Don Shapiro: …really appreciate your giving us this time.

Audrey Tang: We have an entire hour to ourselves.

Don Shapiro: We’re doing good. I think we can make good use of that. Your recording system is still…

Audrey Tang: Functional? Yes.

Don Shapiro: …very functional.

Don Shapiro: I think we won’t have to worry about doing our own taping.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We’ll be sending you a transcript for co-editing. We can embargo the publication of the transcript after you publish. That’s fine.

Don Shapiro: That’s great. To start with, we thought we would just ask you maybe to explain to our readers what are the responsibilities of a digital minister. Perhaps, what do you consider to be some of the main achievements over the past few years since you’ve been in this position? What are some of the key things that still need to be done, that you’re looking forward to tackling?

Audrey Tang: My office, the Public Digital Innovation Space, is not a ministry. I’m one of the horizontal ministers, at which there’s eight at this moment called 政務委員 or ministers without portfolio, whereas there’s 32 ministries with their own minsters that are vertical.

Audrey Tang: We in the cabinet – all of us are on the ground floor – work on cross-ministerial issues, that is to say things that are not very clearly cut when it comes to the responsibility and their roles. When there’s emerging digital technologies that threaten to disrupt people’s lives, or whenever there is something like e-sports that none of the ministries have a natural obligation to work on, these become my work.

Audrey Tang: My three main mandate is open government, meaning that when we don’t know what’s going on, we ask the people what to do, and social innovation, like when people have a better idea, they tell us what to do.

Audrey Tang: Also use engagement, like when the younger people determine there is a better way forward for the society, we, the older generation, make sure that we realize whatever their ambitions and directions are, like through reverse mentorship. These are my main duties and obligations.

Audrey Tang: As for achievements, I entered the cabinet upon three conditions. First one is radical transparency. Everything that I chair, including this very interview, is published to the public under the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain License so that everybody can learn from it.

Audrey Tang: The second is voluntary association. My office is one secondment from each ministry that voluntarily participates. For example, the Foreign Service is Joel, before Joel, Aurora, and so on a rotating basis in the sense that each ministry can send at most one secondment. All innovations are actually done by the very innovative career public service people. That’s the second thing.

Audrey Tang: The third thing, in addition to radical transparency and voluntary association, is called location independence. Wherever I’m working, I’m working. This is more like our recording studio now. I’m not here most of the time.

Audrey Tang: I’m mostly in the Social Innovation Lab in the Ren’ai road used to be the Air Force headquarters, or I tour around Taiwan to bring, through telepresence, the 12 ministries related to social innovation to everywhere that’s not as connected to the Taipei City to make sure that we empower the people closest to the pain, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: My main achievement is, I would say, that these three working conditions, far from being experimental, are now ratified as national-level regulations. For the open government, we have the participation officer network in each ministries, and some municipal government, too.

Audrey Tang: There are people just like parliamentary officers talking to MPs and media officer talking to the journalists. We have participation officer that talk to hashtags. [laughs] Whenever there’s a trending hashtag, we ensure that we engage the hashtag instead of specific spokesperson, because there’s often no spokesperson for hashtags.

Audrey Tang: We engage those hashtags with funny memes, humor over rumor, and things like that to ensure that these people, instead of just traveling on outrage, can turn their outrage into co-creative energy. When people complain that nobody knows where to find mask, the mask availability map is created as a social innovation partnership.

Audrey Tang: When people complain the tax filing system is bad, the people who complain gets invited to do the tax filing experience together, and so on and so forth. That becomes a radical thing. Social innovation also gets ratified as a annual project, co-sponsored by the American Institute in Taiwan for the presidential hackathon.

Audrey Tang: That’s run by the President’s Office, making sure that every year, we choose five winning teams. We just chose one actually yesterday, the day before, Saturday. We made sure that these five winning teams receive a trophy from the president, which is a micro project that, when turned on, projects the president handing you have a trophy. It’s a self-describing trophy.

Audrey Tang: Whatever they did in the past three months then will become national agenda for the next 12 months. Executive power as a social innovation hackathon prize. That’s that. For the youth engagement, we also regularize reverse mentorship so that each of the 12 ministers now have one or two social innovators under 35 serving as their reverse mentors.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Ministry of Labor’s Reverse Mentor, Huang Wei-Xiang, brought the roller skaters champions to the National Day Parade alongside the athletes, and making sure that in the new K-12 education curriculum that technical skills is not chosen as a second choice to academic skills.

