James Lee: I know you from a while back online, your online personality. I just had a few things we could chat about.

Audrey Tang: We’ll make a transcript and send it to you to edit for 10 days before publishing, if it’s OK with you.

James Lee: I don’t mind. I’m surprised by that, but that’s cool. [laughs] Let’s see. I forget how old this tweet is. I remember you tweeted about Twitter, the English Twitter being half the dimensional density of Chinese...

Audrey Tang: After which Twitter has adjusted its length limit for English...

James Lee: But not for Chinese, which makes perfect sense. I remember reading about it a long time ago. I was like, "That makes so much sense." It was amazing. Twitter has come around to your point of view. It’s really cool.

James Lee: I had a few things. One thing I’m interested in, which it seems like you’ve been working hard on, is not anarchy, but decentralization, in general. I was wondering what you thought of, the alternative? Do you see a change in alternative services now to the big players, like the Facebook, Google, Apple...

Audrey Tang: Or even Twitter?

James Lee: ...or Twitter? I haven’t really looked deep into it. There’s Mastodon, but is that really going to work? There’s RSS. [laughs] I saw that someone in your group, or maybe you, were working direct on this, the MoE Dictionary.

Audrey Tang: I was just publishing a new version.

James Lee: You were working on it just now? It’s so well done. I was looking at it, "This is what the Web should be, just really clean URLs and using other open dictionaries."

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

James Lee: Everything’s so well done, with a good license, if anybody else wants to reuse. I was like, "Oh, wow. This is really great," but everybody’s on Facebook, [laughs] and I use it. A lot of people, the reality is they’re on these closed gardens now. What do you see as maybe the alternative? Is there an alternative?

Audrey Tang: Mastodon’s really catching up. The g0v instance, there’s a g0v social. I have an account there. It’s not very active, but neither is my Twitter account. [laughs]

James Lee: Sure.

Audrey Tang: For the original uses of the RSS, which is public by default, to exchange and things like that -- that is, in the public forum use case -- I think there is plenty of alternatives. People in Taiwan, it’s actually quite unusual. Facebook, in other jurisdictions, they’re mostly using Facebook to catch up with friends and families, while using Twitter, Instagram, or whatever for more public-facing personality.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, I think everybody is family-ish. You can just meet a random stranger on the street and start calling them Uncle or Auntie, without feeling weird. [laughs] There’s this sense of the entire Taiwan being a huge family, and so people feel kind of comfortable talking about family-ish things in a mixed public/private forum and using Facebook for both purposes.

Audrey Tang: I think this is quite unusual, actually, and not at all what we’re seeing in Europe or in North American jurisdictions. That’s...

James Lee: Let me see if I understand you. You think the family aspect of conversation will also make its way to Mastodon-like things?

Audrey Tang: No, I think that Mastodon and people who are switching to Medium...people are using PTT already, but these are all for public discourse. What I’m saying is that I’m seeing many people, certainly my friends now, moving toward these alternate venues for public discourse purposes.

Audrey Tang: They realize that Facebook just is not optimized for that purpose. Facebook was originally designed to catch up with people you met during your college years.

James Lee: It’s like Facebook is actually the social network it was meant to be in Taiwan, whereas in other places, people have tried to use it as...

Audrey Tang: Election tools.

James Lee: ...a Twitter or like fake new or real news.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Right, but it’s the same in Taiwan. What I’m saying is, in Taiwan, we’re gradually realizing this. I’m seeing an exodus for public discourse. Of course, it’s a popular choice. There’s also a new one called Matters, which is a blockchain-ish public forum.

Audrey Tang: It offers immutability, meaning that if you write on something, it’s there forever. You can’t retract your words...

Audrey Tang: ...nor can oppressive governments censor its contents without your reader realizing. These are all very important properties for public discourse. You never know that, if you post on Facebook, and then people pressure you...

James Lee: That’s probably the best use of blockchain I’ve heard so far.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: For its accountability purposes, not for its money-making purposes. [laughs] There’s no incentive structure better than just keeping everybody honest on their opinions.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan, being a very open, fertile ground for this kind of blockchain initiatives, we’re also seeing blockchain being used as a mutual distributed ledger, like how it’s designed to be used, [laughs] rather than being hyped to do something like replacing Visa or MasterCard. Frankly speaking, the math is not there yet, which is why I love this idea of social innovation. It’s innovation solving social needs. That’s the first answer to your question.

