関治之: I am very honored to welcome you here because I am also a computer engineer, I have been. I’ve heard your name as a open source contributor for Perl. As a engineer, you are my hero. [laughs]

関治之: Before Code for Japan, I didn’t think that computer engineer can help the government by using our computer skills.

蔡偉淦: 就開始吧！稍等一下，找一下東西。他準備幾個題目，但是並不是什麼事情就已經有，可能題目會臨時提出來，不是事前特別準備的。

Audrey Tang: Of course.

蔡偉淦: 關於你的採訪，大部分都是用英文的，日文的好像沒有聽過，沒有人用日文採訪過，充滿了謎樣人物。可能他以前問你已經答覆過或者是被問過，他可能不知道，會再跟你提一下。今天政委對於社會問題有興趣，開始第一步是從哪裡開始？起頭的部分可以請政委說明。

Audrey Tang: I’ll answer in English.

関治之: Yes. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Audrey Tang: It will be a trilingual interview.

Audrey Tang: Both of my parents are journalists. They worked during Taiwan’s martial law era to work on democratization, environmental protection, and many other social causes in Taiwan. You see, around the time I was born, there is still martial law. When I was six, the martial law gets lifted. Taiwan started enjoying the freedom of press, freedom of assembly and so on.

Audrey Tang: The presidential election is in ’96, which is around the time World Wide Web got really popular. There’s 10 years where the Taiwan civil society can experiment very freely with a lot of associations. Because it’s before the presidential election, the democratic apparatus is not yet fully formed. People don’t trust as much the governments as their neighbor associations. We call it the 10 year of civil society building.

Audrey Tang: That’s how I get interested in, for example, one of our people in the g0v community coming to this workshop is the head of the Homemakers Union foundation. The Homemakers Union is originally just people who are homemakers who care about the environment, who want to spread the message about the environment. My mom was one of the co-founders. I was like five years old at the time.

Audrey Tang: Then they turned it into collective action by forming a cooperative, a co-op, to buy only the farm agricultural products with full accountability with organic or environmental-friendly way of production and things like that. It’s not running for president or running for legislator because that was not allowed back then. This kind of grassroot civil society is nevertheless political action.

Audrey Tang: Through this kind of assembly, we called on many reforms. I talk about environment, but the education reform is another thing that we successfully petitioned for change. Taiwan had a very top-down, authoritarian education system. Then we made it change so that people don’t have to compete very intensely for universities. They can develop their own interests and so on.

Audrey Tang: All these were what we call social movements, but a sustainable model of social movement. That’s how I become immersed, because I was going to the petitions, going to the protests and things like that when I was like 10 years old and things like that. It’s part of my childhood.

蔡偉淦: 從小時候就開始對社會運動、議題、題目比較有興趣了？

Audrey Tang: I mentioned that was when I was 10 years old or younger. By the time I was 10 years old, my father chose a PhD thesis to explore the dynamic in social movement in large-scale protests in the Tiananmen Square. Because he’s a journalist, he visited Beijing in May and June of 1989, when the protest was at its height. He wrote many covers.

Audrey Tang: He went back to Taiwan, I think, on 1st of June, which is very important because otherwise I may not have a father anymore.

Audrey Tang: That made him very connected and interested in the student movement leaders. Many of them went on exile, diaspora, into Europe. He followed them to Europe and started working at his PhD thesis in Saarland in Germany. I also moved to Germany for a year when he’s working on his PhD.

Audrey Tang: I remember I was raised among the people who cannot return to the PRC anymore. They worked on the democratization. They keep debating how to democratize the PRC government. That is also a important part in my life because I heard first how technology can shape the connection between people.

Audrey Tang: It was the time of the first color camera, digital camera, fax machine, and so on. It really helped both on the Tiananmen and also in the fall of Berlin Wall, and also the Wild Lily movement shortly afterward, in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: In addition to the collective action in my early days that I experienced when I was five or seven years old, now with technology, suddenly, a large amount of people can very easily connect to one another, know what’s happening and care about what’s happening even if it’s very long distance away. That is very different from the old model, where you only get collective action with people living nearby.

