Rachael Harder: May I ask one question?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course.

Rachael Harder: I was curious about this actually having completely transparent interactions like this? Does it impact what you say? Does it impact the types of conversations that you have?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it does. It gives a conversation a inter-generational quality, because whatever we say will also be read and analyzed by future generations. I find the nature of conversation to be more about the long term, about the common good and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s less likely that we will end up discussing things that are only good for our generation at the expense of future, because it will look quite bad 50 years down the road.

Rachael Harder: That’s fascinating to me. When you have conversations, you’re consistently thinking in the back of your mind not only how will this impact the person I’m talking to today, but how will this transcript impact future generations. That’s always in the back of your mind.

Audrey Tang: It’s always in the back of my mind, like seven generations down the line, is this a net positive?

Rachael Harder: I love that. What about the immediate pushback or disgruntlement or frustration that what you say could cause this for you today? Do you ever worry about that?

Audrey Tang: We’re not live streaming this. If we make some in-jokes, or if you tell a anecdote of one of your friends who have not cleared this for publication, there’s always 10 days to co-edit a transcript, and thoroughly de identified that part so that it’s retained the semantic but not the specifics.

Rachael Harder: You’re communicating the spirit of the conversation or the basics of the conversation, but you give yourself permission, and other ministers would have permission to retract things that perhaps might be incriminating or unhelpful?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The purpose of radical transparency in the commons is to enable conversation asynchronously across time essentially. If we put ourselves at a danger of losing the job, then that’s not helpful either. We’re not doing things for the next generation at the expense of this generation, either. There has to be a balance of it.

Rachael Harder: Thank you so much. That’s very interesting to me. Very interesting. Minister, I’m not sure if you want me to make some introductions, or if there’s a different way that we would like to start this meeting.

Audrey Tang: It’s fine. I see your colleague. Hi, Bob. Sarah is here. I don’t know. I have received a list of topics. I’m happy to explore that right away.

Rachael Harder: Sure. Minister, I’ve refined my questions a little bit. [laughs] They’re along the lines of the topics that you’ve been given. Would you mind if I went from the questions that are in front of me or would you prefer to stick to the topics that…?

Audrey Tang: Just say whatever. [laughs] This is not a scripted podcast or something like that. [laughs] I’m not waiting for teleprompters.

Rachael Harder: OK.

Audrey Tang: Call me Audrey. I don’t do this Right Honorable thing. [laughs]

Rachael Harder: Thank you. [laughs] If I refer you as Minister Tang, that’s fine?

Audrey Tang: That’s fine. Of course.

Rachael Harder: Perfect. I’ll tell you what, I had the opportunity, the privilege, I would say, to listen to your talk on digital government at the Canada’s First Women Only Virtual Business Mission to Taiwan that took place a week and a half ago. I absolutely loved your presentation. I was so intrigued. I sat there and took notes rigorously. Some of my questions come from that and so forth.

Rachael Harder: One of the things that I was interested in during your presentation was you described consensus driven decision making involving the public, for example, Uber coming to Taiwan. I can see this as being a really interesting mechanism to use in order to get the opinion of constituents or citizens and then being able to make decisions. I guess, I have a few questions.

Rachael Harder: One is, what are the challenges of implementing a system like that? Two, could this potentially, actually exclude some members of society from being able to fully participate? For example, the elderly who may be technologically challenged, or even those who do not have access to broadband. Or maybe that’s not even so much a problem for you folks but certainly would be a problem here.

Audrey Tang: The Pol.is conversation is usually text driven. Strictly speaking, any Internet connection would do, we don’t strictly require a broadband. With that said, any place in Taiwan, if anyone doesn’t have 10 megabits per second, for €16 a month, unlimited data, it’s my fault personally. We have broadband as a human right, so that’s less of a problem.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, for the elderly, and the people who are not as versed in text based policy conversations, that’s certainly an issue, which is why we always insist on having town hall style, face to face discussions that define the common values, that defines the rough consensus. We live stream that, of cause, and take Internet commentaries with a up voting mechanism.

Audrey Tang: We do not use this text based conversation as a substitute to the face to face conversations, that is to say it only augments and never replaces. Finally, the challenges pertains to the fact that people would only invest time on the things that are not yet decided.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, if we crowdsource the general feeling, the agenda, on something that the government has no idea what to do with, then people are very interested because there’s more agenda setting power. If we are already settled on this multipurpose taxi solution and crowdsourcing the best name for the bill, nobody is interested, because that’s quite late in the game.

Audrey Tang: Convincing the career public service that even this earlier in the process there will be more signal than noise because that wasn’t their previous experience with freedom of information requests are always petitions.

Audrey Tang: Assuming that this online facilitation produce more signal than noise, and if the career public service can get behind that, that initial challenge, once it overcame, then you get more early stage agenda setting consultations that are guaranteed to be interesting and successful. Later in the stage, that’s less likely.

Rachael Harder: Interesting. Can you give me an example of what’s the most recent topic that you set out as a question to public?