Audrey Tang: Rather, people will have role models that work with them to improve their K-12 community, the school building, and so on. They have a role model that’s not athletic, that’s not academic, but technical to look up to. That’s a pretty good idea that’s realized by our reverse mentor, Huang Wei-Xiang, who’s not even 30 years old when he entered the reverse mentorship cabinet.

Audrey Tang: My main achievement is just that it works pretty well without me. I could be touring the world giving speech in Berlin or whatever, in Addis Ababa, and the system still functions very well.

Don Shapiro: In terms of getting suggestions from the public, is there anything in particular that you could cite as a good example of how that’s worked?

Audrey Tang: The mask availability map that I just alluded to is entirely a social innovation. We certainly did not until 吳展瑋 in Tainan to come up with a mask availability map that would be a procurement.

Audrey Tang: Instead he just got it on himself, amplified it through the media, and demanded actually that the public sector provide him with a public API, which we did, but also empowers many other map maker such as 江明宗 .

Audrey Tang: As the Center of our Disease Control, the 疾管家 bot that together serves more than, I think, 10 million people on the first week making sure that people remain calm and collected during the COVID.

Don Shapiro: Looking ahead, what are your main objectives for the future?

Audrey Tang: These things are pretty much autonomous now. [laughs] I’m helping the President, the Premier, and the team to make sure that in the next coming session that we will propose a digital ministry, council, agency or museum. We haven’t yet…

Audrey Tang: Maybe not museum, [laughs] but anyway, a dedicated agency that’s on par with any other ministry or council. That is to say, in addition to the horizontal digital minister role, we will also be able to call digital ministry, counsel or museum that accompanies the role…

Don Shapiro: In addition to?

Audrey Tang: In addition to, yes.

Don Shapiro: I know you haven’t reached a decision on exactly how to organize that.

Audrey Tang: My favorite is museum.

Audrey Tang: We’ll maybe call it [non-English speech] , the National Digital Museum, the NDM, and next to the NPM. That’s because then the head of that museum could be called a chief curator, which in Taiwan Mandarin is called [non-English speech].

Audrey Tang: It sounds of a higher rank than anyone.

Don Shapiro: What are the pros and cons of some of the various options, whether you make it a ministry, council or a museum?

Audrey Tang: The museum is the best, I just talked about it. The ministry, the good thing is that for a ministerial budgeting, it’s easier for a ministry to assume other existing agencies’ budgets in order to, instead of having to draw the budget from scratch, you can have a continuous operating budget.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, a ministry is bigger when it comes to work with other ministers, because it’s just on par with any other minister. We will have to then put in the ministry’s founding act for specific issues that ministry has the same budgeting and coordination power as, for example, the Chief Commissioner of the National Development Council. That’s the ministry option.

Audrey Tang: On the flip side, of course, building a national digital council would give it, of course, the oversight and strategic making power as the National Development Council, but then it will be weak on the budget itself. Then NDC doesn’t have much budget to itself.

Audrey Tang: Then, of course, in addition to being a council, we’ll also say, “But, by the way, when running these kind of things, like cybersecurity or whatever, this council also acts as a ministry.”

Audrey Tang: Either way, we will have some put some clauses that defines this ministry/council as something that is also something like council/ministry, which is I think museum is the better, because then it would not pry on people’s thoughts on particular silos.

Don Shapiro: What’s the likely procedure and time frame for making that decision?

Audrey Tang: We are committed, because it’s presidential promise. We’re committed to bring a draft out before the end of the year. On the other hand, when the legislation passes, I don’t know.

Don Shapiro: Some bill being proposed during the…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The founding acts of the digital agency will be proposed to the parliament. I also hope that in addition to that, we will also have an independent data protection authority that will be then also part of this batch of these founding acts.

Audrey Tang: Previously, in the National Development Council, there’s currently the GDPR negotiation office that also doubles as the data protection authority when it comes to interpretation, but it doesn’t have any teeth in the sense of even ministries doesn’t obey the rules set by the NDC Regulatory Reform Center, which I understand has a close relationship to AmCham.