Audrey Tang: Now you can have collective action with many, many cities connected in a connected fashion. That’s my second exposure to the social movement. When I was 12, I get into the Internet. That was 1993. In ’94, there was a introduction of the graphic browser. Then I told my teachers, everything I’m interested I can develop online and learn from the people. I quit high school in ’95. All my teachers actually agreed with it.

関治之: Wow. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They said, "Oh, it’s really true. You don’t have to study for 10 years, go abroad to enter the lab of a researcher. You can just write a email to that researcher and we start collaborating." Many of them protested in what we call the Blue Ribbon...

関治之: Blue Ribbon.

Audrey Tang: ...movement to protest a law by Bill Clinton that protect the young people, that requires all the user-generated content, like all the posts, all the comments, to be blocked by minors if they contain possibly indecent material. It was ruled as unconstitutional, but during that, all the website that I visited turned the black background and put a blue ribbon on it to protect the free speech of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: I learned that the World Wide Web is not just a tool for collective learning and action, but it can also be a tool for mobilization to make it very quickly known that something is wrong and something need to be corrected. This is a connected way of social movement that I experienced when I quit high school and started my startups.

関治之: インターネットの存在が大きかったのですね。それを通じて一人一人の意見を集めることができるようになり、それがその後のきっかけになったと。最初に立ち上げた会社はどのような会社だたのですか？

蔡偉淦: 透過網際網路蒐集到很多人的資訊，這做起頭，你後來自己也創業，是這樣的發展過程。剛開始的公司是怎麼樣的一家公司呢？

Audrey Tang: When I joined, it was a publishing press called The Informationist. I joined as a author to share my experience learning programming languages, making web pages and so on. It was the beginning of the e-commerce days. I helped the company to build a e-commerce website for the company. That was really early, like ’95 or something like that.

Audrey Tang: Then we discovered that it’s actually much more interesting if we can show people what we’re talking about in the form of software, so not just our stories, but actually how we go about our daily life. You talk about searching for information.

Audrey Tang: I shared the tool that I used personally, which is what we call a metasearch engine that can search both the computer’s own files and also 5 or 10 search engines concurrently, also score and rank them. It’s called Fusion Search. It went to be one of the bestselling products at the Computech Taiwan at that time.

Audrey Tang: My co-authors thought it’s good that we switch to a software company from a publishing company. I was a co-founder in the new software company, called Inforian. It’s not Informationist, which was the press. We worked on many things. We worked on the first C2C auction site in Taiwan, called CoolBid.

Audrey Tang: We worked on the first social -- nowadays, we would call it a social media -- a community website and also develop our own search engine products. After I left Inforian, @clkao, one of the key people in the g0v movement, joined also Inforian to develop CICQ, one of the first instant message platforms, and many other things.

Audrey Tang: It’s just a early software startup that was very popular and got a lot of investment from Intel and so on during the dot-com bubble.

関治之: アントレプレナーとして成功してきたわけですね。私もスタートアップの世界で活動していました。一般的に言って、利益を追求しなくてはいけないスタートアップと、社会課題を解決する活動というのが一致しないこともあるかと思うのですが、会社の活動と、社会活動家としての自分の間の矛盾などはありませんでしたか？

蔡偉淦: 所以也算是相當成功在這個領域上，一般來講新創企業跟你的社會工作，往往目標不會一致，這兩個工作有沒有什麼衝突或者有什麼調和？

Audrey Tang: Yes. In my first startup, although we used the Perl language, there was really no other choice. It’s too early.

Audrey Tang: In ’94, you don’t have other choices — you don’t have Ruby.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I participated in the Perl community, not as full-time, but just as a hobby. We started the Taipei Perl Mongers, which was the meetup group of the Perl community and translated books and materials and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think it really changed when I visited Silicon Valley in ’97 to ’98 because there was a social movement called the free software movement that really was not very popular with the commercial software developers.

Audrey Tang: Around that time, the community leaders forked the movement to rebrand the movement as the open source movement and with the goal to attract large corporations like Netscape to change how their software is developed by offering it as a software that everybody can change and everybody can fork, can rebrand into Phoenix, Firebird, and now Firefox.

