Question: I would like to know how do you feel to be in Korea, and what do you think about the IT industry in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Sure. This is my first time in Korea. I just arrive yesterday. People told me about the air, or about the weather. I found the air is very clean, and the weather very good when I arrived. About the IT industry, I’m still learning.

Audrey Tang: Just tomorrow, I will be talking with the government 3.0 people and also the Smart City people. I will have a lot of questions to ask, but so far I only have questions and no answers. Sorry, I just arrived.

Question: Why did you decide to come to Korea and what’s going to be the emphasis?

Audrey Tang: I was invited by the CODEGATE event, and because it’s reasonably close and there’s no jet lag, it only takes a couple hours to get here, so I accepted this very gracious arrangement because I always treasure the opportunity to talk with IT practitioners all over the world.

Audrey Tang: In fact, I was doing exactly that in more than a dozen countries before becoming a minister, and after becoming a minister, I find that my travel is severely limited. I have to get approval for any country that I want to go to, so I had to resort to robots or virtual reality for many of my international engagements.

Audrey Tang: I’m very happy also that our Ministry of Foreign Affairs considered it is worthwhile for me to go to Korea to approve this trip, and I really treasure it. As for my keynote, I will be talking about open government, which is my main work in Taiwan, and how we use information technology to increase trust between government and its people.

Audrey Tang: For the government to trust people more and to listen to people’s ideas and feelings, and have people listen to each other’s feelings and experiences. I will talk about those, the technology and the culture to enable this open government.

Question: I have two questions. As the digital minister, what area are you working on, and what kind of policies? The second question is, as a public servant, or a IT policymaker, you said that you were focusing on the open government, so what could be the most important or you have considered most?

Audrey Tang: Great questions. I’ll answer separately, the answers, one by one. As the digital minister, my main work is using digital technologies to transform the way the public service works. Already we see mobile technology, artificial intelligence transforming not only the private sector on how they structure their workflow, but also the civil society.

Audrey Tang: All the protests, all the NGOs already restructured their working around the advent of mobile communication, and even of machine learning. That leaves the public sector. The public sector is the slowest to adapt to the technological change.

Audrey Tang: Many of our internal working, even though we are using electronic technology, the workflow is still the paper-based workflow with a very rigid, bureaucratic, tree-like, hierarchical structure. This is what technology can change, but it has to also change with the culture.

Audrey Tang: People need, in the public service, to listen better across ministries, and also across the different sectors. Only by this kind of cultural change can we use the maximum extent of digital transformation, because otherwise we would just be using the new tools in the old way.

Audrey Tang: As for your second question, what is the most important issue when working on open government, especially around IT policymaking? It is a change in mentality. Instead of saying "we know everything and we have a plan for the private sector," the public servants are now learning to say "we have no idea, and we are asking the society for ideas."

Audrey Tang: This is a very different way from the patriarchal way of policymaking, like a parent knows best and decide the rules for children. Because the private sector and the civil society are no longer children now. They all have their own, very adult, organizational methods.

Audrey Tang: For us, instead of having a bureaucracy deciding the next plan for four years, for eight years, what we’re now learning is this multi-stakeholder model, which from the very beginning have all the stakeholders, people who’ll get impacted by the technology, to input their experience, their feelings, their will, their volition, and try to blend those volitions into something maybe people not all agree with, but at least can live with.

Audrey Tang: The role of government changes from the one who set the rules to the one to make sure everybody understands where everybody else is standing on, and getting some consensus where everybody can live with.

Question: What are the promises in Taiwan to protect information or privacy, and then if this can be applied to Korea? What kind of measures are you taking to make high-tech possible?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan we put a lot of emphasis, both on cybersecurity, and on PETs, what we call privacy-enhancing technologies. Privacy-enhancing technologies are technologies that protects people’s privacy at the moment of collecting it.

Audrey Tang: A lot of information is kept by the government for our governmental purposes, but we don’t need, actually, to take hold of this much information. For many different use cases we can ask for people’s consent or to ask people to provide it again, instead of saying we keep all your data, and then transmit it to third parties.

Audrey Tang: What we, in Taiwan, is doing is instilling -- inspired by the European Union’s way of data protection -- a way in the national administration to handle the policy of private data. Make sure that, first, when we collect private data, we minimize the collection.

Audrey Tang: Second, it gets a due processing, so that it becomes no longer private data, before it can be transmitted across agencies. Third, to have an independent panel of at least one-third of external experts to audit our national policy on open data for each and every ministry so that they can safeguard the privacy concerns of people.

