Audrey Tang: All right, let me check the volume levels. It seems good, all right.

Anoush Darabi: Perfect. To give you a bit of background into what it is I do, we have the network function as part of what we do, but we also try to publish journalism about policy, the policymakers, and how people are working.

Anoush Darabi: That’s based on what people who are working in roles like yours should be reading about and should know about. That’s my role for Apolitical, in that I cover our digital government side of the things. I have, for the past year, been trying to get my head around things which are beyond my grasp, basically. [laughs]

Anoush Darabi: Then write them up in a way that means that your average public servant can get a grasp of the issues that are behind things, and work out how they may be able to approach them themselves.

Anoush Darabi: When Sean mentioned that he was meeting you and were arranging a webinar, I jumped on the chance to talk to you about your own work, and the history of your work. It’s fascinating. It would be great to dig into some of that. Just so I’m sure, in 2014, that’s when the protests kick off, and that’s when government falls.

Anoush Darabi: You begin this process of working out how to transfer that movement into politics itself, and how you can bring some of those reforms.

Audrey Tang: The "you" you just said there is plural, right?

Anoush Darabi: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: There’s literally more than 20 NGOs in the Occupy. The Occupy certainly wasn’t my idea. I was just there supporting their communication. The g0v segment is one of the three neutral groups, generally regarded as impartial during the occupy, which provides communication.

Audrey Tang: The other two neutrals are the doctors and the lawyers, the teams who separated regardless of the message or the NGO. Even the anti-protest spirit is because communication is a fundamental human right and all that. I think what this means politically speaking, is that all the teams, the three teams the doctors, lawyers, and club zero gained legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: That is perhaps at times even more than the movement itself, because it’s trusted as a neutral arbitrator, or at least neutral supporting to all the sides involved.

Audrey Tang: My personal involvement in the cabinet setting was when Jaclyn Tsai, the minister at the time, went to the g0v hackathon. I think there’s two dozens, like 20-something people, who collaboratively ideated the first vTaiwan concept.

Audrey Tang: All the multi-stakeholder setting and things like that, it’s basically an adapted Internet Society decision making process. I think nobody can take full credit for it, because it’s a very full co-creative session, even at that hackathon.

Audrey Tang: Then just as we’re implementing it, the election came. Non-Occupiers lost all their seats. Occupiers and supports found themselves mayors, even when they did not prepare for it, so the cabinet all resigned. [laughs] Then, of course, Jaclyn Tsai still retained her position right afterward.

Audrey Tang: That’s when we started worked for real, because this election at the mayoral level sends a very clear signal that anyone who is not for crowdsourcing and open government lose the election. That became the national direction by the new premiere.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s the legitimacy trail that led to our work with the cabinet at a point. I think I am just one of many. I am perhaps seen as more of a symbol, simply because the initial set of lectures, which is delivered to all the rank 12 public servants, there is exactly 300 of these people in Taiwan administration.

Audrey Tang: I was the invited speaker, along with another futurist who went to Singularity University. The two of us become more iconic, but we’re really just one of many, many people.

Anoush Darabi: Did you have any idea when you first went along to those protests in 2014 that it would lead to this point now, with a cabinet position, being able to implement some of the ideas that the movement was thinking at that time? Did you imagine back then that this could be what would result?

Audrey Tang: Certainly, because g0v has this long tradition of forking the government. What we were offering, basically, is a demo theme, a theme for a demonstration for viable attendees. Because we relinquished copyright, naturally, the government just merged things right back in.

Audrey Tang: This is the inaugural g0v project, the budget visualization, which gets merged this year into join.gov.tw. Actually, all the 1,300 government projects, including their procurement, research, and milestones, and whatever are social objects around which people can have real discussion with career public servants.

Audrey Tang: Just by choosing this domain name, basically it says we’re a standby solution for the government.