James Lee: Cool, thank you. I had a small follow-up, and this is just a Web-related idea. I’ve seen some of the open data initiatives, which I assume you’ve headed up and pushed for...

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014-ish.

James Lee: ...in Taiwan. Governments around the world try to do it, to some extent. I’ve tried to play with some open data sets myself. One thing that’s interesting is sometimes they’re Excel documents, Microsoft Word documents. Even if they’re not, it can be somewhat opaque in how they’re used.

James Lee: I just had a brief idea. Maybe you have some thoughts. What if open data moved towards where, if the government wanted to publish a Web page, they had to consume their own open data in the same format.

Audrey Tang: Like API-first design?

James Lee: Exactly. I’m looking at the TaiPower electricity demand page. I want that view and that set of data, and then if you could just get it easily...

Audrey Tang: We’re getting there. There are two answers to your questions. The first one relates to non-privacy related data, like public data or environmental data, in which there’s a concerted push to do this. It’s called the Civil IoT Project or https://ci.taiwan.g0v.tw/.

Audrey Tang: What it does is exactly as you said. Previously, these are all separate Web pages. People have their own air box, pollution monitoring. EPA has their own, but everybody using different file formats, different data formats.

Audrey Tang: While it’s all technically open data, what we’re seeing is Professor A uses a subset with a model and make a prediction. Professor B use a different subset, use a different model, make a different prediction. Professor A ends up being more correct, but we never know whether it’s because of the data or the code. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s not evidence-based. Also, they cherry-pick the data sets, not out of malice, but just because it’s too much work to simplify the data sets to be fed into the same model. Every income source of air quality, of water quality, of whatever, was using radically different data formats.

Audrey Tang: The Civil IoT Project, or CI Project, is saying, regardless of whether this is originating from the government, private companies, or civil society, we’re merging everybody toward a shared vocabulary. We’re providing, for free, the National Super Computing Center to store all these different datasets and build a service platform out of it.

Audrey Tang: You will note that this domain is a new one. We get it from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to represent that this is not a single ministry thing. Previously, if you go to data.g0v.tw, ultimately each dataset link back to the domain of a single ministry. Every ministry has their own domain knowledge, and therefore different dataset formats, but that makes the data consumer very, very difficult, because they have to circumnavigate essentially the worldviews.

James Lee: Versus just mirroring the structure of the org itself.

Audrey Tang: Right. Exactly, exactly. What we’re now doing here is that the Ministry of Science and Technology is now making a shared dataset for all these different sources, and using an international API called the SensorThings API so that it’s compatible not just among these ministries but also with our international counterparts.

Audrey Tang: This is the first step, but we’re going to have a grant/competition, I think in a month or so, basically see if the civil society and the private sector can make use of this data and make it more useful in the terms of social impact than the individual ministries can use it so that we can prove to these ministers that it makes more sense to put data together and offer it in a streamline format.

Audrey Tang: This is the first part of the answer. That I totally agree. We told they should move through if you API-first design, and we have to politically convince each minister.

James Lee: I appreciate it now that you’re talking about it and taking about convincing ministers and that kind of thing. It makes sense. It’s a large organization, and obviously I have much less insight [laughs] into the organization or people aspects of that. That makes sense.

Audrey Tang: You can think of the 32 ministries as essentially 31 large NPOs. They have their own annual goals, they have their own budgets, and like any other charity, they want to show that they’re useful to people, but perhaps not to the same target audience. [laughs] Right?

Audrey Tang: Just one, like the Central Bank of course, they have to make money, but the other ones they’re about spending money in the most impactful way. The first answer to your question.

Audrey Tang: The second one is that on a local government level, which we don’t have as much direct control, we’re basically saying now that if they are making new IT procurements, they can say that making the Web machine-readable is just as important if not more important than making it accessible to, say, blind people, so the machines are kind of blind people.

James Lee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: With all due respect.

James Lee: With all due respect to machine vision, right? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: With all due respect to people working on OpenCV...

Audrey Tang: APIs are easier to understand than all the Flash animations, recent advances in machine intelligence notwithstanding.

James Lee: It’s a lot of work.