Audrey Tang: Recently, we worked on a bilateral collaboration with the AIT, the de facto US Embassy in Taiwan, on cohack.TW for counter coronavirus hackathon. We crowdsourced from five countries, the norms around which that for example, contact tracing apps, and its privacy norm, trade offs.

Audrey Tang: How to protect the ice use, and so on, while respecting this general norm here of first come, first serve, and so on. There’s five broad areas of feelings across countries before we even start to write or crowdsource our AI based counter coronavirus efforts in the hope that those assistive intelligence do not inadvertently perpetuate a norm that is counter to previous social norm around the privacy expectations.

Audrey Tang: That’s the cohack. It builds upon existing infrastructure of the digital dialogue with the US people, also with AI on Pol.is, on trade, on security, people to people ties, and making talent visible in the world for conversation topics. These are the more recent ones.

Rachael Harder: It’s very interesting. I should just pause and say, Bob, at any point, if you have a follow up question, please type it and definitely I’ll certainly turn it over to you as well, for some time to ask any questions that you’re…

Bob Zimmer: Sure. When you’re ready anytime.

Rachael Harder: OK.

Rachael Harder: Minister, when you’re talking about consulting with the general public, inviting citizens to have input on these things, one of the things that is an objective of the government that’s currently in place in Canada, again, I’m not in the government, I’m on the side of opposition, but one of the phrases that they use is to be open by default.

Rachael Harder: Now in Canada open by default, under this current government, I would say doesn’t look anything close to what you’re talking about in terms of inviting citizen engagement and communicating with them the conversations that you’re having as a minister, the decisions that are being made at the higher levels.

Rachael Harder: I’m wondering, if you were to give an example, and you’ve already given some, but if you were to give some further examples in terms of what does it looks like in Taiwan to be open by default? What would you point to to show this as a capstone, I guess, in the way that you do government?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I will point to join.gov.tw, our national participation portal. We used to call it e participation, but we dropped the E when there’s 10 million, 8 million visitors. Taiwan is 23 million people, a vast majority of adults. There’s many people under 18 as well frequenting the site, so we dropped the E because everybody knows it’s the participating portal.

Audrey Tang: On the portal is an entire life cycle of policy making, starting from citizens initiatives, which if 5,000 signature is gathered using SMS based authentication, but the proposer could be 16 years old. Actually, they’re very popular with 16 year olds who usually propose things like banning plastic straws from bubble teas and things like that for future generations.

Audrey Tang: 5,000 signatures later, all the ministries related to that issue need to come out and respond point by point, as if this is a parliamentary interpolation. It carries the same power as a parliamentary interpolation within 60 days. If this is inter agency, then we have a team of participation officers embedded in each ministry. 32 ministries, more than 100, these people.

Audrey Tang: They are responsible for engaging those emerging hashtags. They have to speak through the memes, cute dogs and cats, and things like that, making sure that people understand the current policy decision situations in a way that’s fun and engaging, but also always ready to listen to the various different stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: We run collaboration meetings, more than, I think, 90 collaboration meetings has been run on inter agency issues. I will also point too, that’s the regulatory output from these workshops with the people are also pre announced for 60 days for another round of public commentary.

Audrey Tang: Even when it’s signed into action and allocated a budget, the budget cycle itself, every month or so, there’s also a participation part in the budget that’s already allocated and running.

Audrey Tang: Finally, there’s also a section on the same website for participatory budget, usually under municipal or local level that people can propose new budget items to complement these budgets already approved by the central level to fit better their local needs. Altogether, this is a complete life cycle. At each and every point, the citizens’ input are responded in the here and now.

Rachael Harder: Are you saying then anyone can go on and submit an idea or question, anything? Then they’re going to get a response from the minister’s office within 60 days.

Audrey Tang: If they get 5,000 people also joining in the e petition test write. They don’t have to be voting citizens. They could be immigrants. They could be very young people and that’s all fine.

Rachael Harder: OK.

Bob Zimmer: Sorry, can you hear me?

Audrey Tang: Yes, very well.

Bob Zimmer: I hate to step on your toes there, Rachael, but I just have a question.

Rachael Harder: No, please.

Bob Zimmer: I was looking at your resume and I see you’re quite the expert on anything digital, and I appreciate your expertise. I got thrown into this as becoming the chair of the ethics committee, Access to Information, Privacy, dealing with Facebook and all the rest. I’ve been to Taiwan, personally, I look at you as a country, and your challenges with your big brother not far away.

Bob Zimmer: I look at security, I look at data and I look at all these concerns that we’re having about what do you do about all these problems that we’re having. It’s a big question, and I realized the answer is a difficult one to answer. What are some of the measures that Taiwan is taking to really address these issues?

Bob Zimmer: I just was on a call before this with the panel on the social dilemma the people that actually made that video. There’s a lot of issues. There’s data minimization, your security is being an issue. There’s so many different facets. Do you have a GDPR type set of regulations with you already?

Audrey Tang: We do.

Bob Zimmer: I think you’ve already…OK, and my apologies.