Audrey Tang: The ministries by law, by our privacy law, actually gets to run their own data protection instead of delegating it to the MOJ or to the NDC. These two are very disconnected. In order to get GDPR adequacy, GDPR would really like any GDPR-adequate country to have an independent organ whose budget and personnel is not controlled by any ministry.

Audrey Tang: It’s a little bit like the Aviation Safety Council, now the Transportation Safety Council, because the minister of transportation doesn’t name the head councilor. We’ll probably have that as well so that the digital ministry or council doesn’t control the budget or the personnel of this independent organ that is in charge of privacy and digital data protection.

Don Shapiro: I think there’s also been speculation that the National Communications Commission would be part of this new organization. Is that part…?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think so.

Don Shapiro: No?

Audrey Tang: No. I think for the independent authority that they have on content evaluation and moderation and so on, the independence of the NCC is very important. I think the NCC need to maintain its independence on these regards.

Audrey Tang: Even if we go the way of the council, like the National Digital Council, the NCC, instead of being a subordinate council should also still be an independent council next to it, similar to the Data Protection Council.

Don Shapiro: Whatever the nature of the new organization, what will be its main mandate and significance?

Audrey Tang: The main mandate is just to make sure that what’s fragmented, all the different ministries, at the moment, cyber security, it’s actually in triple I for not the best of reasons. [laughs] It’s on the cabinet, the Executive Yuan itself, as the Department of Cyber Security, with the backup of the Triple I of technical personnel. That’s far from a very healthy organizational chart.

Audrey Tang: The same would also go on for, for example, the Information Management department within the NDC is actually in charge of National Participation Platform, a data platform. That is already far expanding, stretching the idea of information management, which it would be like traditional MIS. It’s not inward looking anymore. It’s very outreach looking, and so many other things.

Audrey Tang: There is also the part that Digital Nation group within the Board of Science and Technology that takes care of the policy-making when it comes to the digital strategies across ministries, but they don’t always, because they report to different horizontal ministries. One is the post, one is the NDC. These two don’t necessarily know what each other is doing.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that they have a consistent worldview so that each ministry, when they want to propose something, sometime have to write like three different versions for three different horizontal ministries, part of the DIGI+ plan.

Audrey Tang: We the three ministers, that’s me, the post minister, and the NDC minister need to convene very regularly just to make sure that we are on the same copy when it comes to digital issues. It causes a lot of internal churn, so to speak. The digital organization is just making sure that for all these things, there need only to be one single recipient for those ministerial proposals.

Don Shapiro: In recent years, there’s been a program to shrink the size of the central government. This seems to be going in the opposite direction. Are you running into any resistance?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all. It was the main presidential campaign item of not only Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, but also in primary of now VP, William Lai. Also, in another primary of the then VP candidate, Simon Chang, used to be Premier Chang, so all these three people.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really know about Han Kuo-yu, but the other three people in that particular race committed to a dedicated digital organization as part of their either primary or presidential platforms. There is broad consensus on that.

Don Shapiro: Do you think good support in the parliament as well?

Audrey Tang: Of course, the TMD or the NPP has their own priority, whether it’s high or low priority. I think the two major parties both agree that it’s of priority. From what I heard about, at least they are happy to see that there is some clarity in this matter.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think they have a specific proposal yet, but I think they wouldn’t say no to a dedicated digital organization. We’ll see.

Don Shapiro: On another topic, the magazine has also an article updating the situation with Uber.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm. Uber is now a Taiwan company, actually three companies. I use it every day, almost.

Don Shapiro: Good.

Don Shapiro: The question we wanted to pose to you, when they came in, they encountered a lot of challenges, some of them maybe of their own making. If there are new companies coming in with the digital economy, innovative business plans, has the government worked in a way to make it easier in future for…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly. What we agreed on Uber in the end is a pretty good win-win-win situation for both the public, social, and economic sectors. The main complaint was that we took too long to get to this point.

Audrey Tang: The process of which the Uber conversation had, although it did have this crowdsourcing part, that’s the vTaiwan part, the ratification within each ministry is the churn, that really took many months. That’s for sure.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s really to Minister Lin Chia-lung’s credit that he really speeded up this process so that Uber is like Q-Taxi, the fleet that they registered as and also the Uber Eats company that’s a separate company.

Audrey Tang: The Investment Evaluation Board really fast tracked the entire process so that for the Uber drivers, there is no point in time where their livelihood is put into any uncertainty. Minister Lin Chia-lung really handled that really well. What’s important is to make sure that all these ratification process is done in a manner that is truly responsive, truly accountable.

