has limits.

Audrey Tang: We co-designed a float base on, this thing just follows as a companion animal. The elder’s along, and when they run buy orchid, they just put it on there, when it becomes a bit burden, it just summons another sibling to follow along.

Audrey Tang: Once they continue their shopping well into the Jade Market or whatever. They’re finished, they just sit on the first one and they drive them home and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Because they have the same right to road as pedestrians, it actually makes it really easy to experiment. They’re very slow, meaning that it’s just like a person running slowly. Even if it runs into buildings, there’s no harm done.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that allows us to do what we call participatory co-creation of ethics. That is our main goal.

Miriam Meckel: But they’re still in the experimental mode, they’re not running around the city.

Audrey Tang: But they could now, because we have a bill, the autonomous vehicle bill, and we mean it, I think it’s the first bill in the world that doesn’t distinguish between the aerial and the seafaring and the ground modes. It’s a trimodal act. The trimodal act enabled lots of experiments like a car that just turns into a helicopter or the ship that just turns into a truck or whatever.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that if you have an idea, you’re given one year with a pondering municipality or county. Many original revitalization plans start with the premise that drones are used for delivery, because they are far from the roads. The drones are, by far, the most popular, but autonomous ships and buses and so on are also popular.

Audrey Tang: They get to co-create, first with slower speed and a lighter payload and gradually increasing for one year. Then at the end of that year, if the local society likes it after a consultation process, they get to keep it. If they don’t like it, well, we thank the innovators for paying the tuition for sharing the data. Maybe try again next time.

Audrey Tang: Then if they like it, they can scale it up or scale it out for another year. But at most, after two years, the regulator needs to make a decision, like the laws and regulations that’s broken because of this experimentation.

Audrey Tang: We decide to not penalize them, right, for one year or two. But at the end of it, if it’s a good idea, deemed by the people, after 60 days of regulatory consultation, we need to integrate it back to the regulation.

Audrey Tang: It’s the same as the financial sandbox and the 5G sandbox that I’m sure Germany is also doing and platform economy sandboxes. But if the MP said, "Wait a moment, it’s not just a municipality thing, it’s not just a regulation thing, we really need a law. Because it’s a genuine new species," or whatever, then they can take up to four years to get a new law.

Audrey Tang: But during those four years, the operator can still run the experiment, so de facto, a monopoly. Because, for everybody else, it’s illegal. It’s just legal for them in that region. They can still run the business. The experiment can include a service plan that’s charging the customers.

Audrey Tang: It’s only after the MPs are done with it, the competition enter the market in that region. We foresee dozens or hundreds of experiments concurrently going. Then we just make public the lessons learned. Like, most of them, we fail. But we take the ones that really work and make it into part of regulations.

Audrey Tang: This is what we do regulatory co-creation on topics that we have no idea about. That’s what a Shalun Science City would do, because everybody can just enter into the zoo and see how those experiments are doing.

Miriam Meckel: The one year of extension from competition is enabling development that would otherwise not happen.

Audrey Tang: Of course, because the law did not anticipate this. You have to break the law to experiment. Like, the law doesn’t know about cars that doesn’t have a steering wheel.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s both open innovation but also kind of planned economy. It’s a very interesting mix.

Miriam Meckel: Hey, it is. It’s a really interesting mix. The sad thing is that, I think a lot of people on an international scale don’t know about what you’re doing here.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, people know that we’re doing Fintech sandbox. But that’s because Singapore and UK and everybody else is doing that. But the AV and other sandboxes, I don’t think we have that much visibility.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah. I guess you’re confronted very often with the same question, a need to tackle quickly on it.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK, we have lots of time.

Miriam Meckel: Taiwan has a hardware history, and needs to be turned into a software future.

Audrey Tang: Not really.

Miriam Meckel: Not really?

Audrey Tang: Not really.

Miriam Meckel: Why not?

Audrey Tang: I mean, the hardware culture is punctual. It’s, in a German word, [German] .

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I start all my meetings with a kind of a ritualistic saying, saying, “we are starting this meeting a punctual way.” I learned it in German. I stayed in Germany for a year, and that’s what my teacher, Frau Wagner taught me when I was in Saarland.

Miriam Meckel: “Pünktlichkeit.”

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Miriam Meckel: Be punctual.

Audrey Tang: Be punctual. That’s one of the very first things that she taught me. That’s Frau Wagner, by the way. I visited her, I think, three years ago. I went back to Dudweiler.

Audrey Tang: But I learned, also, from her, that nowadays, the kids are not like that anymore. It’s maybe the culture from the ’90s.

Audrey Tang: But anyway, the punctuality that that word really is in English, the punctuality of the hardware culture, I think, is to be appreciated. It is not something that’s easily duplicated. Google found it the hard way during their autonomous vehicle, the Waymo experiment, that autonomous cars and especially cars are not software.

Audrey Tang: It’s not something that you can design, find a problem, over lunch, fix it. The iteration cycle is not five minutes, it’s literally, you have to preplan by five month and every segment you cannot miss by a second. That’s the Pünktlichkeit of the hardware culture. I think that is something to be respected.