Audrey Tang: We are seeking GDPR adequacy. I think next week we’ll have the part of the Act that’s this independence DPA. We have DPA it’s just not independent by itself. That’s the only difference from us to GDPR. In many ways like the data collation stuff, I think we’re beyond GDPR. Of course, we are on the same ethical track.

Bob Zimmer: How are you finding the rollout of that? Canada, I don’t know if you know much about our legislation. We have C11 that’s been talked about. I’ve read it thoroughly. It’s really set up as a bit of a smokescreen. It’s supposed to deal with this stuff, but there are holes that trucks can drive through in this legislation.

Bob Zimmer: How do you find your version, I think you call the DPA, how do you find it working with social media? How’s it going?

Audrey Tang: Well, in Taiwan, we have domestic pro-social social media. That’s part of a digital public infrastructure. For example, when Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower from Wuhan share on social media in 2019, December that year, and I quote, “Seven new SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market.” It got posted on Reddit and other forums as well.

Audrey Tang: Only on PTT, the Taiwanese social media did it get serious triage and within 24 hours. It enabled us to start house inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan on the first day of 2020. The difference here is that the PTT doesn’t have any advertisements. It doesn’t have any shareholders.

Audrey Tang: For 25 years they’re just pet projects by recent undergrads of the National Taiwan University. That is to say, they are sponsored by the ministry of education, and subsidized entirely by taxpayer money, thoroughly open source co-governed, and stuff.

Audrey Tang: The upshot is that we have something like the public town halls, public squares, parks and national parks, the digital equivalence of a public infrastructure for us to have a real conversation instead of being distracted by the digital equivalent of a nightlife district with private bouncer and addictive drinks…so which is the Facebook…

Bob Zimmer: It’s an interesting way to put that. We just talked about the polarization and the desire in the best case. It always drives the conversation to the polar left or the polar right. Most of us exist in the middle, whether it’s we have dinner together, we typically stay in that 95 percent of agreeing with most of what people are saying across from us. I appreciate what you’re doing.

Bob Zimmer: I guess to me, I have to do a bit of more of my homework on what your legislation looks like. Again, we’re looking for models that will protect that public square. Sometimes there are going to be abrasive conversations there. In this woke world that we’re in now, it seems we’re moving away from anything that can offend anybody. That isn’t good, either. Do you find you found the balance there?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, yes. The point here is that we focus on the common values, the rough consensus rather than the positions themselves, then the conversation tend to be more fruitful. The technology that I was alluding to, the Pol.is technology, specialize on that when people share what their feelings about Uber.

Audrey Tang: In 2015, we didn’t talk about whether it’s gig economy, platform economy, or sharing economy, because that, while very interesting as a debate, is not very fruitful to discover common feelings. Instead, we just focus on this is AI assistive intelligence conversation called Pol.is. My friends and family…

Bob Zimmer: Pol.is.

Audrey Tang: …in different clusters and it is open source free software actually bilingual, automated translated so you can do English French conversations [laughs] with it. Basically people are invited to comment on each other’s feelings. For example, this is a feeling from yours truly that I said, “No matter whether they’re professional licensed drivers or not passenger insurance I feel is very important.”

Audrey Tang: Whether you agree with that, in which case you move closer to me, or you disagree with that, which you move further away from me, there is no reply button, so there is no points for the trolls to grow. These areas, they measure…

Bob Zimmer: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: …plurality and diversities do not measure the head count. Even if people mobilize 5000 people to build the same, it doesn’t really increase the area at the end of it. People see that everyone agree with their neighbors on their shared common feelings on these five polarized ideology points. People agree to disagree but they don’t spend calorie on it.

Bob Zimmer: See, to me we’re looking at the writing these algorithms to get to exactly where you’re at. Recreating the wheel, you’ve already created the wheel, we just have to figure out how that’s going to be implemented in North America.

Audrey Tang: It’s free software. All I did is to install it on our local National Center for High Speed Computation. There’s some translation and polis.gov.tw to it. Something that gov.tw is signified digital public infrastructure. It’s not a one time thing. It’s not a project thing, it’s part of government. It’s not going away.

Bob Zimmer: Thank you.

Rachael Harder: I’m sorry, just to make sure I understand correctly. You were able to generate that data based on what platform? Where are people accessing that?

Audrey Tang: On polis.gov.tw. We start the pol.is conversation.

Bob Zimmer: It is a social media platform.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a pro-social social media platform, not an anti social one.

Rachael Harder: Is that a platform that you’ve created to help replace something like Facebook?

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that the town square or the public square is there to replace the nightclubs. If I say so nightclubs are going to be angry. There is a place for really loud music, people shouting at each other and getting drunk, but these are not the place where we do public consultation.

Bob Zimmer: You’re not going to bring your family there for dinner?

Audrey Tang: No.

Rachael Harder: It brings another question for me, though, just bouncing off of what Bob is saying. I would be interested in your view as minister, is there a place for information censorship? Again, in Canada, there’s a lot of conversation around misinformation and wanting to prevent its spread. There’s been various attempts made at legislating what can and cannot be said.

