Audience Member: Our research focus is on the probability of Taiwanese and Chinese reunification…

Audrey Tang: Whoa — were they unified to being with?

Audience Member: Excuse me?

Audrey Tang: You said “re-unification,” as if they were unified at some point in the past.

Audrey Tang: Were they unified at any point in time since the Neolithic era?

Audience Member: Actually, we’ve just been talking about this specific topic, with the “re-unification” or “unification.”

Audrey Tang: Well the Jade Mountain (Tongku Saveq / Tanungu’incu / Patungkuonʉ / Yùshān) and the Tàiháng Mountains were never unified under a single jurisdiction at any point in time. So to me, it’s just “unification.”

Audience Member: “Unification” then. Yes.

Audience Member: During this week, we’re going to meet in total, I think, 10 different people from professors to politicians to businessmen, to give us a brief overview of the topic. At the end of the week, we try to at least have a better idea of how to answer the question of unification.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for accommodating…

Audrey Tang: …I was just making a point.

Audience Member: For me, I’m Felix. I’m studying law in Hamburg, in the northern part of Germany. I’ve been living in China for six years, in Shanghai. That’s how I got interested in this topic.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Audience Member: I’ll continue. I come from Aachen. I study electrical engineering. My research focus is on artificial intelligence. It’s my first time in Asia.

Audrey Tang: Welcome.

Audience Member: Hi, I’m researching on using tradition in parametric design.

Audrey Tang: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: That’s a very interesting angle.

Julian: I’m Julian. I’m concerning Chinese studies and politics in Heidelberg, Germany and London. Naturally, I’m interested in Taiwan press relations. It’s my first time in Taiwan. I like it a lot. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Welcome.

Audience Member: My name’s Oran. I’m studying journalism and economics in Bonn. I’m mostly interested in the developing media systems.

Sonja: I’m Sonja. I’m studying law in MÃ¼nster. I’m in my second year, so I don’t have a research purpose yet, but I’m generally interested in Taiwan.

Audience Member: I’m Sophia. I study political science and law in Munich. I’m very interested in political systems. That’s why I’m so interested in this topic.

Audience Member: Hi. I study public policy, and I work for the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy. My research focus is mostly on energy and climate policy, but I’m also interested in innovation policies in the public sector. I’m interested in this right now.

Audrey Tang: Climate change, that’s a truly reunifying topic for the planet.

Audience Member: My name is Jakob. I’m studying management and technology, but I’m currently studying abroad in Singapore. I’m also very interested in everything that’s going on with Taiwan and China and what this means for our global political landscape.

Audience Member: Hi. I’m completing my master’s at Stockholm University, performance studies. I’m currently studying at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. I’m studying Chinese. That’s also why I’m interested in the whole problem. I’ve been talking a lot with Chinese people about their view on Taiwan, but I haven’t spoken with any Taiwanese yet.

Audrey Tang: I had students in the Hangzhou China Academy of Art and the Kaohsiung Academy of Art participating in my online classes. When I taught the class, I was in Paris. We used virtual reality to scan each other’s environment and for each one of the students.

Audience Member: My name is Markus. I am studying media-related studies, too, technology arts and culture studies. I’m studying, getting a double degree in Germany and in Hong Kong. I’ve been living in Hong Kong, studying, for almost two years now. Also getting along…

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting times there.

Audience Member: …protester and development there. I’m interested how…Taiwan’s perspective.

Anika: My name is Anika. I’m doing a master’s in social and cultural anthropology in Cologne. I’ve been here in Taipei for two and a half months now, and I’m going to be here for a year to do research for my master’s thesis on Taiwanese youth identity.

Moritz: My name’s Moritz. I’m freshly accredited medical doctor from Berlin. Besides studying in Berlin and Hamburg, I studied in Chongqing, Shanghai, and here in Taoyuan.

Audrey Tang: The NTUH.

Audience Member: Yeah. Right now, I’m attending a new job around digitalization of workspace…

Audrey Tang: Telework?

Audience Member: …occupational medicine perspective.

Audience Member: Hi. I’m also a medical student, but I have not graduated yet. My current research focus has nothing to do with Taiwan but I’m generally interested in what could happen to Taiwan, what will happen in the future, what’s the current situation.

Svenja: My name is Svenja, and I study law in Hamburg. I grew up in Beijing, so I lived in China my entire life, but I’ve never had the opportunity to come to Taiwan before. That’s why I took this opportunity now.

Audrey Tang: Such a diverse background. By way of a quick introduction, you’re in my boring office. This is my real office.

Audrey Tang: It’s the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab. Every Wednesday, from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, everybody can talk to me for 40 minutes at a time. People do talk about lots of things. A lot of the issues that you briefly touched on about how digital is transforming the urban landscape, how self-driving vehicles, telework, or whatever, 5G, is reconfiguring people’s idea of proximity and things like that.

Audrey Tang: In the lab, we’re trying to shape the norm upon which the people want to integrate or want these new creatures to co-domesticate with us, and, together, find out the optimal or at least socially acceptable integration path for those self-driving tricycles serving as shopping carts for people.

Audrey Tang: This is what we call a norm-first design or, in UN parlance, a co-governance design. Instead of passing any law, we’re inviting people to do a lot of what we call sandbox experiments and invite all the 12 different ministries in, and for them to settle on a social norm after a year or so of AI-moderated discussion.

Audrey Tang: Then we set a market policy, and then that turns into programming, new code, and finally into law. To do the other way is very top-down and builds a surveillance state or surveillance capitalism very quickly. What we’re trying to do is to empower the social sector to take governance and control of that mechanism.

Audrey Tang: Full disclosure, I’m also on the board of RadicalxChange. I sit along Glen Weyl the economist or Vitalik Buterin the Etherium inventor, and so on, using blockchain ideas and mechanism design to empower the social sector so that the social innovation can happen without over-reliance or industrial innovation. That’s my main mandate.

Audrey Tang: My office is one person from each ministry. Theoretically, I can have 32 colleagues from 32 vertical ministries. At the moment, we have maybe 20 people here, meaning not all ministries have bought into radical transparency. The Ministry of Defense never send anyone.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really know about anything related to Ministry of Defense, but we do have a Foreign Service delegate. [laughs] We work on public diplomacy together.

Audrey Tang: Interviews with me are recorded. We will make a transcript. We’re not publishing the recording, per se. We will just make a transcript for all of you to edit for 10 days. Starting from the point you receive that in your email, feel free to adjust your wordings, add new linking materials, especially URLs that’s very hard to pronounce, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: After that, we publish it to the great thing that’s called the Internet and that people can understand with structured data. Ever since I became the Digital Minister, I’ve been keeping the record for all lobbying, all the interviews, and all the meeting that I chair, even internally.

Audrey Tang: The great thing about that is that, whereas before people usually lobby for their private interests, once people understand that it will be on public record, suddenly everybody talk about the Global Sustainable Goals.

Audrey Tang: It’s very much a mechanism by itself. People can see that I’ve held more than 1,000 meetings with 4,000 or so speakers, over 200,000 or so speeches. If, during our conversation, I make reference to the previous conversation I had with, for example, the Center of American Progress or the NCFP, because they all touched on this Cross-Strait issue as well, I’ll make a hyperlink afterward.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to resolve it now in the mind. I couldn’t do that. [laughs] The idea is this intertextuality of not just the what of policy but also the why of policy-making is shared with the social sector. That’s my five-minutes pitch. [laughs] Is there anything you would like to begin with, any topic?

Audience Member: In Germany, we’re interested in the digital innovation space. You called it different way, what is it called?

Audrey Tang: My office is called the Public Digital Innovation Space, but PDIS, but that physical manifestation, that physical place is called Social Innovation Lab.

Audience Member: Social Innovation Lab.

Audrey Tang: So Social Innovation Lab.

Audience Member: In Germany if you gave us a good overview of the work that you do, I’m not sure that any more questions towards that topic?

Audience Member: It’s a topic of the innovation lab, so what exactly is happening at the innovation lab?

Audrey Tang: Maybe we’ll just collect a round of questions, and accept it in summary?

Audience Member: I just wanted to ask you described a certain way of making law, how many laws have you passed in that work in that specific manner?

Audrey Tang: How many law, have been done in a crowd.law way?

Audience Member: Maybe give an example of how it was implemented, how it was trialed.

Audrey Tang: Cool. That’s a URL by the way, a lot of detail is on that URL, crowd.law, but I’ll answer in summary. Yes?