Audrey Tang: What I see now, because I start as an entrepreneur in the dot com days, there’s a lot of misunderstanding between the hardware manufacturer giants and the app people, social media people, like at the first generation.

Audrey Tang: But I think with time, by the time that augmented reality and Vive being a very good example, VR, and so on, came about, people realized that it needed really close collaboration between all the fields. Including the liberal arts, really, to make the experience tick.

Audrey Tang: But the hardware is still driving all this. The hardware engineer also learned that, maybe the designers have a point.

Audrey Tang: I worked with Apple for six years. In other Silicon Valley companies, sometimes the project managers call the shots, sometimes the software engineers call the shots, like in Google. Sometimes the hardware culture, and so on.

Audrey Tang: But in Apple, it’s really always the people, the users, calling the shots. The designers are like the Oracles in Delphi that channels what the users want or what users need. Everybody listen to the designer, that’s the Cupertino culture. I came from the tradition now.

Audrey Tang: I think with time, and with more projects like this one, we hear less and less about how I need to be to cultivate software culture.

Audrey Tang: We hear more and more about AIoT for social good, which is really a thing in Taiwan. AIoT meaning an assistive intelligence of things. You can explain it whatever way. But AIoT is really a word here.

Miriam Meckel: AIoT?

Audrey Tang: For social good.

Miriam Meckel: For social good. Yes, thank you.

Audrey Tang: AIoT for SG. I think that is the slogan for last year’s Global Entrepreneurship in Taipei or something, enabling social impact with AIoT. Anyway, AIoT is a thing.

Audrey Tang: By adopting the term AIoT, it means a new culture that is neither hardware nor software.

Miriam Meckel: Very good.

Audrey Tang: That means IoT, Internet of Things, but being used as an assistive intelligence, for sustainability. I think that forms the new culture.

Miriam Meckel: If you were the Wizard of Oz for a few minutes, if you could make something happen immediately, what would that be? [snaps fingers]

Audrey Tang: Nothing.

Miriam Meckel: Nothing? OK.

Audrey Tang: I enjoy life as it is.

Miriam Meckel: That’s perfect.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Miriam Meckel: As you showed me the picture of your teacher, I hope I have it here, I’ll show you a picture...Let me see if I have it. Yes, I do.

Miriam Meckel: I lived here in Taipei, 1990, for a year. I lived with a Chinese family. At home, I found a letter of my father, he sent to me 30 years ago with the address of the house where we lived. Then I used Google and I found out where this might be, and this, I just went there and I found the house.

Audrey Tang: Oh, wow.

Miriam Meckel: I knocked furiously a few times and they were actually there, with 80 and 82. Isn’t that nice? It was a really, really wonderful moment for me. They were totally surprised, like, "Who are you?" Then, "Oh, yes, you lived with us."

Audrey Tang: Yeah, 30 years ago.

Miriam Meckel: It’s such a long time ago. It was really wonderful, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Did you study Mandarin back then, or which?

Miriam Meckel: Yes, I did. I worked here with a German company to just earn the money I needed for staying here. I was at Shida, learning Chinese, because I always wanted to become a foreign correspondent. Which didn’t happen, unfortunately. But other things happened.

Miriam Meckel: I haven’t really had the chance to use language. I can say that I don’t eat meat, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Very useful.

Miriam Meckel: It’s very useful, it is. I can read stuff. But I can’t really speak. I could when I came home after the year. But nowadays, it’s difficult, because you really need to practice and live the language in a way which I haven’t.

Audrey Tang: That’s true. But that’s really sweet.

Miriam Meckel: Yeah, it’s really sweet, yeah. I found it really sweet.

Miriam Meckel: Maybe to be transparent about what I’m going to do.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Miriam Meckel: I’m going to do a little story on the hackathon and the collaborative government issue, because that’s really interesting for German readers. I might be doing a portrait for our magazine, our digital magazine. According to, first of all, the second thing, I might also be using the shortened version of our interview for a digital publication.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Miriam Meckel: We have different channels that I will be using to publicize what we have been talking about, if this is OK with you.

Audrey Tang: Of course. Well, I mean, after we co-edit for 10 days and it’s published through the Commons. I actually relinquish copyrights, it’s in the Commons. Everybody do anything with that. Yeah.

Miriam Meckel: I can use that to work out other formats in a way. Do I have the chance to maybe use some photos?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. It’s all online, I can send you the links.

Miriam Meckel: Perfect, OK, yeah. Wonderful. I would like to do a selfie with you, of course.

Audrey Tang: Of course, of course.

Miriam Meckel: I think other photos of you will be available as well.

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course, yeah.

Miriam Meckel: Perfect.

Audrey Tang: We’ll just take a regular photo. I’ll ask my colleague.

Miriam Meckel: OK.

Audrey Tang: OK, cool.

Miriam Meckel: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Miriam Meckel: That was really an interesting conversation, I loved it.