Rachael Harder: We’re aware of the fact that throughout COVID, there’s been tons of information that’s been taken down from YouTube or Facebook. You look at Twitter censors, what’s been said. They kicked off the United States of America President. I’m wondering, in your view, what is the role of censoring information? Should the government be playing a role in that or should government remain hands off?

Audrey Tang: I see take downs by the administration, very much like lock downs for pandemic from the administration. That is to say, there are things of a last resort that we try very hard not to do. Taiwan this time countered the pandemic with no lockdown whatsoever. We countered infodemic, indeed the same election conspiracy theories that we saw in the US, without any take down.

Audrey Tang: I think lockdowns are take downs. It signifies that the preventative measures, quarantine and vaccination have failed. This is a action of last resort. We try not to get to that place. For example, when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president gets reelected on the election day, there’s this rampant disinformation campaign that says the CIA made invisible inks, the counts were wrong.

Audrey Tang: No matter who you vote, Dr. Tsai is going to get a vote. The tallying machine has been rigged. It didn’t say random oversea software companies on military raids or something. That’s a US specialty, I believe. [laughs] Otherwise, something very isomorphic to what we saw later on in the US election was here, too.

Audrey Tang: It got cleared up within just a couple hours and the disinformation stopped to spread. The reason why is that we invited YouTubers of all the opposing parties to attend the counting ceremony. We use paper based ballots. We count publicly, in the sense that everybody is allowed to record. The YouTuber of the major parties all are armed with this app that does real time tallying.

Audrey Tang: The point is that there is a almost participatory auditing accountability going on. People, while they don’t listen to the opposition’s party’s YouTubers, they are of course listening to their own YouTubers. When those counts agree with one another, then invisible ink is just not very plausible. The idea is through more transparency and participatory, once at that, do we counter that.

Audrey Tang: Or there was a conspiracy theory that says the masks are being hoarded by certain pharmacies or production facilities and so on, there’s a black market. Again, it’s countered by making the real time stock availability available of all the pharmacies medical grade mask so that every 30 seconds people queuing in line can check the real time availability, analyze the distribution patterns and so on in more than 100 applications.

Audrey Tang: Again, more transparency, less room for the rumor to spread. I referred to these infrastructure, again, as vaccines of the mind. When people see that laugh about it, share about it is far less likely for the disinformation to spread.

Rachael Harder: Minister, I’m so intrigued by this. It’s fascinating how you’re tackling misinformation. When I was a part of the session, the Virtual Business Mission to Taiwan, you talked about using humor in order to come against some of the disinformation that was being spread. You shared a number of memes and images that were being used. I found that very fascinating.

Rachael Harder: One of the things that I’m wondering, and I hope my question comes across well. That is, Taiwan and Canada are very different countries in terms of our make up.

Rachael Harder: I’m wondering, if you were to venture a guess or an observation, to what extent does the social fabric or the cultural norms of Taiwan, to what extent does that have an impact on your success in implementing the types of practices that you’re talking about? Could Canada do something similar?

Audrey Tang: I think so. Part of the reason why I’m so optimistic is that just a few years ago, in 2013, ‘14, nobody believed something like that is possible in Taiwan. [laughs] People are saying the young people are apathetic about politics, there’s very low level of political engagement. People say that the political process is rigged and things like that.

Audrey Tang: In 2014, I think the administration only had an approval rate of 9.2 percent [laughs] from the people, the historic low in terms of trust. We rebuilt from that using nothing but crowdsourcing and this digital public infrastructure. Promise and delivered responding to the here and now and encouraging people to share these viral memes.

Audrey Tang: That’s basically rebuild democracy as a type of technology that everybody could join on. The more you consider citizens capable of doing something like this, the more they become mature enough to do something like this, is the Pygmalion effect or self-fulfilling prophecy.

Audrey Tang: If the authoritarian government treats people as kids, babies and so on, then people are not going to be very good partners because the government doesn’t trust the people in the first place. Canada, I believe, has the culture of this rough consensus, common values out of different positions, whatever polarization, you say, maybe just an artifact of the anti-social social media.

Bob Zimmer: Minister Tang based on what you just said there too. What do you find the usership? I assume there’s Facebook and not all this typical social media platforms are in Taiwan. What is the usership of Pol.is versus these other platforms? Are they highly used?

Audrey Tang: The Pol.is is just one tool in the toolkit of online participation. The Join platform has a very active visitorship of around 8 million 10 million depending on… Our country is 23 million so large.

Bob Zimmer: What was the name of that social media?

Audrey Tang: Join.gov.tw. Pol.is is used in Join, but participatory budget also, citizen initiative also. This whole toolkit is exposed on the same platform. It does something like Amazon recommendation, you file this petition, maybe you’ll be interested in three other things. It’s fun. It makes citizen participation fun.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, the age groups that are most active are people around 16 and 17 years olds, and people around 60 and 70 years olds. My conjecture is that these two generation have more time on their hands and care more about future generations.

Bob Zimmer: How does it pay for itself? Does it generate? Does it have ads, like any other platform?

Audrey Tang: No. It’s .gov.tw.