Audience Member: Previously we’ve been talking about the problem of China paying Taiwanese journalist who publish some pro-Chinese opinions. I was wondering if there was some kind of technical solution, maybe utilizing blockchain or like some type of web of trust or something to fight fake news?

Audrey Tang: About countering disinformation, yeah. Both my parents are journalists, and in Taiwan we translate news and journalism into the same word, 新聞. Saying fake news is like saying fake journalism. Because both my parents were journalists, filial piety says that I can’t use that word.

Audrey Tang: Please feel free to continue saying fake news, but I’ll use disinformation, but it’s an excellent question.

Audience Member: We are reading on Taiwan’s view of digitalization of Taiwan. Which future of digitalization Taiwan wants to move towards. We’ve read about AI, Internet of Things, and Taiwan’s smart tech innovation.

Audience Member: I wonder how and if there’s also an idea of data protection, and people living in China are now seeing how much digitalization is like in some way enhancing every day life, but also enhancing the surveillance of every day life. I wonder how Taiwan wants to deal with it?

Audrey Tang: We’re making the state completely transparent to the citizens, and they’re making the citizen completely transparent to the state. Same transparency, similar technology, different direction. We’ll be talking about that. Good question, thank you. Yes?

Audience Member: I would be interested into the change of making all these discussions public, and what the implications were. You probably had discussion before which were not public, and whether the discussion or the way discussion was held changed, and what the outcome of the discussion was?

Audrey Tang: The impact of radical transparency.

Audience Member: My question was kind of similar, how are you perceived among your colleagues is very interesting. How is it how you have this radical openness approach so people can come to your lab and talk to you for a full day, so do people use this?

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah.

Audience Member: Who’s coming? Who’s talking to you? What do they want to talk about?

Audrey Tang: Both office hours, and how the public service respond to it.

Audience Member: My interest would be in governance of your innovation lab, did you face resistance? The public sector is usually very reluctant to endorse such ideas. How was your relationship with the other ministries, how you set it up, etc.

Audrey Tang: We are the resistance.

Audrey Tang: We haven’t faced resistance, and I’ll elaborate why. Question from this side?

Audience Member: Was going in the same direction, if you have the feeling that your influence extends socially, outside politically?

Audrey Tang: So the social impact question, OK.

Audience Member: China’s planning on being top in all key technologies by 2025. I was wondering if Taiwan has any sort of not necessarily countermeasure, but something to keep up so that they cannot put too much pressure on Taiwan…

Audrey Tang: When they’re running in our opposite direction, it’s hard to keep up. Rather, perhaps it will wrap around… [laughs]

Audience Member: Looking at cross strait relations, Taiwan, it’s in my opinion, try to be a bit more independent form China, since China’s the greatest economic partner in this part, and since your focus is on digitalization, I was wondering if your ministry has any mean of counteracting that economic power and pressure that China has put on Taiwan, and how you’re planning on…

Audrey Tang: Economic and supply chain diversification in terms of digital technology? OK. Was there question there?

Audience Member: I would like to know of course why you don’t speak of “reunification,” but of “unification.”

Audience Member: And the probability of unification, and how you see that topic?

Audrey Tang: Interesting story, my dad was a journalist as I said, but he covered the Tiananmen Protest up until June the 1st, and went home. Fortunate for our family. Then made it a research focus for him to understand how the social dynamic works in the Tiananmen Protest. He went to Saarland University to study with Professor Jürgen Domes, doing his PhD thesis on particularly that topic.

Audrey Tang: Just by the way, he’s also covered the Berlin Wall when it fell. So we know what “wieder-vereinigung” means, I guess, [laughs] also in Dudweiler where I lived for a year. Most of my father’s research subjects, they were just people around your age were all completing their study abroad because they couldn’t return to the PRC anymore, because they participated in the Tiananmen Protest.

Audrey Tang: That’s literally the atmosphere that I grew up, talking about the democratization of the PRC regime, which for a while seemed like very probable, but now less so. Many of them actually became residents in Taiwan, and some even taught in Universities, some of their students ends up occupying the parliament in 2014 in the Sunflower Movement, which I’m a part of.

Audrey Tang: Some Sunflower participants also introduced that technology to the Umbrella Movement, which then evolved after five years into this leaderless phenomenon. This is kind of how this strings together in my mind.

Audrey Tang: Before delving into the various questions, I’ll just say that for me, the idea of Taiwan’s various lineages like the Austronesian-speaking peoples with a lineage all the way to Māori, that is one important lineage. The administration’s spokesperson Kolas Yotaka can probably talk to you more about that. For me, that is to be conserved.

Audrey Tang: The western side, which is more Westernized, in addition to Western influences also, of course, have Taiwanese Hoklo, Hakka, and various other new immigrants.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re prototyping a kind of democracy that focus on plurality. This is essentially the condition upon which we do diplomacy to all the like-minded countries, Germany included. This plurality-based liberal democracy was once called the end of civilization, but it’s less hip now, thanks partly to the advent of social media in its amplification of the divisiveness. Our main work, still, is to focus on this plurality of democracy.

Audrey Tang: To me, as long as there is still a great firewall that sometimes turn into a great cannon that sometimes takes down websites, and the immense difficulty of having any freedom of speech or assembly, it’s unimaginable how this kind of civil society norms can unify with authoritarian norms. Something extremely innovative have to be found for that to happen.

Audrey Tang: Speaking strictly personally, at this point it’s more likely to consider unification with Germany than unification with the PRC….

Audrey Tang: That’s all my personal opinion, not at all representative of the government here. [laughs] That’s a quick answer. Are you OK with that?

Audience Member: Yes.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Back to the practical questions. I’d like to share the outlook first because this is the philosophical differences. I’ll share with you my job description. Three years ago when I became digital minister, that’s a first. There was no such position in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The HR environment was very flexible, I guess. [laughs] They asked me, “What are you actually doing?” I’m saying, “You know, there’s this new thing that just passed,” that was in 2016, “that was just passed for a year. It’s called the Sustainable Development Agenda. And my work is within the 17s, so it’s connecting the three sectors together.

Audrey Tang: “My main work for the next four years will be enhancing availability of reliable data, will be encouraging international cross-sectoral partnership, and about helping innovation. In short, 17.18, 17.17, and 17.6.” And our HR environment is like, “Minister, do you know how many people in Taiwan knows about the Sustainable Development goals?”

Audrey Tang: It turns out nowadays, it’s 20 percent. It’s not too bad. At that point, it’s 2 percent. Explaining my job in terms of SDGs obviously is a non-starter. They asked me to write something in plain language what I’m going to do instead of this very technical SDG thing. I just write them a poem, a prayer, and that’s my job description. I’ll read it to you because that’s the outlook.

Audrey Tang: When we see the “Internet of things”, let’s make it an Internet of beings.

Audrey Tang: When we see “virtual reality”, let’s make it a shared reality.

Audrey Tang: When we see “machine learning”, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Audrey Tang: When we see “user experience”, let’s make it about human experience.

Audrey Tang: And whenever we hear that “the singularity may be near,” let us always remember that a Plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: That’s my job description. [laughs] It’s a very broad brush of what the machine-facing, linear, GDP-oriented thinking in the previous industrial age and the current you can call it industrial 4.0 or society 5.0, I don’t really care, [laughs] this plurality-based way of thinking about technology that is about empowering the plurality instead of anything linear.

Audrey Tang: That is very much captured by the triple-bottom-line idea of the Sustainable Goals. It’s just poetry easier to convey and a Venn diagram, less so. That is the general outlook.

Audrey Tang: Based on this outlook, the social impact of radical transparency allows people of different positions to come to me, one by one. I act as a channel so that they can listen to each other’s voices in a way that is collaborative. I’ll use two examples. One example is about the idea of e-sport. I’m sure it’s also a emerging issue in many jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan took 10 years to talk about what e-sport should belong, whether it’s a sport, whether it’s a cultural performance, whether it’s educational material. Whether this is something that’s just industrial, whether it is something social, whether it’s addictive, whether it’s bad for the health, whether it’s good for the health, and so on, for 10 years. I’m sure other places as well.

Audrey Tang: Before I become digital minister, it was deadlocked. The premiers of the previous cabinets tried various different strategies, but they never did any coherent plan because the three ministries involved all think very differently, have very philosophical takes on the e-sport issue. We begin with a radical transparency idea. Esport.pdis.tw has the nitty-gritty details.