Audrey Tang: It is the first time that I saw the possibility. It’s no longer that people must be working only for commercial purpose in their day job in Netscape — and only contribute to the free software movement in their off-time. Rather, if they convince the shareholders, that it is better for everyone, for their bottom line also, to participate in collective community action, then actually they can work full-time on free software.

Audrey Tang: Actually, that organization is still around. It’s the Mozilla Foundation. They control the Mozilla Corporation, which is still very profitable. Everything they earn goes back to the Mozilla Foundation. This is what we call a social enterprise. I really learned a lot by participating in Silicon Valley the very early beginnings of the open-source movement.

Audrey Tang: When I went back to Taiwan, I dedicated 100 percent of my time to open-source advocacy. When I work on projects, I would ask my clients to allow me to publish under a open-source license. If they allowed, then I charge them a certain fee. If they don’t, I charge them up to six times because I have to rewrite everything again.

Audrey Tang: Gradually, people become more accepting of the Free Software licenses.

関治之: Cool. Someone said you were working with Jennifer Pahlka sometimes, right?

Audrey Tang: No, I haven’t worked with Jennifer. I work with Silicon Valley companies for a very long time. Because we’re in the Perl community, usually, it’s like Larry Wall and other friends of Tim O’Reilly who, for a very long time, supported the Perl community.

Audrey Tang: Also, Clay Shirky who used the Perl community to develop his theory of collective intelligence of cognitive surplus, and many other thinkers like Ward Cunningham or Dan Bricklin and so on. Many of them ended up supporting a startup that I also worked in with @clkao, called Socialtext.

Audrey Tang: We worked to bring all the wiki, microblogging, and many other community systems into the enterprise, so that we can collaboratively capture the collective wisdom of the organization also.

Audrey Tang: Socialtext was another startup where we worked on many technologies, such as te collaborative spreadsheet EtherCalc as well as Etherpad. Many technologies then became the founding blocks of the g0v movement.

関治之: I think in my opinion, the open-source culture idea is more...

蔡偉淦: 開放源碼。

関治之: It’s hard to explain in English, (let me use Japanese).

関治之: オープンソース文化というのは、今の社会のあり方に強く影響を与えているように思います。ソフトウェアの作り方が、社会のイノベーションの作り方と高い共通性を持ってきているように感じています。g0v の草の根のあり方と、Code for America のあり方は、少し違いがあるようにも感じています。

蔡偉淦: 寫軟體、程式與社會創新應該有共同的方式、共同點，也可以應用在整個社會的建造。草根性的做法跟Code for America好像沒有關，Code for America比較偏向政府、官方的。

Audrey Tang: Yes. It starts with the gov tech.

関治之: 強く GovTech 寄りの活動になりすぎないように意識していることはありますか？

林冠妤: g0v做的事情跟政府的科技有意識要區別嗎？

Audrey Tang: Actually, one of the Code for Japan people, I forgot who, said that the real invention of g0v is the name.

関治之: It’s something, yes.

Audrey Tang: Yes, because everything else, we see it elsewhere, but the domain name g0v.tw means that the g0v is positioned as a alternative fork of the government itself. Not just complementing where the government isn’t seeing not. Not just working with the government structure. Rather, it’s about re-imagining a government structure.

Audrey Tang: Although in the very beginning, the g0v people talked about taking every government website and change the O to a 0 to get into the shadow of government website. For the legislative, the parliament, ly.gov.tw. If you would change the O to a 0, you get into the open-source version of the parliament.

Audrey Tang: The truth is that many g0v projects started working on things that doesn’t have a government counterpart. It is not just about working with existing government service and making it better, but actually delivering new services that the government doesn’t even know that the public really want this kind of services. I think that tradition is really powerful.

Audrey Tang: For example, there’s a chatbot called Cofacts that if you look at a information from your instant message, it’s private, but you don’t know whether it’s rumor or not. You can forward to that bot. That bot will get back to you like a crowdsource wiki, like fact checking, and say, "This is false" or "This is true," and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is something that the government really should not be doing, because otherwise we will be judging the media and so on and centralize the power. The Cofacts project at cofacts.g0v.tw re-imagined the government’s model so that everybody can be a fact checker, like Wikipedia.