Audrey Tang: As for your second question, before I become the digital minister, I was involved in the National Academy of Educational Research to design the curriculum for next year. For the next year we’re going to switch to a new curriculum that puts learning first, and not teaching first. It is a large change in the Taiwan’s curriculum.

Audrey Tang: In one of those core concerns of the new curriculum, we put students’ autonomy as the most important thing. This is important because in future high-tech, if people are going to school when they’re seven years old, we cannot predict the technology when they become senior high school students.

Audrey Tang: It is very important that they learn how to learn, and learn how to collaborate, not only with other human being, but also with artificial intelligences as they are learning. We’re designing information technology and media literacy as one of the core concerns. Not as a class.

Audrey Tang: Not something that you can take four of five hours a week, or anything, but require that all the curriculum and textbook makers to integrate this into every single discipline, so that they learn the discipline in a way that makes use of information technology while keeping critical thinking and media literacy as their learning attitude, so they can decide for themselves.

Question: Where did you work before?

Audrey Tang: The National Academy of Education Research.

Question: How do you think of the white-hat hackers? What do you use to nurture white hat hackers in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Security researchers are people who are motivated primarily by curiosity. A hacker is somebody who learns a system so that they know the entire system down to the details, including the loopholes.

Audrey Tang: If we get white hat hackers who point out those loopholes without using it for their benefit, we need to give them a sufficient amount of recognition, of integrating into society, of having the society think that they make useful contribution.

Audrey Tang: When I become the digital minister, the first thing I did was to recompile the Linux kernel to add secure computing of my day-to-day computer systems. The next thing I did was to invite white hat hackers to do penetration testing on the system that I set up.

Audrey Tang: I introduced them to our administration people, saying that only by having people who attempt penetration testing can we know for sure how secure it is, and not just led to be felt secure by security features introduced by vendors.

Audrey Tang: People really need to know the detail of what the white hat hackers are doing, in order for them to be a valuable part of public service. We put, really, a lot of emphasis on this, having a new department of cybersecurity as part of this new administration.

Question: We know that cyber security industry in Taiwan is growing, but currently more than half of Taiwan’s cybersecurity vendors go to foreign companies. Is there any plan to make your governmental agencies or local companies to have more market shares?

Audrey Tang: Yes, we focusing on having local talents, and develop our cybersecurity market and countermeasures, we do hope that we can have local, not only entrepreneurs, but existing information technology companies to participate more in the cybersecurity community, and make sure that all the parts of cybersecurity -- penetration testing, forensics, and so on -- have adequate coverage.

Question: You are youngest minister in Taiwan now and that have been a big issues in Taiwan that you’re talking. He heard that you have been a programmer or hacker, and have been quite good in it. What could be the reason, what kind of issues, or what kind of events, that has led you to be the minister?

Audrey Tang: One of the oldest definition of hacker, before it becomes a cybersecurity term, is the hobbyist use of the term hacker, back in the MIT or the Chaos Computing Club. Back at that time hacker means somebody who can make their own tools when there are no existing tools to do some job. This means the maker of tools.

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014, when we had the Sunflower Occupy, of which students occupied the Parliament for 22 days, it was not just a protest. It is because the parliamentarians, the legislators refused to deliberate on a trade service agreement.

Audrey Tang: The Occupiers did a demo, but it’s a demonstration, meaning that they tried to deliberate in a way that is effective and has everybody who participate, half a million people, to provide input into a consensus that then people can say, "OK, this is our feeling about the trade service agreement."

Audrey Tang: Hackers play a very important role in that movement by facilitating communication, both for the Occupy, and also against the Occupy, with all the different sides, and keeping a record, so that people can, over many days, converge into something that everybody can live with.

Audrey Tang: After participating on the Occupy, at the end of 2014, the new Premier declared that from this point on open data, crowdsourcing, the hackers’ idea of democracy, must become the national agenda.

Audrey Tang: A lot of hackers who participated in the Sunflower Movement ended up being teachers, instructors, advisers, consultants to the administration. I started working with the administration at the time, so I was already an understudy.

Audrey Tang: In this cabinet, the Premier declared open government as one of the core, important issues of the government. They hired me back and have me continue doing exactly the same thing, but full-time as a minister, not just a consultant.

Question: You have been a hacker, and you have your own startup, and you also make your own personal projects. If there’s any effect on your job as a minister, your personal history. The impacts on that?

Audrey Tang: Very interesting question. As a participant in the open source, free culture movement, "my work" is not just my work. I use a lot of different technologies and cultures that was co-developed, for example, by the Policy Lab and the Government Digital Service in the UK. For example, by the city of Madrid, and then also from Barcelona, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that this is an international movement of people using information technology to further understanding and listening of people who did not get included into the political process. Which is why our website, PDIs.tw, the PDIS website is an English website with machine translation, so that my foreign counterparts who work on very similar programs can share with us regularly.