Audrey Tang: The idea, very simply put, is that we started with a public hearing in the month that I joined, in October ‘16, in which case you can see it’s not like most summaries. It’s just a play-by-play entire verbatim transcript of the e-sport competitors outlining their real differences with the traditional sports but also their real needs in comparison with the real sport athletes and so on.

Audrey Tang: Even though the three ministries have very different takes, I can use this to distill the contention points and talk to each one of them. You can see the Ministry of Education’s logo, Ministry of Culture’s logo, and so on. This represents a internal discussion that I chaired.

Audrey Tang: I said, “Within two weeks, everything will be public, and so make your argument solid. Maybe edit away the in-jokes and things like that.” It’s just that the argument is because, in Taiwan, sport translates sometimes as PE or physical education. The Ministry of Education thinks that there’s nothing physical in e-sport, so it really shouldn’t be their business. It should be Ministry of Culture.

Audrey Tang: Culture says, “We protect traditional culture. That’s Wéiqí (Go), or something like that, and it’s…you know, e-sport doesn’t have 2,000 years of traditions, and it’s not Ministry of Culture’s business. It should be Ministry of Economy.”

Audrey Tang: Economy Affairs says, “You know, we just make the machines, the software. We make the basket and the ball, but not the players. [laughs] And so the players really should be our business. It should be the Ministry of Education.” [laughs] It’s just like this.

Audrey Tang: The idea of radical transparency brings the idea of ice bucket challenge. You’ve heard of this? Whenever any agency say it’s some other agency’s business, I invite that agency into this kind of public interviews, so that everybody’s position is laid on the table, like a mind map.

Audrey Tang: Then we publish all of this into the public forums, the likes of Reddit. The equivalent Reddit in Taiwan is called PTT, and there’s many other forums as well. The great Internet people just went through this transcript and find flaws, find holes in these arguments.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the first four commenters make personal attacks. I pretend those don’t exist. The fifth commenter usually have something, a insight. For example, somebody observed that chess and Go is mostly online now, so it should be considered an e-sport – it’s a really good point – and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We bring the best arguments from the wide Internet into the next meeting, which is a month after that, and say, “If you’re offering alternative military service to Wéiqí players, surely now that Wéiqí is a e-sport, you should offer it to other e-sport players as well.” Very creative arguments.

Audrey Tang: I always credit the wide Internet for proposing these. The ministries at hand saw that as a valid point because that person, senior public servant, was a Wéiqí player. [laughs] He’s actually quite flexible now that we only established that it should be as much as Wéiqí player and not the same as a basketball player, so it’s easy for them to change.

Audrey Tang: Then the Ministry of Education say, “If you call it a skilled performance, we have no problem with it” We actually are introducing a media literacy program for the competence of YouTubers in the K to 12 curriculum starting this year.

Audrey Tang: If somebody’s interested in e-sport, it’s actually a very good segue into learning good media competency and literacy classes. That would be a highlight of Ministry of Education if we can just call it that.” We’re like, “Of course, we can call it that,” so that is resolved. It’s like a ratchet. Every meeting, you solve something, and you table the divisive ones.

Audrey Tang: Then we publish what are the divisive ones. For the next meeting to table the still divisive ones, but every meeting, we can see a shape much like this. Perhaps the most important shape here is that using AI-based conversation from the wide Internet, we can always show the ministries at hand that most people agree on most of the things most of the time.

Audrey Tang: The thing that you think would block the conversation is just a few, a handful. These ones, we should just regulate it and pass it into legislation because everybody supports them anyway across the ideological aisles. If you only look at social media or, indeed, some institutional media, you would think that’s all it is for politics.

Audrey Tang: This kind of radical transparency ensures two things. The first is that the public service gets all the credit. Previously, if they do something right, they don’t get the credit. The minister does. If they do something wrong, the minister can always blame the public service, so it’s a no-win situation for them to innovate.

Audrey Tang: Using this way, you can see exactly who is the Wéiqí-playing Ministry of Culture public servant that came upon this interesting idea from the PTT and did a innovative solution. We invite them to the press conferences. We make sure that we feature their faces in my presentations and so on, so they get the full credit.

Audrey Tang: If things go wrong, I absorb all the blame because I’m the one that interfaces with random citizens to my office or random people on the Internet. I hug the trolls and make sure the trolls who have interesting insights bring those insights into the public service.

Audrey Tang: That’s the social impact of radical transparency. It makes the payoff matrix for the public servant flipped about so that they always get incentivized when they innovate. If it breaks down, we absorb all the risk. That is the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second case, which is shorter, is because, in each and every ministry, we have a team called participation officers, just like media officer talking to journalists or parliamentary officers talking to the MPs. We just had a meeting with all their supervisors, which are all deputy ministers or general secretary for the ministry. They report a very direct line to the minister.

Audrey Tang: Every month, we choose usually two cases that are emergent, meaning if we don’t process that, 5,000 will take to the street very quickly. We handle many petition cases. Two years ago, there was a 16-year-old that we didn’t know was 16-year-old that called for the banning of plastic straws and all the one-use utensils, single-use utensils, because it’s bad for the ocean and bad for carbon cycle.

Audrey Tang: They got 5,000, which is the threshold for a ministerial response, in no time, like in just a few days. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, thought it must be a senior environmental activist to get this kind of outreach. It turn out she’s 16, and that’s her civics class assignment, to find something that people resonate with.

Audrey Tang: But because she’s so good with social media, [laughs] everybody supported preventing sea turtles from being choked and things like that. We just invited her in, and that’s our Greta. Instead of going to strike on Fridays, [laughs] we just meet a Friday and bring the people who produce those plastic straws and single-use utensils.

Audrey Tang: The participation officer’s work is to respond to people’s main ideas and make sure that we listen to every other side as well. You would think that the business side will be against that idea, but it turns out that the people who showed up, who make those single-use plastic utensils, said they joined this business 30 years ago when they were young as social entrepreneurs.

Audrey Tang: At that time, hepatitis B was a real issue in Taiwan, and there was an epidemic. They make those single-use utensils to prevent Hep B from outbreaking. Nowadays Hep B is fixed, take a pill, it’s gone. Because of that, they’re now also looking at alternative materials now that they don’t need to think about Hep B issue.

Audrey Tang: We actually start brainstorming about it, and introduced like sugar cane wastes, or some coffee leaf wastes, and like upcycling them, and literally reinforcing straws, back to the basics, and so on.

Audrey Tang: These business folks got new materials to work with and activists try to get them critical deals from the suppliers, and after two years of communication, this year we just passed straws for indoor drinking, and we have a lot more upcycling economy thanks to the initial collaboration.

Audrey Tang: We didn’t make international news because then the girl got a scholarship and became a well-trusted and somewhat well-known environmental activist, but without resorting to occupying the parliament, or anything like that. The idea of this design is to make sure that we can turn the energy from activists into social innovation and social entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: That’s a – wow, it took 10 minutes – a short answer to the outlook as well as the impact of radical transparency, as well how the public service think it as a way to absorb the risk and let them get credit. The obvious next question is what do other ministries think about it? You can tell by which ministries send people to my office.

Audrey Tang: At the beginning, it’s the usual suspects. The Ministry of Communication and Culture, obviously, and then Interior, Education, Law, Finance, and so on. After a year or so, public service from the Foreign Affairs Committee thought it was a great idea because they’re starting to use the same AI-moderated conversation to set diplomatic agenda.

Audrey Tang: You can see actually for many months now, we’re running a public conversation with the AIT, which is the US de facto embassy, how to promote Taiwan’s role in global community and so on. Again, we see one divisive issue, quote every time China closes the international door for Taiwan, the US should try open one for Taiwan someplace else.

Audrey Tang: This is something that divides the population neatly in half. You have half of Taiwan population thinking that’s what should happen, and half thinking that’s not what should happen. A lot of conversation ends up hinging on this statement.

Audrey Tang: There’s only one such statement, right? For everything else, actually, people do agree. We just get the US embassy’s commitment on the various things that, that I’ll share later, basically each and every one that they can do.

Audrey Tang: For example, sending somebody to the Taiwan Presidential Hackathon, and after a couple weeks they send somebody to Taiwan Presidential Hackathon. It’s easy as that, because there are many low-hanging fruits, so to speak. It’s much easier to focus on them than on that particular divisive issue, although that divisive issue sells newspapers.