Audrey Tang: It’s no longer just looking at government service and extending it. It’s inventing new services that the government at its current incarnation probably cannot deliver for the time being.

関治之: Cofacts については私も実際に拝見しました。素晴らしい取り組みだと思っているのですが、仕組み自体を構築することはそれほど難しくはないと思います。しかし、人々を組織してモチベートする部分は非常に難しいと感じます。

蔡偉淦: 假訊息要確認動機，在日本沒有熱情來對假訊息的澄清。

林冠妤: 雖然cofacts是很簡單的構造，但是真正困難的是讓人使用它，如何讓人去使用？

Audrey Tang: Before Cofact, there’s many similar projects already. Just in the g0v project alone, there was a news helper project that does the same thing as Cofact, but is a browser plugin that targets Facebook posts. People just...中文叫做「新聞小幫手」。

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think mostly because in Taiwan, people really saw that there is not just misinformation, which is honest mistake. A journalist might be filling in something that the news source did not state. They’re not malicious, they’re just extending their projections into the reporting.

Audrey Tang: Usually, they can be corrected very quickly. Sometimes it’s intentional. It’s disinformation. They really want to gain commercial or political benefit from only reporting one side of a certain event. That systemic bias is something that pretty much all the viewers in Taiwan is aware of.

Audrey Tang: It’s just if they have a certain ideological side then, of course, they see only the other side as biased. [laughs] Everybody can see bias in Taiwanese social media, and also some traditional media as well. I think that’s because our media landscape is more polarized than in Japan.

Audrey Tang: People become more motivated in correcting the mistakes that’s given because you cannot really see the whole picture from any more popular media outlets. There’s a lot of efforts working on balancing their narrative, so we can all get a better understanding.

Audrey Tang: This is my first startup project. There was five search engines. All of them are very good. A metasearch is of value. Nowadays, because Google is culminating, my product, if I start offering it today will not be as popular as it was before.

Audrey Tang: It’s the same idea.

関治之: 今日のイベントにも関わりますが、インターネット上で建設的な議論を行うのは非常に難しいと感じています。オードリーさんは、それについて、同じような考えはありますか？ご意見を聞かせてください。

蔡偉淦: 跟今天的話題也有關係，在網路上比較屬於建設性的意見比較少，您覺得在網路上缺乏這一種建設性的意見，政委對這個看法怎麼樣？

Audrey Tang: The methodology that we use in the vTaiwan project since the very beginning is meant to fix this problem. I would say it’s not just online. If you are dropped into a discussion with a hundred people, you don’t know them, and everybody wears a mask, you will not get a productive conversation either.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s important if we are going to reach any kind of constructive discussion, we know first where people are coming from, that we have a mental picture of the other people. If we don’t have that, of course, we can project whatever. It’s like a dream. Whatever you project is probably wrong.

Audrey Tang: We will spend a lot of time giving out a lot of ideas. Those ideas doesn’t make any collective sense if you don’t know what are the subjective feelings that brings those ideas out. We will hear a lot of the government should do whatever, or the citizens should do whatever.

Audrey Tang: You don’t stop to ask, "What do you feel about the situation? What are the feelings that prompt to give out this idea?" Someone who keep asking this question in a face-to-face meeting is called a facilitator. A facilitator must also, when somebody say, "Oh, I fear some development," or "I am angry about something," they ask what the facts that you are having this emotion about?

Audrey Tang: Is the fact objectively verifiable? Is it something everybody can see? Or is it something that you will have to share for other people to know?" By restoring everything into the fact part, then people can’t agree on this situation as is. Only during this, we can ask, so we check each other’s feelings about the same facts. The same fact you can feel happy, I can feel angry. That’s all OK.

Audrey Tang: For many online discussion, you only see feelings, but not the facts that they’re feeling toward. The ideas must also respond to the feelings. We set a rule. The best idea is the one that take care of most people’s feelings. That is a powerful insight because we are not saying the best idea is the one with 7,000 votes. We’re not counting votes to rank ideas.

Audrey Tang: We’re saying, if everybody feel happy about your idea, then it is an idea that we would talk about seriously. Once we talk about this idea, it become decisions. This is called the focus conversation method or the ORID method. As we can see, there’s a fellow citizen, Lisa, who feels something about autonomous driving...