Bob Zimmer: It’s completely government app?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Five years ago, we had this long, passionate conversation with the national budget office on whether something like this, the digital equivalent of public squares, bridges and national parks, could qualify for the investment in infrastructure bills, because we’re introducing a special act on infrastructure bill.

Audrey Tang: Usually, whatever that’s hosted in the cloud, gets classified as a continuous spending on personnel and things like that, and never part of the infrastructure budget because of the lack of this accounting part of it.

Audrey Tang: The Minister of Culture at a time, Minister Cheng, Li-Chiun (鄭麗君) feel very passionately about digitizing all the historic buildings into volumetric 3D scans so it could be used in video games and films and so on. Now, that’s entirely non-corporeal. There’s nothing tangible, it’s not a bridge. It’s public infrastructure, because it’s in the digital commons.

Audrey Tang: After quite a few meetings, we managed to convince the national budget office so that it called out this very special digital and cultural realm within the infrastructure bill. This is a mind change to many of the accountants.

Bob Zimmer: To me that’s brilliant in that it’s so similar to what we consider, I was just in Stanley Park last week. The reason why it’s a public space is because, we all have this common interest to keep that space preserved. The analogy is so similar to the Digital Public Square, it makes complete sense. Yeah, it’s brilliant in many ways. I’m thinking about how to apply it to our Canadian situation.

Bob Zimmer: The fact that you’re doing this in your very hotbed of anybody’s being challenged with their democracy and their security and data, it’s you in Taiwan and you’re managing to make it work.

Rachael Harder: Is it OK if I jump in and ask a question Bob?

Bob Zimmer: Yeah, absolutely.

Rachael Harder: Because we’re on this topic right now, I just wanted to jump in, like when you’re talking about Pol.is or Joint, are there algorithms that are used in order to draw people into those forums or towards specific questions?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. Here’s the recommendation engine as I mentioned, there’s also the Pol.is clustering is K means clustering. Based on the yes and no answers, agree or not answers, you are grouped with the people who share a similar sentiments and most outstanding divisiveness in the conversations is also automatically surfaced.

Audrey Tang: This two dimensional plot uses the most controversial issues as the X axis and the next one as the Y axis that’s called principal component analysis. These are AI, but they’re not deep learning or for that matter, any recent machine learning. This is last century AI but because of that, it’s very explainable. People could download open data, analyze it for themselves, and many people do.

Rachael Harder: Will people see these forums advertised within their social media feeds or when they’re searching online?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. We make many funny memes to draw people in to the discussion. We do engage Facebook, Twitter or Instagram in that sense, but always with a link to a Pol.is. This is putting a town hall or public square deliberation as advertisements on the front door of the local bar or nightclub.

Rachael Harder: Could your platforms ever be misused by a bad actor?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Well, there’s many intentional abuses that we have seen. For example, people sometimes thought that if they mobilize other people to vote exactly the same way, it will work to their advantage, but they discover we only hold ourselves accountable to the agenda that is resonating across all the different clusters. Mobilizing people to vote the same doesn’t work.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes it doesn’t work, but in creative ways. For example, right after UberX, we did an Airbnb consultation, and Airbnb sent a newsletter, an email to all its Taiwanese members, saying please go to Pol.is and vote for our company platform. They discovered that this would actually have worked if this is just a few preedesigned survey questions where there’s the standard answer.

Audrey Tang: Because the Pol.is is a weekly survey, you’re basically asked to also share your feelings for other people to respond to. It’s a higher bitrate, higher dimension. Only one third of Airbnb members mobilized this way actually voted in a pro-Airbnb way.

Audrey Tang: The other members then brainstorm about things that are more fair, and not at all the Airbnb position back then because they’re asked to also share their genuine feelings and compete on how across the aisle it could be.

Rachael Harder: When you use algorithms then to promote these sites and draw people in, are there specific individuals or target groups? Whether that’s age, gender or career, whatever that is, are there different groups of people that you’re wanting to target or is it equally made available to everyone?

Audrey Tang: It’s equally made available, though when this conversations are rolled out, there are natural groups of stakeholders. For example, the UberX, of course the taxi unions and co-ops, well Uber itself and the various associations associated with during economy and so on. These are natural stakeholder groups.

Audrey Tang: Basically, they would ask us, so can we distribute this link to our members? We made sure that we share this link to all of them on the same hour, same minutes, so that’s when people go to this Pol.is conversation there’s already a variety of viewpoints initially.

Bob Zimmer: I was going to ask just about infrastructure, the cost of it. What is the management look like? I know Google’s got a thousands of employees, and they’re almost a trillion dollar. I can’t really know what they are. What is the sort of the cost to the government per year for this? Again, how many people does it take to manage?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, participation officer team are all career public servants. They take their salaries already, but with an additional training to engage the public. That’s an entirely HR budget that’s already paid. In terms of hosting requirements for Join and so on, it’s inexpensive because it’s just four virtual machines running on a already nationalized data center.

Audrey Tang: It’s hundreds of Euros per year so like negligible. The software, there’s no licensing cost, because this is a free software. We pay people like four full time staff for the operation, the localization, customer support and some legal, but again, these are not negligible, but certainly very affordable.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that any local township can do this, and indeed many township did. In the US, Bowling Green Kentucky did this entirely using just the newspapers budget or something.