Audrey Tang: We can actually get things done without doing that divisive issues deliberation until the time is right, I’m sure. This is this part, and finally the crowd.law part, a lot of this is in crowd.law, the issue here is in three levels.

Audrey Tang: At the most basic level every single regulation, and every single bill that concerns trade, but every single regulation, so about 2,000 of them every year. At any time, you can go to join the g0v.tw which is our participation platform, and this one has 10 million active users out of 23 million in Taiwan, so not a bad population.

Audrey Tang: At any time, you can see around 200 regulations being preannounced here. It’s all for public commentary, and this is the petition that I referred to. At any point, there’s more than 100 petitions going on.

Audrey Tang: More importantly, once those ideas and petitions turn into government policies, you can see how your tax is being spent by the various ministries and 2,000 running projects. Each one, maybe this is long-term healthcare, sanitation, social housing, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Each one if you click into it, you can see not only its quarterly reports and KPIs that it delivers up to 10 year plan out to 30 year, but also a lot of people just offering their insights and comments, and creating of the system is that everything has a URL.

Audrey Tang: So that every time the Minister of Health and Welfare says oh, thanks to your input we’ve changed for this quarter the reimbursement policy, we understand this is a hassle to us and to you as well, this takes only less than one quarter to happen, a couple months to happen, not a year or two years.

Audrey Tang: Also people who ask the same question, they can just google it and find it instead of calling the same ministry and asking for the 50th time, but each one not knowing 49 people have asked that before. This greatly simplified the direct connection between the career public service and the citizenry.

Audrey Tang: On the basic level all the regulations and most of the bills went through this public commentary and discussion period. On the second level, we also have the collaboration meetings where we choose the ones that are particularly contentional, or particularly difficult, particularly not within any ministry’s purview, by a voting by all the participation officers.

Audrey Tang: So far, we’ve done 55 of these open collaboration meetings, but the ministries may also run it by their own. Altogether, maybe close to 100 such meetings that was done not only through agenda-setting by the Internet, but also using those agenda has a binding agenda for people to meet with ministers and agency leaders face to face as the second level.

Audrey Tang: On the third level, which is the ongoing level, daily democracy level, we don’t wait for petitions, we actually proactively go to a tour. Every other Tuesday or so, like tonight, I’m going to Tainan and spend three days there.

Audrey Tang: Every week I take like Wednesday as the office hour, the entire day. Every other week I take two or three days in a rural or a indigenous, or a offshore area, because people who come to my office hour, are naturally close to the high speed rail station, because it’s less time for them to travel to the capital city.

Audrey Tang: Now even from Kaohsiung it’s only an hour and a half, but that’s the Western side. Other than the HSR, it’s actually very difficult for them to just hop to Taipei and hop back in the same day, so I travel to them.

Audrey Tang: The arrangement is that every time I go there, I took into their existing meeting places, so it may be a existing co-op, existing charity, or existing local community builder, and we gather everybody here to talk about a regional revitalization ideas, and how people in the central government have been stopping them from realizing their dreams.

Audrey Tang: At the very same time at the Social Innovation Lab, indeed in five municipalities, all 12 different ministries that join our program send their section chiefs or higher into the same room. Share the music, share the food, no wine because it’s day time, but in a very amiable atmosphere using broadband to look at the local peoples’ idea.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan we say meeting face to face builds 30 percent of trust, but across the Internet, if it’s broadband, you can build 20 percent of trust. With 5G maybe 25 percent of trust, because you can get micro expression more. The idea is that they don’t have to see each other only as abstract transcripts, they can just do a lot of back and forth.

Audrey Tang: The Minister of Health and Welfare can brainstorm with Minister of Interior instead of saying, “We’ll copy the ministry. The ministry’s just sitting nearby.” Because of that, they can brainstorm on the spot. Again, they get all the credit and much more credibility actually, because they can see them face to face and actually solving the issues right there.

Audrey Tang: Many long-held regulatory deadlocks, for example there was one about whether associations can start and control a for-profit company, essentially make it a social enterprise that answers to the parenting association. That was decided right there, and there’s a lot of regulatory changes around company that want to have a social/environmental purpose as well.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, for these things, these are solved on the spot. If they’re not solved, then the local people can propose it into the sandbox system, or the social innovation platform which would allow people focusing on similar sustainable goals to bond together, and to propose their idea directly to the President, to the Presidential Hackathon, which is like the top level.

Audrey Tang: Every year the President gives out five award, it’s like a prototype fund, but the one that actually got the five winning spots gets a trophy form our President, the trophy looks something like this, but it’s a projector, there’s no prize money. When turned on, it projects the President handing a trophy to you, so it’s very meta, and each time are cross-sectorial.

Audrey Tang: Each time the trophy gets turned on, their Director General will come up with budget, and their ministry will come to the regulatory and personnel adjustments, so every year we make five such bypasses into the regulatory idea, and that actually enhances the social innovation lab’s presence, because every year we took those five ideas that are then promised by the President to be integrated into the public service within a year.

Audrey Tang: I think that handles the office of the Social Innovation Lab. There was a follow-up question, yes?

Audience Member: Yeah. I wonder if you can participate in these processes. What is the digital literacy of the elderly in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: In the most remote and rural places we have 98 percent of Internet accessibility. Even on the top of the Ushuaia Mountain, which is almost four kilometers, give them a century or so, it will become four kilometers.

Audrey Tang: Close four kilometers, and the South Pacific Islands of Taiping, and Dongsha, no matter where you are, you are guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second at $16 US per month. If you don’t have the coverage, it’s my fault. We’re at the final two percent.

Audrey Tang: The digital opportunity center, the indigenous culture and indigenous center, and so on, they all lend tablets for people who don’t have tablets in a very affordable fashion, because of the campaign promise of “broadband as a human right.” That accessibility is there.

Audrey Tang: Now in terms of raw participation on the platform, we have seen two peaks. People around 15 years old, and people around 65 are the most active. For good reason, because they have more time on their hands. [laughs] Also they tend to care more about sustainability rather than their private interests. This doesn’t taper off until 70, 75 or so, after which there is a disconnection.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s because our immersive VR isn’t quite there yet, but in any case, most of the elderly people now use at least a instant messenger that can participate. Just for going to the petition website and showing support, they’re very well equipped in doing that.

Audrey Tang: I think a lot of this digital governance issues in other countries gets blocked because the principles of democracy says you cannot exclude systemically a bunch of people, even though they’re just 5 percent or 10 percent of people, they still need to be protected in the agenda-setting power.

Audrey Tang: Now because even on the most remote places we have 98 percent Internet accessibility, we can now say that our participation platform, just now our e-participation platform. We just dropped the e, because everyone can access to it. Yes?

Audience Member: Thank you for the answer.

Audrey Tang: I think that handles most of it, we are getting GDPR adequacy real soon now. Our personal information protection act is a carbon copy of the pre-GDPR, European Union one, and so it shouldn’t be a trouble for us to get GDPR adequacy.

Audrey Tang: We’re definitely on the site of viewing personal data as a beginning of a relationship, not something to be extracted as oil. That is our basic stance, but I’m happy to explore more. Finally, this so-called non-red supply chain thing.

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014 when I helped people occupy in the parliament, the occupiers are segmented into 20 different NGOs around the parliament that’s occupying. Each talk about one particular aspect of the cross-straight service and trade agreement, the CSSTA with Beijing.

Audrey Tang: Which the parliament at the time were refusing to deliberate, because they considered it an administrative policy, not something that is worthy of legislative debate for some reason. The MPs were on strike, so we took their place and deliberate for them. That’s the legitimacy theory, anyway.

Audrey Tang: The 20 NGOs each talk about one particular thing, and one of them talk about the communication. There was a broad consensus among the occupiers after three weeks of occupy that we really should not allow PRC-made components into the, at that time still bidding, the 4G infrastructure, the core infrastructure of 4G.

Audrey Tang: That triggered a conversation in the national security council and the national communication commission, who did a systemic risk analysis and they concluded two points. The first is that in the PRC, because they install party branches in large enterprises and so on, there is no pure market player.

Audrey Tang: Any pure market actor can at any given time become de facto state-owned, if escalation – actually nowadays it doesn’t require escalation if people feel like it – they will become de facto state-controlled. Because of that, we shouldn’t really treat them in the same WTO-based economic order, in the context of core 4G infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is the cybersecurity argument. Instead of saying the current generation contains cybersecurity loopholes, we say this creates a past dependence. If you use their 3G software and hardware, it’s actual very difficult to not use them for 4G, not to use them for 5G, and so on.