Audrey Tang: ...on the AI-powered conversation. People can feel agreeable or disagreeable. There’s no reply button. If there’s a reply button online, we see people attacking or projecting into this person. Because you cannot reply, you can only agree, disagree, or contribute your own feelings and ideas. There’s no room for trolls, because the trolls doesn’t have anything to attach to.

Audrey Tang: Just taking the reply button away actually results in this shape, always, that people actually agree on most of the things with most people. The media, especially social media, only focus on the five divisive issues. While these are, of course, important, it is equally important that we recognize there’s rough consensus of these things and make this happen first without waiting for this divisive issue to be resolved.

Audrey Tang: In a traditional thread of conversation, it’s the other way around [laughs] because people will spend all their energy on those five divisive issues. The design of this space to put facts and feelings before ideas is very important.

関治之: 日本は、台湾に比べると、民主化してからの歴史は長いです。しかし、台湾の人々が熱心に政治に参加していることに比べると、日本の国民は政治に対して冷めている部分が多いと感じます。そのような状況について、なにか提案はありますか？

蔡偉淦: 日本民主化已經很久了，老百姓對政治冷感，不像臺灣對於政治這麼積極參與，且這麼熱烈。對於現在日本老百姓參與的熱情降低，請問政委對於政府應該要如何做、態度為何有什麼建議？

Audrey Tang: I visited Tokyo a few times as digital minister. I talked with the ministers in charge of the regional revitalization, the 地方創生 plan. I think, in Taiwan also, while we are, of course, very active on the Internet part, what we are now learning also from Japan is that we must not always ask people to come to the space of technology.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes it is better to ask the technology to come to the space of the people. This is especially true in the indigenous places, in the rural places, in the places focusing on agriculture and other relationship with nature, because people already have a way to interact and come to consensus. They don’t need AI to...

Audrey Tang: ...to help them to come to consensus. It’s a longer tradition than democracy in Taiwan anyway. I talk about community associations and actions when I was really young.

Audrey Tang: It’s important, too, for young people to also learn the art of working with the tribe, working with the indigenous nations, working with the local elders on the way of consensus making that they already know, and bring the language of our digital language into the real world, like Pokémon Go.

Audrey Tang: Relay the digital to the real world. I think in Taiwan, as well as in Japan, many people, if they are young students like when I was 11 years old, if they already feel a beauty, a obligation towards their local community, then when they are in the university level and learning about democratic tools, they will apply it to their community scale.

Audrey Tang: If you teach the students in an abstract way outside of the local context, then much more likely when they become a graduate student or in their graduating years, they will choose a topic not related to the local community because they grow up separated. Maybe they will go overseas. Maybe they go to Taipei City.

Audrey Tang: They will forget that connection with the community. I think democracy really is the rule of the people, the power of the people. The people could be abstract, like people who share the same hobby. People who use the same hashtag on Twitter. That’s the Internet community that we’re used to.

Audrey Tang: Equally important is that we help to look into the local community, a township, and find the hashtags that makes it unique and bring it into the digital world while asking people through the digital world to start caring about the local community. I think that deepens the democracy.

Audrey Tang: If I understand correctly, also, tomorrow’s workshop is about teleworking, is about people who are embedded in the community. Through digital tools, they can also connect their resource of large organizations or multinational organizations but into a township.

Audrey Tang: It’s very important that we shape this relationship as a mutually beneficial relationship, and not like a colonizing relationship. I think Japan is particularly good in this regard.

関治之: 今のお話を伺って、日本では政治参加に対して否定的な部分は改善が必要だと改めて感じます。日本では政治参加についての教育や機会があまり充実していません。そういったことをもっと若い世代から学んでいくことは必要だと感じました。

蔡偉淦: 日本確實像政委講的，他們比較屬於消極，如何把科技運用進來，這個是（可以請益的）。日本在學校裡面，民主這一種教育也沒有特別去加強，這一種東西是他們學校教育比較缺乏的。

関治之: Actually, we have 80 local Code for Japan groups and we networking the local, legal companies. It’s quite nice to bring that technology to the local people.

Audrey Tang: Your community. Yes.