Anoush Darabi: I wanted to ask about that, actually, with the g0v link. I was reading some of your earlier interviews before I came out here. There was a point you made, I think, about it’s having technologists work with government and not for them.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Anoush Darabi: If you could expand on that a little, about what that means in terms of the practicalities of governing.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. My appointment is, I think, politically significantly because I’ve always billed myself as a conservative anarchist. Having an anarchist minister is, I think the last time that happens was in the Spanish Revolution or something. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It requires a new compact to be reached. The point of radical transparency and the social innovation is that I don’t give command nor take command, but I just act as a very reliable channel to contextualize policymaking, so that the civic society can know exactly what’s going on, in a way that make the public service sound still professional.

Audrey Tang: They’re allowed 10 working days to edit and all that, but then the collective intelligence here can then feedback in much earlier in the process, like a huge amount of difference in terms of time. Once the channels are in, again, of course, I act as a liaison to make sure that it’s civil, it’s a well-designed place where trolls have no effect, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The voluntary association part means that the civil society is held as an equal place as the government. I think that’s what I mean by working with the government, meaning that it’s not giving the government more mandate or legitimacy through this technology. It’s complements hierarchical power, but it doesn’t reinforce hierarchical power.

Anoush Darabi: I see. That’s interesting, because it seems over the past two years, at least, the threats from technology have come to the fore far more than the potential benefits. I’m thinking of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the weaponization of Facebook and other social networks.

Anoush Darabi: Meanwhile, you build a network or a system that allows people to make collective decision making in a collaborative way, which negates all of that, and takes out the conflict, and the reduction of debate.

Audrey Tang: It’s nonviolent communication.

Anoush Darabi: Did you feel that the potential danger of technology back end when the movement was creating the vTaiwan platform then? Did you see the potential for online spaces to be potentially damaging to debate?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. We were around in the previous generations of P2P networks: Gnutella, Freenet, SETI@home. Back then already, this whole debate that we’re now having around distributed ledgers and around surveillance data and whatever, database nation, has already happened in the cypherpunks community way back then.

Audrey Tang: As a contributor to Freenet, and also was around when the Golden Shield and the Great Firewall was still being prototyped in its nascent versions, we were literally at the front line, just as Estonia was, of the ramifications of all the different interplay of technologies.

Audrey Tang: We thought a lot about it, and our Snowden moment came much earlier than the Snowden moment for the rest of the globe, I guess. [laughs] There is a concerted work around disinformation in Taiwan, about the rapid response from government, predictable, four hour or less response to each and every disinformation that’s being spread.

Audrey Tang: Instead of a balanced report on paper, we have to have a temporal balance on the Internet. This whole paper balance thing doesn’t work in interactive screens, for obvious reasons. We work with multiple civic tech communities on automated response strategies for fact checking.

Audrey Tang: They have to be independent, because the government can also spread lies. They were chaired by reputable journalists and/or civic hackers that are known as not exactly pro the TPP government. I think it’s the best of the both worlds, because nobody’s freedom of expression has been compromised because of this.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, people have a reliable way of, if it’s on instant messaging, like places where search engines can’t reach, they have a bot where they can just forward to, and the bot goes back with a fact check, crowdsourced and auditable response.

Audrey Tang: There’s civic technology in every different media modalities that use collectively the rapid response format from the government, but of course, also from every other stakeholder as well. It’s a collective fact-finding process.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s unique in Taiwan that we were able to build that, because in every other country in our region, the far easier way is just to put a restraint on the freedom of expression. Our no-compromise solution is the result of Taiwan people holding the freedom of expression as core, not instrumental, but like national identity stuff.

Anoush Darabi: This is interesting. There’s a quote I remember that seems to be particularly relevant, is that, and I think it’s what some of the public digital was saying from the very beginning. That’s, "Software is politics now," and it probably has been for much longer than people realize.

Audrey Tang: "Code is law." Physical law, but yes, law. [laughs]

Anoush Darabi: It seems that for your work, and through the work of public servants in Taiwan, there’s this constant commitment to making sure, to thinking about what democracy means in the current era, how technology will interact with democracy, and how you can help it to fulfill its promise through that.