Audrey Tang: At any given time where there’s a systemic break of a virus or something, you have to trust the vendor to supply you with the kind of hot patch, and these hot patches are deemed too great a risk, because of that they’re claim Taiwan, I guess, to greater risk to allow into the core infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: We made our decision back then, which is why during the 5G discussion you don’t hear much from Taiwan because we had that discussion five years ago. From that point on, built a alternate supply chain, especially for the Taiwan public service, but now extends to the critical infrastructures, including the industrial parks, which includes the Taiwan semiconductors.

Audrey Tang: Each government projects now must allocate five percent to seven percent to cybersecurity, that’s separate from the IT budget, it’s just cybersecurity budget. We invite a lot of penetration tester, white hat hackers, to test the system that I personally brought in also as Digital Minister in open source, and welcoming them to just find holes in it.

Audrey Tang: In that we’re building a cybersecurity industry, but also an entire supply chain based on non-PRC components. This is not saying that we’re not doing business with PRC, we’re just saying that if a friendly jurisdiction want to build their connectivity infrastructure and they said that they don’t want PRC components, we’re ready to deliver it whenever.

Audrey Tang: As system integrators, of course the market in Taiwan can also work with PRC component, but just not in critical infrastructures. That’s the basic idea. I think I answered everything but the Taiwan journalism thing. Any additional questions?

Audience Member: Yeah, so talking about the critical infrastructure for the 5G network. We’re talking about it right now in Germany a lot, and also Huawei, so is your opinion that we in Germany should ban Huawei?

Audrey Tang: I’m not focusing on any particular company. As I said, when we did a system risk analysis, it was not about any particular company. It’s about any particular technology co-vendor, whether they can resist being a de facto state actor, and whether they can resist misusing their hot patch facilities.

Audrey Tang: My suggestion is that for you to do that systemic risk assessment, which will look different, of course, because the PRC is not making a territorial claim on Germany, yet.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, I think just going through the same process is a great communication process to the public as well, because at that time it was the occupy that sets the agenda, and the government had to respond.

Audrey Tang: If the government can proactively do it with the involvement of civil society experts, and human rights experts, and so on, I think that will greatly enhance the legitimacy of whatever the final decision you made. Yes?

Audience Member: Following up my own question, are you basically most of it was focused on, OK, we have other components we could offer, should other countries not want to use mainland Chinese component.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audience Member: Are there any other means of your ministerial, or ministry, or any way to offer something as an alternative to mainland China?

Audrey Tang: Right, many things, actually. I just came back from a workshop in Thailand and also in Addis Ababa, and we are systemically, I wouldn’t say export, introducing this idea of a open governance mechanism.

Audrey Tang: This, I think is relevant, because that is something that can only…This is not about any particular jurisdiction, but this is a CIVICUS monitor map, about the principle of ensuring freedom of assembly, of speech, and just of agenda-setting from the civil society. This measures what the civil society’s freedom relative to, for example, the administration.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan at the moment is the only jurisdiction, I think, all the way to Africa, that a journalist’s words, a social sector leader’s words has the same room and legitimacy as the minister’s, actually better than the minister’s. At least as good as a minister’s, and other jurisdictions really couldn’t say so.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, our innovation must necessarily thrive in a moment for which, for example, for counter disinformation, for things like that, we must do a setup that does not take away any journalistic oversight power.

Audrey Tang: The core values, which by the way, we are not as open as I think New Zealand and the Nordic countries, so we’re not saying we’re the best, we’re just best in this region. Our work must be, for example, a timely response across ministries, that are fun, that goes viral by itself without taking anything down. You can take the picture. It’s a funny one, but I would not spend time going into details.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that wherever there is a disinformation we have a mechanism that roles out this kind of viral clarification messages that are 20 characters or less. In Thai, though, 200 characters or less in its body, that’s always very funny, and also at least two pictures.

Audrey Tang: For example, this is the Premier when he was young, and how he looks now. He says that even though it’s a rumor that Premier Tsai will be subject to $1 million fine, that is not true. I may be bought now, I would not punish people who look like my youth, however, if you keep perming your hair, many time within a week, you will damage your hair, you may end up looking like me. [laughs]

Audience Member: Is it an official document?

Audrey Tang: It is an official document.

Audience Member: Published by the government.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. We promote memetic engineers, and we work with the collaborative fact checkers, including international fact-checking network, and also do honest advertisement and banning foreign sponsor propaganda.

Audrey Tang: This is an entire package we introduced alongside the social sector and the private sector, so when we were in Thailand, Thailand also has a relationship with that LINE instant messenger, and they really want our mechanism, and there’s a lot of interest in this kind of export. It’s kind of a soft export, not high-speed rails, but again, a governance technology.

Audience Member: Two more questions, go into a different topic. You said before, with your radical transparency, you were able to more or less make the system more efficient by having other people also participate in the process.

Audrey Tang: And generate more trust, but yes.

Audience Member: I was wondering. In Germany, I think most of us complain about whatever the government does and how not well thought through it is. You say you only have to make this petition, then you will test it, and then you will implement the law.

Audience Member: Are you never met with any resistance? In Germany, with the opposition party, for example, it’s super-difficult to have any law passed. They say, “No, no. We want it like this, and not like that,” and they don’t budge from their stance.

Audience Member: I was wondering how you face this problem, once with for example, opposition in government and the second one…

Audrey Tang: But essentially, focusing on the left side. [laughs]

Audience Member: Yeah, and the second one is, at least in my opinion, I think in Germany lobbies are pretty strong, and they have a strong influence in how ultra-mobile, car industry has a very strong influence on what laws are passed in Germany, and how they are passed.

Audience Member: I was wondering if there is a similar structure in Taiwan, and if so, how does that make your work difficult?

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t make it difficult.

Audience Member: Why does it not make it difficult?

Audrey Tang: They’re strong meaning they have a lot of power to think, to research, to make policies and so on. They can afford to pay think tanks, or at least researchers. That does the main thing, the main value they bring to the table.

Audrey Tang: If we think of governance as a way of the various different interest each finding their champion, usually a legislator or maybe a minister or something, to speak on their behalf, that’s called representative democracy, right?

Audrey Tang: It does create a lot of tension on the civil service who [choose the rope in between, which is usually unseen, anonymous, absorb all the tension, and sometimes breaks. The idea of this top-down or representational policy making where you can always find a powerful lobbyist or powerful representative representing some different ideas, that can be kind of complimented by asking a different set of questions.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays there’s also a equally strong organizing power, which is called hashtag, with the right hashtag,                                                       MeToo,                                                   ClimateStrike, you name it, you can get a lot of political forces without any obvious leaders, or in case of Hong Kong, maybe 10,000 leaders, but in that case, that is also a social force.

Audrey Tang: The point here is if we keep asking not “Who are the representatives?” and how to fight and make those fight fair, if we keep asking, “Different positions, but do we have common values?” and settle only on the…Common value is a great word. In Mandarin it’s called 共識, which usually translates as consensus.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t translate as consensus. It translates, literally, as common understanding. It’s not something that everybody can sign your name on, which is what the English word consensus means. 共識 only means that we come to a mutual understanding… which was what happened in 1992, by the way.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that once we have a common understanding, like a common map, then we can reward and design incentives for people who carry out the innovations that leaves everybody better off. That’s called Pareto improvement.

Audrey Tang: Those improvements, while always possible, usually people don’t spend calories on it because they can win much more if they do a zero-sum, winner-takes-all game. But if we design a game such that everybody don’t have the capacity…For example, this is our real online interface. There’s no reply button.

Audrey Tang: Even if you are the best think tank, you’re the best lobbyist, you cannot mount a personal attack to discredit this fellow-citizen sentiment. You can only individually agree or disagree on it. Once you agree or disagree, your avatar moves toward people who feel like you. Then next statement appears, and you can propose another statement for other people to vote on.

Audrey Tang: In all our design spaces, there is no reply button. We found that, with the reply button, people with the most time wins the argument by default because nobody want to squander that much time to play with trolls. Without a reply button, there’s no trolls anymore. People just compete on getting more nuanced, eclectic feeling.

Audrey Tang: My point is that by changing the social media to be convergent instead of divergent, even the lobbyists see that it may be in their best interest to proposed nuanced issues and suggestion that can convince across the aisle. We used this to do UberX and Airbnb. UberX was solved pretty well.