Bob Zimmer: Thank you.

Rachael Harder: I’m just on that note, my last question with regards to algorithms. You’re talking about using individuals with expertise, they’re working behind the scenes to help do this. There’s that behind the scenes operational side, I would imagine then, as the minister, you have to have a high level of trust to those who are working for you, because you’re giving them access to, so much.

Rachael Harder: One of the things is that they’re in charge of the algorithms that are being used. Do you ever worry that there could be a bad actor within those individuals that are working behind the scenes?

Audrey Tang: Not at all because this is all free software. The Pol.is, another platform that we use Sandstorm and so on, these of course are already free software in the sense that people can audit it. We also pay professional penetration testers and they are good, really good. Second place on Defcon CDF internationally and to do basically, a WhiteHat testing for the cybersecurity properties as well.

Audrey Tang: Of course, because Bob asks about costs, I guess there’s some cost there as well, but it’s not millions of Euros, it’s just I think tens of thousands of Euros to do a thorough penetration testing of that. I’m not worried on either the cybersecurity side or the algorithmic transparency side.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, these are not deep learning. It’s not like we have to explain the unexplainable. This is entirely explainable in just middle school level mathematics.

Rachael Harder: I guess it was just also wondering, you’re talking a lot about open government, the way that you make decisions, an invitation to the public to engage. It sounds you’re very much wanting to protect people’s freedom and limit it only when absolutely, necessary.

Rachael Harder: I’m wondering, do you have a set of guiding principles or values that help you make the decisions that you make as a minister? How do you communicate those to the individuals who are working within your department to implement?

Audrey Tang: I read those principles as poetry [laughs] on the meeting that you attended. I call myself a poetician because I just write some poetry to communicate that. The entire country knows my guiding principles are, for example, when we see Internet of Things, let’s make, Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, always make it a shared reality.

Audrey Tang: When we see machine learning, always make a collaborative learning. When we see user experience, make it about the human experience. Whenever we hear singularity may be near, we always remember the plurality is here and so on. These are self-explanatory.

Audrey Tang: It basically says that digital here to connect people with people to conserve existing traditions like pointing a national languages, and then create something out of the rough consensus. It’s not about connecting machines to machines, or automating to take away people’s jobs, not about asking the society to just adapt itself to fit the latest whims of technologies.

Audrey Tang: It’s nothing like that, it’s democracy as a form of technology.

Rachael Harder: One of the phrases that you used in the session that I was a part of then, you said the government exists to serve the people, the people don’t exist to serve the government. We use digital platforms then to facilitate their use of being and their participation democracy rather than just to collect data from them.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s empowering people to determine how they are doing things with their data, and empowering them in a sense of not literacy, because that assumes citizen are just consumers of data and media, but competence because it assumes they’re producers of their own narratives.

Rachael Harder: Bob, I want to switch back to a former topic that we were talking about. I just have one last question to touch back on but I don’t want to change from this topic if you have any questions.

Bob Zimmer: No. Go ahead. There’s so many things swimming around right now, after what just been said, I think of extremely clever way of doing this, addressing it and exactly. It’s funny how it becomes obvious when somebody else is probably how certain things are invented, but what you just said it makes complete sense.

Bob Zimmer: Surprised, we haven’t thought about it sooner on this side of the Pacific. Kudos to you for doing it. I just see, man, this is the way we need to keep going forward on this. It’s a great example.

Audrey Tang: As we say, Taiwan can help. We’re really happy to help.

Bob Zimmer: Maybe just one last question Minister. How many Facebook users do you have in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: In terms of Facebook accounts as in slightly more than that Taiwanese population.

Bob Zimmer: You’re not pushing them out of the space. This is just a significant operator within that space.

Audrey Tang: I must add that Taiwan is the first jurisdiction where Facebook published as open data and real time open API all the political and social advertisement during election sessions, and also banned foreign sponsorship of advertisements during our election sessions for those topics. They did that not because we pass a law, we’d never pass a law for that.

Audrey Tang: They pass that because they know they will face social sanction, if they don’t, because the more pro-social social media such as PTT have already signed on such accord and people holds our national office to accounts. When we publish only on FOIA based paper that people came to the office took out the paper copies did a scanning, did crowd OCR, rebuilds data structure, send it to investigative journalists.

Audrey Tang: When national auditing office said, “You can’t be sure that these crowds are completely correct.” People said, “Well, we’ll just do social boycotting, and sanction until you publish the data so that everybody could do the audit.” When the national audit office finally did, people applied the same pressure to Facebook. Like any trade negotiation, is easier if the people are on your side. Or if you are on people’s side.

Bob Zimmer: There’s a great example of people that has a healthy distrust for government. Yeah, that’s great. I’ll pass it back to Rachael. That’s good stuff. Thanks.