Audrey Tang: Right. There’s this link which I can send you as part of a transcript that basically says...Can you read this...

James Lee: Yeah, slowly. I’m OK.

Audrey Tang: Essentially what we did is that we published the Linux Foundation OpenAPI standard as a national standard, and then we say, "Whenever you’re making a new purchase that involves information technology, you can require your vendor to offer a machine-readable OpenAPI standard for anything that people can consume on a web page at zero or very little cost.

Audrey Tang: And if they charge you a lot for it, then they’re not professional, and you can disqualify them based on that." Right? [laughs]

James Lee: Very cool, very important, too. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Very important, yeah. Of course, that means that many vendors will then switch to open source-based solutions, like CKAN or even Drupal or WordPress. They start building OpenAPI standards instead of brewing their own.

Audrey Tang: But then the warranty and the complex licensing issue enters play, and so we also say, "You know, if you disclose again another Linux Foundation standard using SPDX or a compatible format, exactly what open source components you’re using to fulfill your procurement responsibilities, then those warranties are passed through to those open source vendors, so the system debriefer is not held liable for choosing to use Drupal or WordPress or so on.

Audrey Tang: That’s the only way to make them comfortable using, say, GPL software or some other software. All this is done, and we’re now working closely with the National Development Council starting with these very high impact subsystems, the nine subsystems, to use these procurement standards to build nine domain-specific data centers. We expect that everything else will follow after those nine domain-specific standards.

James Lee: That’s so cool. Do you see other government closely tying these things with open source?

Audrey Tang: The UK Government Digital Service also adopted OpenAPI standards. Please use it whenever it makes sense.

James Lee: Super cool.

Audrey Tang: We’re also doing what we call a Government Digital Service Principle or GDSP that is loosely modeled after the government design principle as proposed by the UK GDS. I’m actually going to London in a couple of weeks to meet with the GDS and PolicyLab folks to coordinate. That’s the answer.

James Lee: Very cool. Switching topics a little bit, if I may. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about information in the media and democracy in general. I think the Web certainly has a lot of dissemination of information that become a lot better.

James Lee: I remember reading some of your notes on the Sunflower Movement and setting up the IT there and all that stuff. That’s what people thought the Internet was going to be in like 1998 or something, 1999 or something. I was like, "That’s what they thought it was going to be."

Audrey Tang: A liberating force.

James Lee: They didn’t think it was going to be Facebook. They didn’t think it was going to be like Google has you logged in on every single property. That’s not the Internet that people had conceived, right?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

James Lee: There’s an ideology out there that supposes the less restrictions the better. I guess libertarianism to some extent, right? At the same time we’re seeing in the Internet that it’s influenceable, it’s controllable. People can amass huge amounts of power and money and shape in a way that is particular, very specific versus...

Audrey Tang: Precision persuasion.

James Lee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you see the government’s digital initiatives...That’s dangerous, because the government can be influencing things...

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

James Lee: ...in a way that’s not good. What’s the ideal here? What’s the response or what can be done? The Sunflower Movement and IT there, amazing good use, at least from many people’s point of view, of the Internet, IT, and technology. There’s all these other not-so-good uses that are directly influencing democracies in really biased ways, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

James Lee: What’s supposed to happen? What do you wish would happen? What do you think should be done? Should anything be done? It’s just going to sort itself out? What do you think? Do you have thoughts on that?

Audrey Tang: We’re aggressively doing lots of things. [laughs] First, I think the government should be a role model of not spreading disinformation.

James Lee: That’s important.

Audrey Tang: It’s easier said than done.

James Lee: Did you have a particular example in mind?

Audrey Tang: For example, in our government home page, we have a dedicated section that just says, "Real-time clarification." I think this is important.

Audrey Tang: Previously, people worked on a news cycle that is largely based on paper. People can mass print paper. It’s newspaper, it’s weekly papers, it’s magazines, and things like that. Paper has this property of your reactions on it are largely private, meaning that if I read about it and I make some notes, and I flip it or something, it’s a private action. It doesn’t go viral.

James Lee: Here!

Audrey Tang: Basically, the editors and people working on media literacy in paper-based form, they have a long tradition of making balanced reports, of having different perspectives, of editorials and things like that. That works very well on paper.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, because people all read on screens... Especially younger generation, if they see a screen that you can’t touch, they think it’s broken.