Anoush Darabi: Has that been the project from the beginning, then? Being able to think to try and think about technology not as an-add to politics, not as an app that you can just stick on the end of a government service, but something that from the very beginning is going to affect the way that people communicate?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. If you look at the first few requests for comments in the Internet Society, it’s all politics. They were very clear that what they’re doing is new kind of policymaking.

Audrey Tang: As the Internet grew out of DARPA, people start to look at it and wonder why an anarchist group with no army nor navy can get sovereign entities to follow its protocol, literally, and not actually having to be subsidiary to any particular political entity. Especially after Snowden, now they are really sovereign now.

Audrey Tang: I think that political theory is on everybody’s mind. At least the core folks who work in g0v movement, we first introduced blogging to Taiwan in the translated web blog, and also the netizen mail list, and the media globalizes, you name it.

Audrey Tang: We’re very cognizant of the inherent political nature of code, and have been doing so for the past 20 years or so.

Anoush Darabi: One thing I was interested about was, why has this happened in Taiwan? What is particular to Taiwan that has enabled this to emerge in such a strong way?

Audrey Tang: If you look at the CIVICUS Monitor, obviously, Taiwan is the only place in that region. If you click Asia, and fully open civil society, Taiwan is the only place. I think that is the background. It forces us to make technopolitical decisions that upgrade our improvements that leaves nobody behind.

Audrey Tang: In every other country, it’s far easier to just go the oppressive or slightly oppressive route. That’s one thing unique about Taiwan, in that we still remember the martial law, and we’re not going back there. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that I think our geography really makes it easy. Although we have 23 million people, on the main island from Taipei to Kaohsiung, north to south, is one and a half hour by high speed rail. It’s actually just slightly larger than municipal level.

Audrey Tang: Before 1998, Taiwan used to be called a province — of course, we don’t say that now. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, the number of people in Taiwan are far more than other municipal or provincial areas of the same size. The good thing about this is that when we say, "Broadband is human right," we really mean it. It’s easy to deliver.

Audrey Tang: People don’t feel excluded if you introduce cutting edge civic tech or gov tech, because our Internet readiness, literacy, participation, whatever, it is very high on the marks because the geography, not because, I think, any particularly wise policymakers. It is a reality of the geography.

Audrey Tang: That, I think, is what we call maybe a critical mass reached by the living lab, because it’s enough number of people with enough diversity, with four different layers of cultural layers all in one place, but with largely shared languages, and with broadband as a human right. I think those are the preset conditions for the experiment to happen.

Anoush Darabi: When you entered government, did you see the public service as prepared for the reforms you wanted to do, or is this a decade-long project that you’re having to work? Are you finding the average public servant easy to work with? Are they open to the changes that you want to bring through?

Audrey Tang: The voluntary association part means that I only meet people who are ready to work with me. I don’t go to Ministry of Defense and say, "Tomorrow, you’re going to change your ways." There’s limits to servant leadership.

Audrey Tang: I think in this current age of digital being massively weaponized, as you said, maybe servant leadership and people-centric design is really the only feasible way forward. Otherwise, if you concentrate too much power, like central registry for all your citizens’ data or whatever, that that’s very explosive. I won’t name countries, but that’s very explosive.

Audrey Tang: What we’re now seeing is a general, I think the term used in the UK is devolution of responsibilities and techniques. We usually say democratization of technology. That is a far more familiar phrase, but I think it means generally the same thing.

Audrey Tang: It means people in every level are equipped with the appropriate level of tech. It doesn’t have to be shining, emerging, or trending. It just gets the job done, and makes the experiments’ costs very, very low, so that innovation can happen very quickly.

Audrey Tang: Which is why we all prefer open source in basic education, and certainly higher education as well. People are not tied to particular ways to solve problems, and also are not locked in when their goes away.

Audrey Tang: I think even in administration, digital service itself, we prefer to say we’re API first, so open API, not very indoctrinating people on open source. I think people are generally raised in an environment where open innovation is cherished.

Audrey Tang: I think that is the reason why I don’t encounter much resistance because it’s taken for granted that Taiwan’s strength is finding common values despite difference.

Anoush Darabi: Yep. When did you decide to make radical transparency your approach to your work? Was it straightforward from the beginning or did you find there were difficulties that you had to overcome?