Rachael Harder: Thank you for bringing that up. I want to come back to this concept of misinformation, censorship and freedom. I’m curious, coming back to that topic. You talked about conquering misinformation or tackling misinformation through humor. You talked about the election and inviting you to…

Audrey Tang: More transparency, more democracy.

Rachael Harder: More openness, more transparency, greater freedom, which you’re demonstrating a high level of trust towards the Chinese people. I’m just wondering, though and you did make mention of the fact that it’s under limited circumstances that you would take down information that’s your last resort is my understanding.

Audrey Tang: Like lockdown. It’s not like we promised never to do that, but we only do that when we admit we have failed.

Rachael Harder: That’s true across the board?

Audrey Tang: That’s true, across the board.

Rachael Harder: You leave it up no matter how offensive it is, no matter how damaging it might be.

Audrey Tang: We actually learned from Canada on this one. We used this alternate system instead of a notice and take down. We do notice and public notice, which is the Canadian answer to the DMCA take downs. For copyright violations in Canada.

Audrey Tang: It’s not an administrative take down, but rather this is making it clear that this is a copyright violation to all the violators so they couldn’t say in the court that it wasn’t aware about this. I learn about this from Canada and then we apply it to disinformation handling.

Audrey Tang: For example, in November 2019, right before the presidential election, the Hong Kong issue is shaping to be the deciding factor in our election at the time. There is a trend in this information, I said, and I quote, “The teenagers in Hong Kong are being paid $200,000 to murder a police,” with a scary looking teenage person.

Audrey Tang: That’s actually fit for a take down, if any, if it’s actually going viral, which it was. We didn’t take it down. Instead, we worked with the professional journalists to fact check this Hong Kong thug, whatever thing. We tracked the Reuters photo, but Reuters didn’t say anything about being paid. Reuter said that there’s teenage protesters, that’s all.

Audrey Tang: This alternate caption of this 13 year old thug being paid to import iPhones and recruiting his brothers came from somewhere else. We track it very quickly to the Weibo account of the central political and law units of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chang-an Sword .

Audrey Tang: Now, that we have full attribution, we did a public notices on Facebook and elsewhere, everyone who has signed the disinformation a court. You can still share this piece of information, but it’s always surrounded by a compulsory refrain that says, “This message is proudly…” maybe not properly “…sponsored [laughs] by the state media [laughs] of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Audrey Tang: People who share it, actually participate in the media competence work, because if you take it down, it provokes polarization, but if you add this mandatory frame, people get into this mood into, “Oh, actually, this is information manipulation. This is what an info op looks like.” Then people develop their own antibodies.

Rachael Harder: I’m wondering, though, if I understood you correctly or if I heard you correctly earlier, you said you take down the information or you censor information only if you admit that you’ve failed. Is that what you said? What does that mean?

Audrey Tang: It means that, for example, we never do lockdowns, but in the law, there is still authorization for a state of emergency. The idea of a state of emergency exists in our constitution, our legal system, but we don’t invoke that if we can help it.

Audrey Tang: During the pandemic, there’s calls for the civil society to invoke the emergency clause power, which would actually give the administration the power to do lockdowns and for the legislature to only approve it afterward. That design is there, but when we invoke that, we understand it would have a lot of negative externalities. It would change things.

Audrey Tang: People will have a different norm and civil society solidarity will be decimated, literally cut by 10 percent [laughs] because the state would be essentially making law, but using regulatory emergency powers. The design is there. We could invoke it if we see democracy itself is in trouble, that public health is in trouble. We don’t use that and we have not used that during either the infodemic or pandemic.

Rachael Harder: What are some of the benefits or positive measurable outcomes that you have seen within the citizens of Taiwan and the way that your country is functioning? What are some of those payoffs in terms of how you’ve structured digital government, and been incredibly open, transparency and granted, freedom to the greatest examples to people?

Audrey Tang: The turnout of those are great, for the presidential [laughs] and legislative election. The past election is 74.9, something, percent. Three quarters of people went out and voted. People who have an idea, even before they turned 18 years old, these young people now constitute more than one quarter of citizen’s initiatives on the Join platform.

Audrey Tang: It also helps with inter-generational solidarity because the young people doesn’t feel excluded from the democratic process and are far more likely to come up with actual solutions to pressing social issues rather than, I don’t know, going to the streets every Friday, with all due respect. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: These are some measurable outcomes, but by far, is that this sense of empowerment, people who participate in the Join.gov.tw process, a majority of them say that this feels effective and it let them invest their time in public affairs more. This is, after all, what we wanted, because otherwise, they will spend their time, I don’t know, addictive in anti social social media.

Rachael Harder: Interesting. You’re certainly getting the youth involved to a greater extent, you’re certainly drawing people out into participation in a participatory role to a greater extent, both in voting, but also in engaging with the issues of the day it’s been formed.

Audrey Tang: Also there’s a quality of the co-creation that instead of 49 percent of people feeling they have lost after a major referendum in other jurisdictions, we’ve seen that. We actually, after referenda and through the co-creation process, for example, we’re the first and still the only Asian country to do marriage equality. Our homosexual marriage is a very different design.