Audrey Tang: This screen right here.

James Lee: My 12-month daughter does the same thing already. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s the new reality, you know?

Audrey Tang: On it, the old ideas of a balanced report, the same real estate on a paper on the pro link-on views, it totally doesn’t make sense anymore. People are just going to highlight the part that they want to go viral, share without reading through it, even adding a few inflammatory or outrageous comments, which makes it even more viral.

Audrey Tang: Basically, that’s because all the private actions that you do while reading on the paper are now active social actions as people are reading and interacting on screens. It’s just material. It’s not about ideology. This is the fact of this material.

Audrey Tang: On balanced reporting and not spreading disinformation, instead of a spatial balance, we can now only do a temporal balance. Whenever there is a viral message out there that is inaccurate or that is only part of the information, the government should strive to, within the same news cycle, say within six hours, provide the other missing piece of the puzzle, without even accusing anyone of anything.

Audrey Tang: Just being a contributor to people’s media literacy, that’s our goal...

James Lee: I see.

Audrey Tang: ...on this. Of course, there’s RSS feed of those. We also see a lot of people working in the civil society, without the government’s funding, about independent fact-checking. There’s also lay people’s fact-checking, the crowd-sourced fact-checking, in addition to a professional journalist fact-checking. Both branches are working, and they’re working closely here in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: There’s a Taiwan FactCheck Center, which is more academic and more professional. There’s also the Cofacts initiative from the g0v movement, which is essentially a LINE bot that you can share to.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of rumor online, and it’s not always political. Sometimes it’s just, "If you eat this and that, you will get something." People care about their family’s health, so they spread all this disinformation.

James Lee: It’s fear-based social engineering.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. The Cofacts initiative is essentially a bot that you can share to. It co-creates the fact-checking.

James Lee: That’s like a wiki?

Audrey Tang: It’s just a chat bot, but it’s edited like a wiki.

James Lee: Got you, a chat bot with wiki mechanics.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It is really active, and there’s plenty of machine learning researchers and so on working on that project.

James Lee: Oh, very cool.

Audrey Tang: I think this is really good. Of course, as part of you mentioned threat to democracy, we see this spike the closer we get to the national election day. They are more motivated to spread this kind of disinformation. There’s also room for a carefully balanced, but still wiki mechanic, view on, specifically, the candidates.

Audrey Tang: There’s, for example, the Voter’s Guide. There’s also g0v project, where people can crowdsource facts. They’re all independently verified facts about pretty much anything on particular electoral candidates. It’s like an interactive introduction to the candidates, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot of these civic tech projects. I think the government should just keep providing factual information, but without getting too involved, either the funding or the personnel. That’s the general direction.

Audrey Tang: Of course, coming next year, we’re going to have critical thinking, media literacy, and so on, as part of the basic education curriculum, the first place in Asia to do this. We’re the teacher instead of being the authority, which doesn’t hold anymore anyway.

Audrey Tang: There’ll just be co-learners with the children and navigating the various information, basically deconstructing the messages on the Internet. People can learn to form their own opinions, but based on factual information about, say, a councilor or a mayor.

Audrey Tang: For example, here is the councilor vote guide. The order and the color of the display of the councilors here are all random, so it’s a different...

James Lee: It’s not his party.

Audrey Tang: It’s a different order every time that I hit refresh.

James Lee: It’s important. It’ll always be neutral.

Audrey Tang: Also, let me see. The important thing is never do live demo on this.

James Lee: Always a tough one.

Audrey Tang: Always a tough one, yeah.

James Lee: That’s OK.

Audrey Tang: You can look it up afterwards.

James Lee: I can look it up later.

Audrey Tang: Oh, here we go. The important thing here is that it is not just the attendance rate or the money, but also how they voted on all these different bills, across their entire political career. People can check whether this agrees to their actual act. Like this is how they promised, this is how they acted.

James Lee: Where does this come from? Is this straight from their...Are these their words?

Audrey Tang: This is straight from the Central Election Committee.

James Lee: It’s on the ballot or something, right?

Audrey Tang: It’s open data.