関治之: オードリーさんから見て、今後日本と台湾がコラボレーションできるような領域について教えてください。

蔡偉淦: 臺日合作，從政委的眼光來看，有什麼領域、角度覺得可以進行的？

Audrey Tang: We are, like, collaborating right now.

Audrey Tang: I’ve held this kind of conversations before I entered the cabinet. Many people were very surprised that Taiwan has been able to make the democratic governance tools so quickly after so long of marshal law.

Audrey Tang: I think just getting the message out is one of the most important things, because for many especially more senior people, is to remember Taiwan as a very authoritarian society. It’s not until they say, "Oh, they have marriage equality too?"

Audrey Tang: They think, "Oh, wait. Is it the same Taiwan that I know about?" Just getting the story that Taiwan is now a new digital and very progressive democracy out, I think it is a important first step.

Audrey Tang: Also, when we participated in the community organized workshops, like in Madrid, in Toronto, or in New York and so on, many people think it’s interesting that in Taiwan and in g0v community, many projects, they have very cross-sectoral partnership.

Audrey Tang: People might be working in the public service, in a startup as entrepreneur, as an investor, as a intermediary organization to facilitate incubation of startups in their day job. In the g0v, people really brought resources from those different sites.

Audrey Tang: When I was in Toronto, noticed that Code for Canada community, Code for Toronto, city government, and also the academics and so on, many of them, it’s their first time sitting in the first table, talking about the same thing. Usually, they have their own community gathering. Maybe all of them meet monthly with their sector. There is very few truly cross-sector collaboration events.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s also what Code for Japan is known for, is that the cross-sectoral trust is very high. I think we should work together to bring this message out, that it’s not just about the civic tech people or the government people signing MOUs.

Audrey Tang: Or launching large projects. It’s even more important that every week, we share food, that every week, we find something interesting to do together, the community building part. I think that’s something we have in common. That’s the rest of the code for all network. I think we can share more of community-building recipe that we’re doing across sectors.

関治之: Wonderful. We should do now. Last year, I think 14 or 15 people who went to g0v summit from Japan. This year, we have called a Code for Japan summit.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we’ll come.

関治之: I want to invite more people to Code for Japan in September in Chiba City.

関治之: I think it’s good to collaborate the people, and bring people together.

Audrey Tang: We are, of course, computer technologists. We know that from a discovery in computer science, like a new theory, a new idea in cryptography, or whatever, the science people and the technology people in our field is very close.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes the people who are computer scientists, they publish their paper with a GitHub link to the technology. The technologists are also very eager to apply the new invention from the science people. It’s not the case for social sciences. The social science people and the social technology people, [laughs] the iteration is longer.

Audrey Tang: It takes many years for a new social science insight to be turned into social technology. I think whatever social technology we’re using, it could be the focus conversation method. It could be the open space technology, it could be non-violent communication, dynamic facilitation. All these are social technologists.

Audrey Tang: If we involve more social technologists and social scientists in our community, then we can theorize faster. I think we really benefited in the early days in open-source because we have anthropologists like Eric Raymond and social scientists, Clay Shirky, Larry Ward the one developing the theory of open-source while they are practicing the technology of open-source.

Audrey Tang: I think that combination is also very helpful if we involve more social scientists to co-develop social technology together.

関治之: In general, I always feel that Japanese people is often forget about making theories. They don’t know what’s good.

関治之: 日本人は、体系的な理論を構築し海外に伝えるのが苦手なような気がしています。また、英語の壁というのも存在します。g0v では英語のツールもよく使っていますが、台湾の人々は英語への壁というのはあまりないのでしょうか？

蔡偉淦: 日本人不擅長所有理論作成體系化，日本人不擅長這一種，當然也有英文這種障礙存在，英文工具也有在用。臺灣沒有英文的障礙？

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that.

Audrey Tang: It’s true that I think it helps to have one or two people who are very well-connected to the English-speaking international community, like Japan pro community that I consider it my home. When I went to Tokyo at that time, I always stayed at a home of Dan Kogai-san of Livedoor. Dan Kogai-san thinks in English, right? [laughs]

関治之: Yeah, right. He is.