Audrey Tang: Airbnb lobbied all their members in Taiwan to join this platform and expect them to vote for Airbnb. But once you are in this platform, it’s not like a referendum. There’s no yes or no. There’s no support or against. This was just full of people’s feelings that you can resonate or not with.

Audrey Tang: Once people go there and spend three or four weeks, even the Airbnb members who have used Airbnb before, only one-third supported the Airbnb party line. Two-third came up with much better, more nuanced regulation ideas.

Audrey Tang: Let the reflection phase, the feeling phase cook for a longer period is a much better way for people with different positions to eventually come to common understanding. It’s mostly mechanism design.

Audrey Tang: There was two follow-up questions, maybe?

Audience Member: Yes, does the person to which most people agree moves forward and gets more attention?

Audrey Tang: Across groups. They must be supermajority across all groups.

Audience Member: How do you mean to protect minorities if technology’s working like that?

Audrey Tang: The minorities, they all get their voices. As you can see, this is not corresponding to the people who agreed. This value can be 1,000. It doesn’t matter. If you mobilize 5,000 people to vote exactly the same way, it’s one dot here.

Audrey Tang: It measures that diversity of opinion. It doesn’t measure at all the support. Basically, even if you can mobilize a lot of people here, it doesn’t change the shape of the clusters. You still have to convince the other three groups for your idea to be included in the agenda.

Audience Member: I was wondering, this is crowd.law?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, this is crowd.law. This particular tool is called Pol.is.

Audience Member: The automation of the tool, this is also the tool where you can see the results?

Audrey Tang: Yes, the BBC just did a                                                       BBC Click episode                                                   on this.

Audience Member: I was wondering if you could share your slides with us?

Audrey Tang: Of course. It’s all online, but we will share with you. The slides are all on PDIS.tw. That’s the website. If you want to see the slides only, it’s issuu.com/pdis.tw.

Audience Member: I have a different question that maybe goes a bit out of the way. In Germany we currently have a really big, not problem, but maybe a really big topic that people who discuss political things online are often caught up in their own bubbles and they only discuss with people…

Audrey Tang: Echo chambers.

Audience Member: …who have their similar opinion on things. Is that something that you deal with, to expose people to different ideas, different from their own?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audience Member: Is that a topic for you?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Audience Member: How do you do it?

Audrey Tang: For this kind of interface design, which is a social media that we set up ourselves, people are by default exposed to people who don’t think like them, but if they want to go back to the people who feel the same – the stratosphere, as we call it, 同溫層 – here, they can always click the group that represents them, and then they can see what’s going on.

Audrey Tang: Let’s take a real example. For example, currently there’s many debates going on. The current one is about promoting US-Taiwan security cooperation. There’s people feeling differently. You can go to each one and see how they differ, but also how they agree.

Audrey Tang: This, it servers two purposes. First is that you can see your friends and families on the other side of the aisle, but they’re not sure. They’re not nameless enemies. They’re still your friends and family, it’s just you didn’t talk about this over at dinner.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that there are people who support your opinion, as well. This clustering both makes it more polity forming, because as time goes by it was actually four different small groups. They’re converged to the middle so that people arrive to common understanding by looking into that picture.

Audrey Tang: Also, the other thing is that during this digital dialog – just a second. If you google digital dialog, that’s the first hit. It’s pretty good SEO – you can also see that only people who convince people on the other side gets the voice, gets the response from the administration.

Audrey Tang: You don’t ever get one from this one, which is the most contention, most divisive one out of the commerce conversation, which is when Taiwanese companies do corporate social responsibility in other countries, then we should also still give them tax breaks because those are diplomatic. It’s very divisive [laughs] , but there are many things that people probably agree on.

Audrey Tang: People can see this by themselves They don’t have to trust a minister’s words, because if you sort by grouped informed consensus you can see exactly how much consensus each one has across different groups. If you’re a data geek you can also do a lot more analysis based on this. There was a virtual reality view on this. It’s very interesting.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m saying is that this shows people that we are a polity, after all, among the divisiveness. That that’s the main point.

Audience Member: Talking about the divisiveness, do you think that these tools might be able to help bring together people that want to unite with China?

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely.

Audience Member: And people that want to have autonomy on and independence?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. That’s very much a worthy-to-discuss topic. We had slices of those discussed using the platform. There was a petition that want to change Taiwan’s time zone to +9 to agree with Japan and Korea.

Audrey Tang: There was 8,000 people here, but also 8,000 people that petitioned for Taiwan to remain in GMT+8. Both sides have a lot of support arguments. [laughs] We responded. It’s written up. I can send you the URL later.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we mind mapped all their arguments and make sure that we’re on the same page as re. data. For example, there was an argument that says this will save energy, like daylight saving.

Audrey Tang: Actually, the Industrial Research Institute, the IRI, did a simulation and said it will save energy, but at 0.0000014 percent, so not really worth it. There’s people saying it will increase tourism. The minister of labor said it will not increase tourism unless you break labor laws by essentially everybody working one hour more, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Every argument was met with a fact-based response from each ministry, and then we invite both sides into the same table. Then it turns out it’s about China.

Audrey Tang: The side with +9 said what they want to do is that they want to force people who travel from Beijing or Shanghai to Taipei to adjust their watch and their phone by one hour in a show of different jurisdiction. The people on the other side correctly points out, first, smartwatches and phones auto-adjust. People will not actually become aware of it. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The second is that we will make, maybe, international news for 15 minutes, but only as a laughing stock, but then people forget about it and we have to pay the same recurring cost. The PRC would say, “One country, two systems. Many country with different time zones. Hong Kong has its own currency.” It really doesn’t change. [laughs] The main narrative is not effective.

Audrey Tang: If you look into the original petition and the mind map that we made of it, one of the interesting thing is that the people with different guidelines of how to talk about these things – this is the map [laughs] – eventually agreed, after they get their feelings checked with each other first, whether a change in time zone can actually make Taiwan more visible. People is like, “Not in a good way.”

Audrey Tang: Finally, we start brainstorming is there any way to spend a similar amount of money, but in a much more effective way that both sides, those who want to identify more PRC and those who don’t, can nevertheless agree on.

Audrey Tang: The top one is set up a rainbow-colored public communication in the Taiwan airport when people come to the Taiwan Pride. Maybe you have seen it. Maybe you have not. This is actually a consensus by our conversation to sell the atmosphere that can not only do marriage equality, but also empower all the different intersectional rights, as well.

Audrey Tang: Public participation, food, very important. Make a movie, TV series, called the “The World Between Us,” which distributes now on HBO Asia and is very highly acclaimed.

Audrey Tang: All these became things that from the administration we say, “OK, these are the things that you ministries should continue to work on, and all the 16,000 people are behind you in doing these,” whether they really want a more friendly PRC relationship or a less friendly relationship with the PRC.

Audrey Tang: Again, I didn’t quite answer that question, because this is mostly about letting people understand that we’re a polity, after all. We’re, as I like to say it, a republic of citizens, or 民國. That reflects into this agenda setting, instead of wasting time on the one or two ideological issues.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like you can solve it, but for each slice, each aspect you can get something like this.

Audience Member: Sorry, do you think you will maybe in the future inviting Chinese citizens to participate in discussion? That could be an option, maybe, to be able to be a mediator?

Audrey Tang: These technologies can be used even within the Great Firewall. That is, indeed, what students in the China Academy of Arts learned about, the people in Hangzhou, so they can run it locally.

Audrey Tang: At that time, which is three years ago, the PRC is somewhat OK with the local level governance or universities to run small experiments, but you can’t call it civic participation. You have to call it social innovators or social entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: In any case, with the right brand name you can still do that, but nowadays, in the past year, it’s becoming more and more difficult. Unless the very basic strata that is the freedom of speech and assembly is established, I don’t think it’s very useful to layer more on top. Maybe we should work on the underlying layer first.

Audrey Tang: That’s the message we’re also hearing from Thailand, is a warning that if you get the basic freedoms out, not even democracy, just the basic freedoms, then these technologies can be upheld, but if you don’t they’re standing on very fragile ground.

Audience Member: Do you have any kind of regulation on which statements can be made? Because everyone can create a statement that is to be disagreed or agreed upon. I can imagine that in Germany we would have a lot of very extremist statements. Do you regulate those?