Audrey Tang: This is also why I publish all the workshops, all the meetings that I chair inside the administration as full transcripts, published 10 working days after every meeting, so that our international counterparts can learn from our process to improve their process. Then we can learn their improved process back, like with Canada at the moment.

Audrey Tang: The whole point is that we’re treating the process itself as a common, as something we build together and make the process transparent to the people, so that people can change the process, for example for their community, and for the national government to then learn the best practice with the process that people have experimented.

Audrey Tang: It is an international thing. Taiwan, for me, is just one of the many sites who participate in this undertaking.

Question: In Korea actually from primary school to high school all the students go through software education. There are some proponents and opponents to this policy. What do you think about this as a policy maker? Is there any case of software education in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in Taiwan we start teaching programming languages at junior high school, not primary school. But we teach computational thinking and design thinking at primary school. This idea is, as I said, software is just one of the many tools to solve a particular issue.

Audrey Tang: Computational thinking and design thinking and media literacy, of course, are those broad skills that one can use to learn any field. Our focus when designing the new curriculum is not just about mastering software as like a foreign language, but have the design thinking, computational thinking, and media literacy integrated into each and every discipline.

Audrey Tang: I don’t pretend to know whether it is better this way; it was a decision made by the consensus of the educators in Taiwan. At the public service, what I’m trying to do as part of the PDIS’s work, is trying to get all of the public servants firsthand exposure to the cutting edge software tools for collaboration.

Audrey Tang: Even when people use the best software tools, if they just use it in isolation, they treat it just like pen and paper. The promise of software tools start to shine when it allows hundreds, thousands of people to work together, and for people to break out of their silos.

Audrey Tang: It has a liberating potential for you to work with a stranger, to trust a stranger. It’s what we call a "swift trust" model.

Audrey Tang: Whereas for the young people who was born with Internet, this is a very natural thing, for many public service people, it takes a lot of workshops and lot of experiments, and a lot of experiences to really start to get the idea, that you can really trust a stranger to share their experience and feelings with you.

Audrey Tang: This is something that we’re working on. Software is just an enabler. They also learn software as part of this training, but it’s not just for the tools.

Question: Internet make possible many things which we didn’t imagine. It makes information free. But some information cause some problem, like fake news. What do you think about the problem, the solution for the fake news? We see the problems all around the world.

Audrey Tang: OK. First, I refuse to use the word "fake news," because it has no definition. You can call rumor fake news. You can call computational propaganda fake news. You can call hoaxes fake news. You can call "real news that your write but I don’t like" fake news. This word has no meaning, so I refuse to use it.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, on the Internet, as you said, there are many rumors. This is true. The social media makes it very easy to look at just one line or picture without reading in entirety, and just press "share." Then it gets viral. Right?

Audrey Tang: By the time we finish reading it, the rumor has already spread through the social media. The facts and the fact checkers and the real journalists did not have time to catch up to the rumor. This is true.

Audrey Tang: I will not say that we will fight rumors the same way people fight people. It’s not in the same category. For this virus of the mind, you cannot really fight virus. It is a different category, because it’s just an idea that spreads.

Audrey Tang: If think of it like an epidemic, like a virus, I think there are two solutions. One is through deliberation. If you have listened to people who have a different idea than you, and you listen to them very carefully and consider their opinions, even though you disagree, you learn to respect their very different positions.

Audrey Tang: On that particular topic, after a deliberation, even when rumors spread, even when there is propaganda, you will not blindly share it, because you have already built an immune system to it. That’s one way of working with it.

Audrey Tang: The other way of working with it is for the government, for everybody, including the journalists and everyone, to make sure that facts spread as easy as rumors. Which means, in our government’s case, to publish the frequently asked questions as one URL per answer, and make the answer very easy to share.

Audrey Tang: We can make it very easy to understand, with pictures and so on, so that people can ask a question directly to a minister, and I will respond to it as quick as I see it, maybe within 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: If you have this relationship with a minister directly, you will not think of the rumors they were saying about me as true or as credible, because at any time you can ask me directly, and I will answer to you.

Audrey Tang: Only when I dodge your question or I hide behind some official sounding word or become very vague, do rumors have room to grow. If people have a direct relationship with the government, just like friends, then people will not have the room for the rumors to grow.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s another solution. It will take longer, of course. So, deliberation and frequently asked questions with a direct line to ministers, I think are both important.