Audrey Tang: It basically says from our co-creation and the two very active, very young and very old generations, we see that wedding and marriage mean different things to these two generations. The younger generations see it as an individual to an individual thing, the older generations see this as a family to family kinship.

Audrey Tang: They’re not wrong because the older generation wed in the time when there’s still this idea of a social ceremony based wedding. The two persons that wed are representatives of their families. These are families that wed, but the individuals in a younger generation don’t feel this way anymore. When we legalize marriage equality, we didn’t change the civil code, we set up a special act.

Audrey Tang: When two homosexual couples wed, their families don’t. This is basically legalizing the bylaws of marriage, but not the in laws of marriage. There’s no kinship relationship [laughs] and so on. Everybody feels that they can live with it. This is the quality of policy making that we’re looking for.

Audrey Tang: If people feel disappointed after each referenda, then they’re less likely to invest energy. If they think, “Yeah, we can live with it. That’s fine.” Then they would spend more time.

Bob Zimmer: Interesting.

Rachael Harder: Bob, do you have other questions?

Bob Zimmer: I do. Well, I was just going to make a comment. Minister, you talked about I was the guy who subpoenaed Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Our premise was foreign interference was a big deal as I’m sure it is in Taiwan. It’s a big deal in Canada.

Bob Zimmer: Part of the actions we’ve seen from Facebook have been because of we pushed them to, you better do this yourself or legislation is coming. We’ve seen some of those good moves where you need to be a…I liked how you even phrased it, “Not just the Internet of Things, but the Internet of beings.” You have to be a being in Canada in order to buy an ad in a political campaign, etc.

Bob Zimmer: I’d say, we could give some the credit to ourselves for that, but it’s got so much more to grow and get better because we still see these. I was just again on a call before, about hate speech. How do we still have that free public square? This looks like the place where we need to get to, to foster that conversation, where we can have those different views.

Bob Zimmer: Still, the analogy is great, to stay out of the nightclubs when we don’t want to be there in the first place. We’d rather just be in that quiet park with our dog and our kids playing, right in that safe space.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s right. Where we don’t need to shout really loud to be heard. [laughs]

Bob Zimmer: Yeah. I love it. I love the analogy. Whatever that Canadian example looks like. We need to study what you guys have done, and see how we can implement this ourselves. I love it that we’re not pushing all the rest out of the space. It has a chance and opportunity to grow at its own pace, and it’s free to do so. What a great idea.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I’m pasting to the chat here, a small study of the points that I just made from a radical exchange. I’m also pasting the transcript that I had with Microsoft senior leadership team as a public transcript in the commons for future study. This conversation, we will also make a transcript but feel free to edit out any particular parts from before we publish.

Bob Zimmer: That’s perfect. I’ll be looking at it because we’re just having this struggle about what do we do in Canada. That even gets near where we want to be. This gets us much further down the road.

Rachael Harder: Minister, you’ve been really gracious with your time. I know that we need to come to an end here but if I may, I would pose one final question and that is, what is the biggest challenge that you see when you look to the future and that you’re working towards overcoming?

Audrey Tang: These methodologies while it has been proven in Taiwan, they need to get into the mindset of the global solutions to global problems. We talked about the bilateral digital dialogue with the US and five country conversation on coronavirus hackathon, but that’s because these are felt on the same urgency. For the things like climate change, this shared urgency isn’t there yet.

Audrey Tang: Even if we designed this space for the worldwide participation, the polities which do not feel the same urgency, or the same agenda setting priorities in their minds, they will not actually invest much calories into this process because there’s nothing to be gained. We say there’s everything to be gained two generations down the line, but that doesn’t quite motivate some people.

Audrey Tang: That priority setting, that urgency that we need to come together and settle on something like rough consensus for global issues was the main challenge. Now is COVID, with the shared urgency across the world, we now have the first example of what this global collaboration looks like, which is great.

Audrey Tang: We need more things like this to tackle truly global things such as climate change, and also ethical assistive intelligence rather than authoritarian AI.

Bob Zimmer: The start of that, though Minister and I wish we would have connected earlier, just a different time in different situation, but we had all the social dilemma. People come to our committees for Shoshana Zuboff, and all the who’s who of that space came to our committee to be heard, but unfortunately, I just didn’t know about your situation, your story.

Bob Zimmer: I’ll be putting forward your name to be heard at our committee if you’re so willing.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Definitely. Come in.

Bob Zimmer: Thanks, Rachael, for having me here. It’s been an excellent conversation today. Thank you Minister for taking the time to talk to two Canadians. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Bob Zimmer: Appreciate it.

Rachael Harder: Minister, you’ve been incredibly gracious with your time. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. Wow, Taiwan is very fortunate to have you, very fortunate.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Bob Zimmer: Hear, hear.

Rachael Harder: Thank you for all of the work that you’re doing. Again, thank you for sharing you’re expertise with us.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Thank you, our ambassador to Canada, for making this happen. [laughs]

Rachael Harder: Yes, thank you.

Bob Zimmer: Thank you, very much so.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Bob Zimmer: Thank you all. Bye bye.

Rachael Harder: Bye. Good night.