Audrey Tang: No. Basically, it has to be on topic. If we are talking how to make Taiwan more globally visible, then proposing time zone change is fine, but proposing something which is utterly unrelated is not.

Audrey Tang: Other than relevance we don’t do much moderation. The reason is that people need to see that extreme comments tend to get only a fringe of support. They can see their position, their avatar literally moving to the fringe, away from the people. That is important to show that extreme views are actually extreme and most people are in the middle.

Audrey Tang: We don’t much care. It’s also somewhat linked to the idea of participation platform having to authenticate through a SMS code. It’s not real name. We don’t disclose the SMS code. You can choose your own avatar and pseudonym, but at the end of the day you cannot get 5,000 accounts very easily, because you have to purchase 5,000 SIM cards, which triggers anti-money laundering now. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: You can’t really easily do that. There is still some sense of identity in there so people will behave in a way that’s not too deviant from their…This is not a dark web. It’s still authentic somehow. People still receive a SMS code. There’s a simple check and balance.

Audrey Tang: In DC, the council that runs this platform doesn’t give out the SMS numbers to the ministries or agencies running this dialog. If there is something truly criminal that happens, then there is a way to track back the person using that SMS. People don’t usually post criminal speech.

Audience Member: Would it be possible for China buy thousands of SIM cards and vote by themselves in the…?

Audrey Tang: First of all, they have to win support from all four groups of people. It’s not about mobilization for a particular group. They have to create genuinely nuanced statement that convince people across the aisle. The same question often gets asked, what about artificial intelligence?

Audrey Tang: I always say, “If a machine-learning apparatus can generate statements that are nuanced enough to convince everybody across the aisle, I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords.” It’s not happening yet though. [laughs] Currently, we’re still primarily relying on collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: Again, measuring the diversity and not the headcount, that is the main thing that makes it resilient to a degree to trolls and also resilient to a larger degree to bots.

Audrey Tang: There was two questions. Sorry.

Audience Member: I would like to follow up on the journalism question.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: As I understand, you have this doomsday machine backfiring within one hour to any…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Any trending rumor.

Audience Member: Yeah. Is there any additional system? The spec firing is by the government probably, I suppose.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who want to. The ministries have all signed up to it. There is also independent fact-checkers from the civil society. If you look only at Line, there’s many more. If you only look at Line, I think they partner with four fact-checkers as well as the administration. This is their dashboard.

Audience Member: My question would be, what’s the way those fact-checkers are credited? In an atmosphere where maybe they might be bought by China, is there any means of…?

Audrey Tang: It’s up to the private sector to vet them. I think Line has a pretty good relationship with these fact-checkers. These are not seen as particularly friendly to the administration, by the way. The Taiwan Fact Check Center is not known for supporting the administration.

Audrey Tang: Just like any good journalism, it’s about its fact-checking process not about particular stunts that it takes. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that the fact-checkers that they work with all have to provide this kind of digital accountability. As you can see, for each particular one, there’s based on the people who report, this is like counter spam.

Audrey Tang: Email is supposedly private communication. If you receive a email that says, “I’m a royalty from a faraway country. I have $10 billion. You just pay this transaction fee of â¬5,000,” and so on. [laughs] That’s a scam, right? It’s spam. A spam is not personal.

Audrey Tang: Many people around the time when we, the Internet community, fought the spam wars, that was almost 20 years ago now, it was pretty pessimistic. Bill Gates was saying we have to charge a postal stamp for each email otherwise emails will stop working.

Audrey Tang: The real solution was not by charging a stamp for each email but rather by people flagging spams. We convinced all the mail agents to include a small flag that says, “Flagged as spam.” That’s all we needed.

Audrey Tang: At that time, just as people reported the spams, we analyzed using artificial intelligence. There was no deep learning back then. It was by using networks to analyze the signature of the senders so that when the senders sent again to another person, that goes to the junk mail folder. It’s buried. It doesn’t go to the inbox. The same is happening here.

Audrey Tang: The clarification are accredited by giving them a section in Line Today, which is that Line is social media. It’s like aggregated news channel. You can see that the top one is gossiping and entertainment. Then it’s top news including the clarification.

Audrey Tang: We’re on the second or third – depending on whether it’s important enough – page, which is not a bad position. I always tell my public service friends, “It’s because our jokes are not funny enough.” If we are entertaining enough, we will eventually take over the gossip and entertainment.

Audrey Tang: In any case, these clarifications are funny or viral by themselves. They serve as legitimate content farm. You can see it as a positive social impact content farm because it is a content farm. It republishes whatever people have heard as propaganda or rumor on the Internet. It’s just this content farm also has clarification and fact-checking steps for people to follow through.

Audrey Tang: The main idea here is that you can both see very entertaining…This rumor is very funny. In a K-12 curriculum in a primary school, the textbook is replacing father with breeder-male and mother with breeder-female. [laughs] This is obviously info up. It’s clarified as false. It’s important that they both review the trajectory, the content farms, as well as the Facebook pages.

Audrey Tang: This is basically a attribution work that shows how it exactly spread to the people who flagged it on the social media. Then it goes into the actual textbooks and clarified that there is no such thing going on. There is also a public commentary.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s fun, the elderly people, as well as the children who are stakeholders, can very easily share this clarification easier than they can share rumors. If they share rumors, they have to go to their chatroom. They go to dark message. They have to click share and so on.

Audrey Tang: Because this is a built-in feature of Line Today, the clarifications are given higher visibility and easier to share to your channels. There is also many bots. For example, the trend MicroBot, which is from the leading anti-virus company that you can invite to your group communication for your class, for example.

Audrey Tang: For every single message that’s sent, the bot scans it against the database of clarified rumors just like a anti-virus company, which they are. Then they don’t keep any logs but if it matches then it immediately post a clarification to the chatroom. It’s delivering the clarification to where it needs it most, which is the place where the rumors are spreading and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is a leveraged network that’s loosely based on the Spamhaus Project when we did to counter spam. Each private sector who enlists those social sector checkers relies on their own reporting mechanism.

Audrey Tang: If you see a fact-checker consistently pushing out propaganda, people can also flag them. These are also special objects. They rely on this kind of cross-checking on the same issue between the four or so fact checkers to make sure that they’re keeping each other honest. Any follow-up?

Audience Member: Maybe another follow-up question. Germany is facing more and more fake news and there is a new challenge. Our society doesn’t get to have something like Line. Do you have any advice on what is a good strategy to set up this kind of trust and facility that is clarifying stuff?

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot role for the traditional institutional media to play. In France, for example, the cross-check initiative is not just AFP but also pretty much everything else.

Audrey Tang: Once you have the institutional media that people believe is toward a political party and another institutional media from another political party if you get a political spectrum, which is what cross-check is about, then you can all increase the legitimacy of journalism, which is all about fact-checking.

Audrey Tang: The journalism crediting of the sources I don’t think is being replaced. Rather, the journalism community should democratize their line of work empowering people to become citizen journalists and hold each other to journalistic standards.

Audrey Tang: That is how we’re doing now for the presidential election. By we, I mean the Taiwan society and not at all the public sector. If you go to the fact-checking of the 2020, there’s currently two presidential candidates. There may be more but at the moment there’s two.

Audrey Tang: You can see that each of their speech during the campaign period is transcribed by the crowd, validated against their original source by the crowd, flagged as false or suspicious. Here are the institutional medias. Many of them are public-paid.

Audrey Tang: There’s at least two public paid. Others are more pan-blue, others more pan-green. The environmental center is pan-green party, which is not pan-green. In any case, all these people participated and fact-checked each and every statement from each of the political speeches by the presidential candidates.

Audrey Tang: This participation led by institutional but contributed by the crowd enforces this kind of cross-checking and improves legitimacy at the entire institutional media landscape. This is the model that we’re exporting here. Go ahead.

Audience Member: I have a question but it’s a bit referring to the comments you made at the beginning. You talked a lot about plurality, and about human rights, and about the importance of human rights. Taiwan has only 15 diplomatic relationships with other countries.

Audrey Tang: As in ROC Embassies?

Audience Member: Yes. Sorry. Where they acknowledged officially. Some of these countries are countries in which human rights are not really recognized. How do you, personally, feel about the ROC relying on these countries for – I don’t know how to say that – approval or for validation in the international context?