Audrey Tang: I’ve always worked this way in the Internet community. I led the Pugs project, which was the first working Perl 6 implementation. We mobilized hundreds, thousands of participants by acting in a radically transparent way and basically have all language communities and to hand them commit bits, meaning that we just make them into co-authors.

Audrey Tang: It’s radical trust in addition to radical transparency. It really works really well. That’s how we get these huge projects like Perl 6 to run. The main lesson there was that the designer, in their language, computer language, but language needs to be humble because language is larger than us.

Audrey Tang: Language is literally you can only change it bit by bit. Also, you can maybe change people’s feelings toward words, but you cannot change people’s words in their minds.

Audrey Tang: A designer of language is, by necessity, a poet. With logic as notes, and possibility of interaction as melodies, but the poetic part of it is where the radical trust and transparency really comes in. You can’t withhold information. A poet that withholds information is...

Anoush Darabi: ...a bad poet.

Audrey Tang: Right. I think that’s the poetic angle.

Audrey Tang: In the Icelandic Pirate party, there’s a fellow anarchist, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who calls herself a "poetician." I think is a very similar idea. [laughs]

Anoush Darabi: That’s very good.

Audrey Tang: There’s just this part. Also, the kind of prototype of the way I work in the cabinet now was in the K-12 Curriculum Committee, which I served before I joined the cabinet. At a time, it was a huge legitimacy crisis in the curriculum reforming process. That threatens the curriculum reform itself.

Audrey Tang: I just joined and personally typed in all the notes, everything, everybody who have spoken. That really informs the kind of balanced...like edit before publish and allow people to hide behind nicknames if they feel that the power structure is unequal.

Audrey Tang: There’s lots of nuts and bolts of radical transparency that makes everybody comfortable. Had I gone in with a live streaming camera, I would get nowhere. They’re educators, so they understand the value of trust building.

Audrey Tang: When the legitimacy was, I think, in the single digits was to manage to recover the whole curriculum building process and that survives the presidential election because, first, the radical transparency, and second, involving actual students who protested in the Curriculum Examination Committee. They’re finishing up their web now. It’s the first time in Taiwan that includes students, parents, whatever, in the process.

Audrey Tang: I think that is largely the prototype of this thing that I’m doing now.

Anoush Darabi: One thing I found really interesting in this is where power sits in this new way of doing things. With you being with the people who are build systems and services and things like that, you would think that the power lies in the hands of the people who are able to build things and deliver things.

Anoush Darabi: At the same time, if you take this approach to the design work, whereby you make it as...You’re almost limiting yourself in the way that you’re able to exercise that power that you have. I think that’s interesting, especially when, like you were saying earlier on, about how there is a translation gap between what people understand from technology and what people who build the technology are able to do.

Anoush Darabi: Is that problem solved in the design then? Do you need the commitment to the democratic process from the beginning then in order to make sure that you aren’t taking power away from people who ultimately are using the service and are benefiting from it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In a Castellian universe, the power I’m referring to would be called "network-making power." The analyses of Occupies and so on are very useful, but let’s think back in communication power. Castells analysis of network-making power is essentially, again, a power of suggestive use of words that leads to effect, change, and action.

Audrey Tang: This kind of suggestive or facilitative, however you want to call it, power, I think it’s only fair to deploy such power in a way that is under radical transparency because otherwise, we’re talking about fascist propaganda stuff. Which is why I limit our people power so severely because to wield the power is wrong. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is if I’m seen as partial to any political party, even international political parties, then all this work is undone. Again, this is a crosscutting work that basically reshapes the silos. Every political party has favorite agenda that favors a ministry over another for obvious reasons in all the countries.

Audrey Tang: Being partial to a political party or a political movement or ideology is essentially saying, "OK, so maybe this cross-ministry stuff is not so cross-ministry at all. It is about leveraging one ministry to serve the cause of another ministry." That will just dissolve the peer network.

Audrey Tang: That’s, again, the second reason why I limited power. It’s not just I never analysis viewpoint, that was a very practical viewpoint.