Audrey Tang: He has no problem theorizing [laughs] in the Berkeley way from whatever he is doing. I’m not saying that everybody need to be native English speakers, but it’s important to both localize like Pol.is would translate it to Japanese but also to have one or two theorists to absorb the insights and turn it into an international audience.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like in the Occupy movement. At the time, they sent two people in each Occupy movement to join the cross-Occupy network. It’s two people because if one gets arrested [laughs] , they can send someone else in their position. It’s a fallback, it’s a RAID configuration, high availability.

Audrey Tang: If it’s too many people, then of course, the theorization will stop, because usually in design thinking you need to have a clear, how might we question in the middle to serve as the provocation. It’s important for each Occupy to have two people who can crystallize their provocations to the other networks.

Audrey Tang: It’s also equally important that whatever insight they get, they must pass through in a transparent way to the Occupy community. It’s what we call a small world network. I think that is the configuration we should be aiming for.

関治之: Wow.

林冠妤: Translation would be important too, like Audrey translated lots of stuff to English... Why I’m speaking in English?

関治之: Yeah, I think it’s the point we, Code for Japan have to train things that skills......

Audrey Tang: To be very intentional in translation.

関治之: Yes. It’s very important.

関治之: Actually, sometimes I feel that Code for Japan is translating the technology world to the local people world, that also we have to translate from the local people in Japan situation to internatinal people.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I think that part is even more important.

関治之: I will do.

Audrey Tang: In the Code for Japan summit, would you expect the attendance internationally to be like half or 30 percent? What are your goals for international participation?

関治之: I think I feel that it’s great that the g0v summit was very international. I want to be same. I think this year we are right now planning. I am not sure, but I want to have a international...

Audrey Tang: Track.

関治之: Track, yeah. At least one track that presentation will be in English and also people safely to be speaking English there.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. When I attended the large conferences in Japan, I found that if they are designed with a international track, then there’s really professional interpreters, like everything is great. I think if there’s designs for remote participation as well...

関治之: Remote participation.

Audrey Tang: ...I think that that will even increase the outreach. When we held discussions like this, usually we even have two different YouTube or Facebook live stream and one with just the interpreter’s soundtrack so that people who are native English speakers, they can put on their earphones.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you are talking about local developments, but because you have good interpreter, so it will be like you are giving a English presentation. People will be able to associate their ideas but with the person, with the right person, even if they are speaking Japanese.

Audrey Tang: That would be my suggestion for maybe highlight some tracks that you know are very good story and even if it’s in pure Japanese to invest in interpretation in real-time, and also, make sure that it’s live-streamed in a way that will be captured. That, I think, will get attention from the international community.

関治之: Cool. Yeah, definitely I will try that, too. Thank you very much for all the advice. Today, we use UDTalk, and that kind of tool will be also helpful for the conference.

Audrey Tang: It’s fully automatic, right?

関治之: Yes.

Audrey Tang: That there’s no human part.

関治之: No human, yes.

Audrey Tang: That’s really good.

関治之: The professional translator is really expensive. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s true.

関治之: Yeah, so we will use this kind of helping tools. Also, we will organize a volunteer translator team at the summit.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s really beautiful, because if more people feel it’s inclusive, like people with deafness or people with blindness or people with different neurodiversity, when we cater to these people, be inclusive, then it could be used outside of the context.

Audrey Tang: Like as I understand UDTalk was initially meant to communicate with people with deafness. Now it is a powerful international collaboration tool.

関治之: Yeah, today, I think he’s the developer of UDTalk. I want to introduce him to you.

関治之: OK, Thank you very much. I think it’s time.

Audrey Tang: It’s good.

関治之: Thank you very much for having this interview.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for the great questions. Here’s a gift.

関治之: Oh.

Audrey Tang: It’s our open government training material. It’s a manga.

関治之: Oh. Oh.

Audrey Tang: It’s in six languages.

蔡偉淦: 跟上次一樣。

関治之: Someone surprised about this manga is on the...

林冠妤: Pixiv?

関治之: Yeah. Pixiv.

Audrey Tang: We have that bridge here.

Audrey Tang: We have a bridge to the manga community here.

関治之: Nice. Yeah, it’s great. I think it’s richer, involve the manga community together.

関治之: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.