Audrey Tang: Our diplomatic focus has changed quite a bit after the rolling out of the sustainable development goals. This presentation here is what I shared in Addis Ababa, which is not a ROC-asserting place. There’s a lot of input from the PRC to build their infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The ideas that I shared, which is about reverse mentorship like each ministry in a social innovation plan, all 12 of them, appoint to young social entrepreneurs as reverse mentors to the minister about this common platform of social innovation in Taiwan to identify the SDGs, the office hour in town halls that I just shared with you.

Audrey Tang: The Presidential Hackathon, this is a Honduras team but also the other winner was a Malaysian team. All shows the same idea, which is “Taiwan Can Help.”

Audrey Tang: We’re not asking, say, the Malaysia team to recognize that Taiwan government somehow represents the entirety of China, which is a difficult statement to say even to me. Now all you have to acknowledge is which sustainable goals that you’re working on. For example, the Malaysian team was around SDG16, they want to build a system that identified from the open procurement data, cartels. So anti-corruption. It’s not quite human right, but it’s anti-corruption.

Audrey Tang: As long as they agree with us on that particular SDG, which is SDG16, then we can share because in Taiwan we open up the entire procurement data. Not just the finalized, but also the initial bits to researchers, completely raw data, and very few jurisdictions do that.

Audrey Tang: I think only Greece does that for obvious reasons, [laughs] because of international demand. Taiwan does this voluntarily, and so because of that, we have a lot to share.

Audrey Tang: My point is that we’re not saying that Malaysia having to officially recognize ROC, but they can still get our Presidential Hackathon award, and we’re not saying that they have to first pass some value check, as long as they want to improve on any of the SDGs, we’re happy to send a team and co-work with them to solve their issues.

Audrey Tang: That’s the very balanced approach, and especially because SDGs are affirmed by all the governments, including the PRC. When I sent my robotic double to share about the SDGs in the Geneva UN building in the Internet Governance Forum, the PRC really couldn’t shout me down, because first they have also agreed on SDGs, was talking about, I think 9, so this one, SDG9.c, I think it’s universal Internet access and infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like that they can shut this down. When I shared that, they did a kind of token protest, but they really couldn’t exclude this conversation from happening. That’s my consistent strategy also in engaging with UNSDSN and UN-ESCAP, UN-Habitat, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Even though the person in the flesh sometime need an invitation later to get into the UNCC-AA building in Ethiopia, we can always send robotic doubles which doesn’t need passports, and what I said through the robots is also on official UN public record. It’s just a digital innovation toward SDGs.

Audrey Tang: As soon as we stray of the SDGs, then it becomes political, it’s not policy anymore; so we stay firmly within this policy area, SDGs, that’s what we’ve been constantly doing for the past three years.

Audrey Tang: Any other questions? Thoughts?

Audience Member: Maybe one more question. I heard that Taiwan is like a big player in the Bitcoin industry?

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah, in crypto, yes.

Audience Member: Yeah, in the cryptocurrency industry. I would like to learn is there an official strategy and what does Taiwan make such a big player, and what is the acceptance of the population? Do you follow a strategy to encourage people to trade on cryptocurrencies, or is it more like a phenomenon of a few people?

Audrey Tang: It’s a deliberate strategy. The v-Taiwan platform which pioneered the use of polis for Uber, Airbnb and so on, at that time when we first run this consultations in 2015, after Uber and Airbnb, the topmost interest was in Bitcoin.

Audrey Tang: In 2016 when I first became Digital Minister, actually before I became Digital Minster, while I was still the understudy, we did the initial consultation on what we call the FinTech sandbox, which is a UK idea. Singapore also implemented it.

Audrey Tang: We extended it to a general-purpose sandbox. Very simply put, sandbox or GTW collects anything that innovators want to clarify whether it’s legal or not, whether it’s a legal gray area, or they think the regulations should be changed to their favor. They usually have to provide a fork, that is to say an alternate version of regulation. FinTech, Crypto is of course part of it.

Audrey Tang: We just matchmake them with the jurisdictions like municipalities and so on, or primary banks, or primary telco operators that can write a business proposal. For self-driving vehicles, which the sandbox goes online this month, with the vehicles.

Audrey Tang: It could be a car that flies, or s hip that also drives, it’s not pertaining to a specific way of vehicle. Then everybody gets one year of sandbox. The one year means that the law will work in your version in that area.

Audrey Tang: For FinTech, for example, people want to use mobile banking, or want to use blockchains to do international wiring without going into the SWIFT system, or things like that. They have to prove to the regulators that they can take care of themselves, that the risk factor is actually lower not higher than the traditional KYC mechanism, so they’re given a year.

Audrey Tang: Then within a year, they have to enroll like 5,000 people or so on, and to show everybody that this is a better way of doing things. If after a year, people think it’s a bad idea, or something very bad happens, then we thank the investors, everybody learns something, it’s open data.

Audrey Tang: People learn to do something in some way else, but if after a year people think it’s a great idea, and then we have a good risk calculation done, then it become the regulation.

Audrey Tang: The person who proposed this lawbreaking behavior is no longer lawbreaking, because their behavior becomes the law. [laughs] The idea of social innovation driving regulatory innovation, this is as I said, general public.

Audrey Tang: Within your FinTech sandbox proposal, you can also challenge the Ministry of Economy, challenge the Ministry of Interior and so on. The only two things that you cannot challenge is money laundering and funding terrorism, because we know these are not good, we don’t have to experiment. Other money laundering and funding terrorism, everything is fair game.

Audrey Tang: You can challenge any regulation of any ministry. After four years, at most, if the MPs take an interest, so at a regulatory level it’s one year, at most two. If the MP feel we have to make a special law about it, then they can deliberate three years if it’s FinTech, four years if it’s self-driving, like three to four years.

Audrey Tang: During their deliberation to a new law, this original proof of concept and proof of business is still running, and everybody else was still illegal. Basically, we were given up to a four years monopoly to try your idea.

Audrey Tang: While the MPs figure out how to regulate, and once they regulate, like there was a STO regulation that was just passed last month, then of course everybody become legal, because then we’re just saying crypto tokens is a way for equity-based crowdfunding to run, and that’s the way it is, is equity-based crowdfunding.

Audrey Tang: You use existing laws on equity-based crowdfunding with some provision on the token-based mechanism of record. That took some time. During that, if there’s a sandbox happening, that can continue to run so that incentivizes disruptive innovators to become less disruptive by actually talking to a society and convince 5,000 people it’s a good idea.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s also far more predictable, compared to a nearby continential jurisdiction. [laughs] There will be not a sudden panic, or a sudden spike. Yes?

Audience Member: My question is rather different from these specific topics, I would like to know from you if you could implement whatever you wanted to in Germany, our political landscape in Germany, our society, what would you do? What would your recommendations be?

Audrey Tang: I was actually invited to a comment on the German AI white paper, and I think my comment is basically that there’s a focus of AI as an industrial innovation driver, and all the language that we hear is of industry, and I think there is a kind of categorical mismatch here.

Audrey Tang: It’s similar to like how we say human resource, but we say incentivizing corporations, encouraging corporations. It’s weird because encouragement is to a human being, or at least a dog or something, but resource, again, is material. By putting human as resource, but incentivizing, encouraging corporations, is a twist of category.

Audrey Tang: I think making social innovation dependent on industrial innovation, in the narrative, I think creates a kind of perversion of categories. If we say social innovation is by itself useful, that distributed ledger, by itself, creates trust making new governance possible without having any GDP contributions. I think that is a much more balanced view.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying industrial innovation or GDP is bad. I’m just saying that if we think long-term, like 10 years, 20 years, and so on, those what we call patient fund, or impact investment, or things like that, that GDP alignment, if long-term enough, will tend to agree with the social one, and will actually work with the social and environmental one to set the agenda.

Audrey Tang: If we’re only looking at the next quarter on automation, then we will focus naturally on how much people work to be replaced, but that creates an unnecessary division between the workers and the capitalists. I think a common long-term planning based on what to empower, and also what to automate, and what people are enjoying doing, shouldn’t be automated.

Audrey Tang: What people are not enjoying doing should be automated, even though it’s hard, and things like that, will make it a much more friendly and also much more fluid conversation across different sectors on automation in particular. I wouldn’t comment on other parts, because I haven’t seen your strategy white paper, but AI one, that was my comment.

Audience Member: Thank you very much. I think our time is almost up, because you have another meeting.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Audience Member: We’ve prepared a very small gift…

Audience Member: Thank you for answering our questions.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Thank you all.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Audience Member: Thank you.