Anoush Darabi: I hope you don’t mind me asking a personal question, but...

Audrey Tang: No, not at all.

Anoush Darabi: You’re Taiwan’s first transgender minister?

Audrey Tang: The world’s first.

Anoush Darabi: Is it something that you think about often? Does it come off in your work or be found up in any obstacles as a result of that?

Audrey Tang: The main step, my gender performance is more fluid. Having gone through two puberties, I’m more able to empathize with people, I guess. There’s a whole notion of intersectionality, like having a organizational advantage or even privilege in one hand, but having a really vulnerable lifting experience, on the other hand, and using the former to help people in the latter, and even across different movements.

Audrey Tang: That just comes natural. It is not something that I particularly label myself in. That’s because Taiwan really has a really good LGBTIQ+ community and the first constitutionally recognized same-sex marriage in Asia. It is generally seen, of course, as my tribe, but maybe not my primary tribe.

Audrey Tang: My primary tribe is, of course, the Internet society and the open culture movement. But yeah, it’s just something that people take as just what I’ll do. Yes.

Anoush Darabi: Empathy is something you mentioned earlier as well. I find really interesting as well this idea that, especially because it seems that the Internet has become a breeding ground for a lack of empathy, especially in United States. It seems that it can be a tool for people you would otherwise never meet and just talking to people you otherwise wouldn’t meet. Again, is a design problem.

Audrey Tang: It is. It is a design problem. It is also a problem of basic literacy. We designed in the new curriculum nine elemental characteristics or characters that are the go of education. Instead of other Asian educational traditions, which put emphasis on skills or disciplines in persons afterwards, we focus on character building.

Audrey Tang: The three category of characters are autonomous, the curiosity and stuff like that, and interactive, being able to communicate across different ethnic, cultural and discipline backgrounds, and also the common good, by finding out common values.

Audrey Tang: Within the communication category, there’s one core character that’s ICT and media literacy, which talks about critical thinking, talks about being able to see past the agenda of a writer and things like this. How this information is manufactured and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We’re also the Asia’s only place, to my knowledge, to just include this in basic education, not as a separate class, but just in a way that each teacher approach their class. We’re now at a point where the students are using mobile phones to check on Wikipedia whatever the teacher says anyway. We might as well leverage that instead of fight against that. It’s a losing battle.

Audrey Tang: We’re basically just making teachers cooler. That’s a far more interesting way because then the teacher can demonstrate critical thinking in terms of a custom project that solves the local community needs, that calls information from all the different strands, but people with charged and loaded and vested interests.

Audrey Tang: Student gets exposed first hand to why people would like to share partial truth and why the media portrays or frames things this way. I think it’s really powerful that we’re having this in our core curriculum.

Anoush Darabi: Comparing now to your own experience of the education system, does it come from an idea then that the education system, when you were growing, was lacking or failed in a particular way?

Audrey Tang: I was a junior high school dropout. I don’t really know much about junior or senior high school education back then, having no lived an experience. My friends told me that yeah, it was pretty score oriented and pretty competitive in terms of individual competitiveness, which never made any sense to me anyway.

Audrey Tang: I can see competitiveness across different groups that solves the same problem, but within the group, competitiveness is obviously wrong. In any case, I can’t see the point, so I quite the school and joined the World Wide Web.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan really has a good... g0v is not the first movement that was funded mainstream. The experimental education movement started far earlier. My brother, four years my junior, is the first generation that are allowed to be educated in alternative schools.

Audrey Tang: My mom, being one of the earliest cofounders of autonomous schools, basically carved out in their movement a place now where up to 10 percent of Taiwanese students can choose to be homeschooled or attended to school, or whatever. There’s a thriving community of people who want an alternative to education.

Audrey Tang: After more than 10 years of experimentation of all sorts, some of that which failed spectacularly, and essentially paying tuitions for other people to not repeat your mistake, the experimental schools system, education system, some really good ideas emerged that are particularly fit.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like a swarm-like process. That are particularly fit to our current media and ICT landscape, which is why we’ve basically just harvested those ideas back into the basic K-12 curriculum. This is like a research versus development relationship.