James Lee: Got you. They wrote it themselves and they registered it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We’re using the screen as a way that’s temporary balancing. People never put the paper ballot from 2014 next to their acts two years or three years afterwards. Paper are not that good for temporal balance, but screen is perfect for that. You can check their votes and their opinions and so on.

James Lee: Ah, temporal balance, yeah. I love that phrase. It makes so much sense. It’s like, "What were people so angry about one year ago? What happened?"

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

James Lee: Does it matter still? Did someone change their mind? All those things, that’s super important, temporal...

Audrey Tang: This is like collective memory for the collective intelligence.

James Lee: Super cool. I think that makes sense. If you try to censor or try to whack-a-mole or something, then you become an agent of power yourself, right?

James Lee: That potentially is problematic. If you just try to feed better information out there, follow-up, and iterate or whatnot, that makes a lot of sense to me.

James Lee: Maybe one last question. Again, it’s switching topics a little bit more, but kind of related to what you were saying about K to 12 education. I knew you had a maybe interesting educational history. It’s something I’m thinking about a little bit now.

James Lee: I have my daughter, and sometimes it seems like she’s picking up languages pretty quickly or something like that. Who can tell at 12 months. If there was one big thing that you could change about how kids are taught in a more traditional education environment, what would that be? What do you think is the biggest thing to watch out for that you would advise parents or something like that to think about?

Audrey Tang: Before I joined the cabinet, I was a member of the K to 12 Curriculum Committee.

James Lee: I didn’t know that.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] I kind of did my work there.

James Lee: Wow, I didn’t realize that.

Audrey Tang: The first and foremost thing that we did in designing the new curriculum as opposed to the previous one, which was eight years ago or something, is the switch from what we call 技能導向 or skill-based education value to a 素養導向, which is hard to translate, but roughly character-based education.

Audrey Tang: The reason why is that it’s impossible to predict the world 12 years down the line. Any skill that the student identify with, compete with other students, build a self-confidence based on that, maybe that skill will be rendered obsolete. Maybe it will just disappear. Maybe other mission takes over. [laughs] Maybe it morphs into something else entirely.

James Lee: Very likely.

Audrey Tang: If the student over-identifies with particular skills, they may encounter loss of dignity at the end of the basic education. This is a real danger as AI gets more powerful. If they identify with something that’s not competitive or extrinsic, but rather intrinsic, and we identified those three main characters and nine manifestations, 三面九項, which you can look up afterwards.

Audrey Tang: The three main characters are being autonomous, that is to say, design their own curriculum, essentially. We put a lot of freedom in how each school, and indeed each student, can do college-like, self-directing learning, like making their own curriculums, making resources of multiple schools, even tele-education and things like that.

Audrey Tang: A lot of freedom into the children, even at the junior high school, but even more in the senior high school stages, so there’s autonomy.

Audrey Tang: The second one being interaction or communication skills with people of different background, different ethnicity, different discipline. Basically, identifying oneself as a better communicator and instead of just being fixed in one discipline.

Audrey Tang: As part of that, we’re also changing the higher education so that you’re not majoring in anything in the four years. That’s totally OK. It could take up to 10 years. You can major in one thing and go out to make some business or join a NGO, go back.

Audrey Tang: It’s a back and forth relationship between the student and higher education also. People can switch their majors anytime so that people are not fixated on particular tracks. That’s the cross-discipline communication character.

Audrey Tang: The third one is what we call common good. Basically, trying to form common values from different positions, especially now that people care about various different things. Without a common good, people would use each other as instruments to further their utility, their use.

Audrey Tang: If we see that children can identify and be proud of the ability of making common values out of various positions, then when they innovate, the innovate will be solution that works for everyone instead of just innovations that sacrifice a majority of people. This character is also very important.

Audrey Tang: Of course, instead of saying, "We allocate particular classes for these things," they are imbued to every class, like history and literacy and math and whatever. They have to all realize the three basic characters. That’s the one change is just switching from identify with skill to identify with character.

James Lee: Wow. Amazing. [laughs] Thank you. I have a lot to think about. Thank you for this wonderful, wonderful conversation.

James Lee: I don’t know if you do this kind of thing. Feel free to decline if it’s weird. Do you mind if we get a photo together?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all.

James Lee: Is that OK?

Audrey Tang: Please give Shou Ting your email. We can send you the transcript.

James Lee: Absolutely. I’ll do that right now...