Anoush Darabi: I don’t want to keep you all day, so finally, I just wanted to ask, what’s next on the agenda? What’s your plan for the immediate future?

Audrey Tang: The immediate future... I fly to New York tomorrow. There is this general assembly thing. We’re just working with people on sustainable development goals. Basically, make Taiwan’s offering in all of the SDGs.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we SDG-index all the different social innovation work, and link places where Taiwan can help, but it’s just not very vocal, very loud about it, to the international community in a way that empowers the civil society and the social sector, rather than just the public sector.

Audrey Tang: Because of Taiwan’s special relationship with the UN, we think that’s the very practical thing going forward, and indeed agrees with the SDG’s ideas of multistakeholderism. I think, had this been a multilateral situation, like the Millennium Development Goals, then the social innovators in Taiwan wouldn’t have much chance to participate in the agenda setting and so on.

Audrey Tang: Because SDGs engages major groups and academic links, such as SDSN and things like that, the 17 goals are inherently what we call an ACE, actionable, connected, extensible member. You don’t have to be a UN member to use the hashtags, the icons, or the logo type.

Audrey Tang: We’re just going to use all of it, and basically make the vocabulary something that is pertinent to our region. Anything that we solve domestically, we can export in a way that also empowers the civil society in the receiving end, instead of traditional development assistance, which doesn’t always focus on the empowerment of the local civil society and social sector.

Anoush Darabi: Sorry, I’m going to steal one more.

Audrey Tang: No, you ask lots more. It’s not even one hour yet. [laughs]

Anoush Darabi: Just thinking about scale, because you mentioned that Taiwan is a very concentrated geography. Does this approach become more difficult the larger the landmass, the larger the number of people?

Audrey Tang: It does, it does. The reason is not just Internet connectivity, which eventually they’ll solve by balloons or whatever, anyway. It’s in the lived-in experiences of people. It’s far harder to get empathy when your constituency spans multiple time zones. That’s just a given.

Audrey Tang: It’s not very clear that this approach can scale to the scope you just mentioned, like the federal level. We’re pretty sure that this works in municipal levels, with a lot of partners. Now, in the provincial level, this is an active research question.

Audrey Tang: How do we get multiple smaller cities to chain together and have collective visions without losing their identities? It’s also something that the UK is facing. I think it is an open political research question in our time.

Anoush Darabi: Coupled with that, I suppose, is how do you engage people who have a low level of technological literacy, who maybe don’t turn a computer on every day, or feel alienated by it? I realize that in Taiwan, there’s a lot of emphasis put on going out into communities and meeting people.

Audrey Tang: Digital opportunity centers, and basically bring the tech to people, rather than asking people to tech, assistive com technology. All this are just a given. We designed the space such that, for example, in rural islands, that’s one of the cases in the PO network, where a lot of fishers, people who want to keep fishing as part of their core identity.

Audrey Tang: Also, people say, "This is a marine national park, and you better ban fishing." There’s traditional very zero-sum situations, where we try to carve out a way toward co-creation. The deliberative setting we have is in a room, where people who are relatively more acquainted with digital and Post-It Notes.

Audrey Tang: That’s one room with stakeholders, about 20, 30 people. That is live streamed into a large town hall, where the local environmental activists or fishes people and so on basically watch the live stream of Fang-Jui there chairing the discussion.

Audrey Tang: I’m the anchor here, like an ESPN anchor, translating play-by-play what does this slide mean? They can have all sort of protests or whatever, a number of actions, acting out their frustration or whatever toward me.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the media loves it. All the SNG or whatever are on the town hall. This is not being live streamed back. This group can focus on the actual issues at hand. People here generally want to see the movie. People who protest or whatever don’t do that for long.

Audrey Tang: We designed the space very carefully in the sense that people here, if they reach any idea or thoughts, they can shout. They can just come and talk to me or one of the helpers, and also use Feng on Slido or whatever.

Audrey Tang: We channel them back into the context of the mind map that Feng Ray is mind mapping. The people in the small room always receive the feedback through the larger room, or indeed the live stream Internet community, in a structured way that is always already tagged within the context of their mind map discussion.

Audrey Tang: This is like a demodulator. It’s just keeping the signal, and also contextualizing the signal, while making people feel free to vent their frustration to a minister. Only the constructive part are taken into the discussion.

Audrey Tang: We did that in Hengchun as well in a rural place, where a popular tourist destination, and there’s lack of medical resource. People want Ministry of Interior to deploy helicopters to serve as ambulance to the large hospitals.

Audrey Tang: We end up just building a large hospital there, and maybe fly doctors in instead of the patients out. Then we use the same dual room connected spaces approach.

Anoush Darabi: All of this seems to be built on this incredibly subtle understanding of the way that people communicate and think with each other. Is that something that just comes intuitively, or is it based on research and focus groups?

Anoush Darabi: Is just an understanding of the way that people communicate, particularly online, that you’ve built up through being part of these communities online over the space of time?

Audrey Tang: This is a good question. The initial software that vTaiwan uses, this discourse system, the Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, I think it’s part art and part technology. The builders of this course are people who have decades of experience moderating the largest forums online. They’ve seen it all.

Audrey Tang: After seeing it all, they think really carefully on how to devolve their moderation theory...

Audrey Tang: "Moderation is good, in theory; theory is good, in moderation." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, they just theorized the stuff that they can. Otherwise, they just add in knobs, and have the discourse operators try different settings.

Audrey Tang: It’s also a very heuristic, genetic algorithm thing that then the discourse itself also iterated, based on the quality of discussion around the different companies. They discover this, and deploy this open software.

Audrey Tang: I think all social interaction design is like that. You have to start with some core principles, pillars, but then you have to make no assumptions at all, because people change. People’s behavior changes, double hermeneutic all the way.

Audrey Tang: When people change, the facility that hold them, the space need to change as well, which is why my office, the Social Innovation Lab, is designed like this. It’s co-created initially by hundreds of social innovators. This is literally my office.

Audrey Tang: These are painted by people with Down syndrome. Turns out they are brilliant artists. Because I’m here every Wednesday 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, people who want to change the space, they come to me, and we just co-create. This is a continuously evolving architecture.

Audrey Tang: I think this really symbolizes co-creation, in the sense that when we hold collaborative meetings there in the PO network, even for people with very antagonistic relations with each other, just stepping in this place lowers their toxicity against each other.

Audrey Tang: I think a lot of it is just getting people’s rights, and making sure that they have an open feedback mechanism, and the space can change to adapt to people. It’s like co-evolution or stuff.

Anoush Darabi: From reading, I think it might have been the Medium post which accompanied this. One of the sentences that stood out, which was about trying to reduce the level of fear that public servants have when they go about their job. Is that a challenge that you’re yet to overcome?

Audrey Tang: I think we’re pretty good now in that way. When people think about e-petition or public participation, they think there is a method to it, and there’s viable cases to compare to. There’s a supportive network.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think this whole "fear, uncertainty and doubt" thing was mostly because they got the consultative experience in a way that doesn’t add to their professional mission. The previous cases wasn’t always aligned with the professional vision and career.

Audrey Tang: People go into public service for all different motivations, but in the end of the day, they serve the public. If a consultation is done in a way that abuses hierarchical power, all the public service will get this intuitive feeling that this is not really contributing to public discourse, and it really makes their appetite of any future engagement lower.

Audrey Tang: By building safe space supportive networks and useful postmortems, sharing food, we were able to overcome most of these initial knee-jerk reactions. That part is already done.

Audrey Tang: We are still building the small cases, celebrating small successes, as we go. As I said, if it’s too far in the future, too far in the past, it’s not very clear how to do it yet. We just admit to this limitation.

Anoush Darabi: I don’t have any other questions. It’s been incredibly interesting. Thank you very much for taking the time. Thanks for being so thorough with the answers and everything. It’s great. Really useful, thank you.

Audrey Tang: Cool. Thank you.

Anoush Darabi: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.