Audrey Tang: Even though he speeded up to a month, for that month, it’s still very unsure for not only Uber but everybody involved. An institutionalized way to have a more transparent conversation that builds upon the MOTC’s existing, already very good technological evaluation capability, I think that’s something the digital organization can help on to make the consultation process even more smooth.

Don Shapiro: At this stage, what would you say is the main contribution that Uber has made to Taiwan’s digital economic development?

Audrey Tang: Of course, it prompted, for example, in our UberX conversation in the vTaiwan platform, I think that’s when the Taiwan Taxi CEO met TonyQ Wang, previously reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai.

Audrey Tang: TonyQ then worked with Taiwan Taxi for quite a few years to rebuild the Uber model in the Taiwan Taxi fleet, including the so-called Multi-Purpose diversified taxi, like not necessarily having to paint it yellow, and able to charge a price multiplier, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All of this made the experience of taking a taxi in Taiwan much more smooth. After Uber registered their own fleet, it also made the Crown Taxi, I think, other taxi fleets that collaborate with Uber also gets the upgrade when it comes to getting new customers from mobile phones and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The entire experience is made much smoother, whether you end up calling a Q-Taxi fleet taxi, or you call one of its competitors. Everybody gets much more flexible space to play, because the regulation gets changed, is reformed, answering Uber’s innovations.

Don Shapiro: Jeremy had a question or two.

Jeremy Olivier: Right. Since we have you in the room now, I’m working on a story for our October issue about the influx of Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American talent from places like Silicon Valley and Seattle back to Taiwan, mostly in the wake of COVID-19. Of course, the most well-known of these is Steve Chang. You two…

Audrey Tang: They have a club now, taiwangoldcard.com.

Jeremy Olivier: Right. I want to find out more about the stuff. I also wanted just to get your thoughts on this trend. Do you see it being a sustained trend?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We designed the Gold Card for that, for digital nomads, for people who don’t necessarily want to find employment here, who are perfectly capable to work anywhere in the world, but because the broadband, the food, I’m sure also hiking is a thing. I’m missing a few things. Anyway, they like Taiwan, so they decided to stay in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: There is also someone I just met from OpenStack community that’s also a recent Gold Card advocate, a strong advocate, who said that from Australia, even though it’s a comparable number of small and medium businesses, most of the SMEs there isn’t focused on OpenStack.

Audrey Tang: He finds that most people here, even if they work in a non-digital industry, actually understand a thing or two about cloud deployment. There’s a much stronger digital entrepreneurship spirit in Taiwan. He finds here more home-like, I guess, for digital nomads. We will continue to do so.

Audrey Tang: The NDC in the Bilingual Nation project actually allocated quite a few projects, including something in the forward-looking infrastructure plan 2.0 to make the bilingual environment much better. Also starting next year I think, we’ll also have the Resident Certificates to make sure that the digits are the same logic as the national ID digits.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that people can work with all the digital services that the government and the economic sector provides, without people accidentally forgetting that they are someone who have the second digit not be a digital ledger.

Audrey Tang: All of these things I think are just small steps, but in the end, you would get much more people interested in Taiwan, not because they want to learn Mandarin or teach English, but rather they want to, I don’t know, learn Python and teach JavaScript, and things like that. [laughs]

Jeremy Olivier: Will the digital ministry play any part in ensuring that people continue to come?

Audrey Tang: That depends on whether legislature declares as the mandate of the digital organization. There are some subtle differences from the KMT, that Simon Chang’s plan, which is more inward looking, it’s a digital transformer of existing ministries, and President Tsai’s plan, which is more outward looking, like speeding up next Uber.

Audrey Tang: There are strong arguments for the digital organization to do both. Truth be told, this is more like a council, and this is more like a ministry. We’ll see how the legislature…The KMT people and the DPP people both are for it, but whether it will end up being more outward looking, more inward looking, or both, is anyone’s guess.

Jeremy Olivier: About the Bilingual Nation initiative, I think it’s one thing to improve the general English language environment in Taiwan. It’s another thing to have highly talented engineers being able to speak about high-level concepts in engineering and science.

Jeremy Olivier: I’m wondering if this Bilingual Nation initiative will include anything like that, or are there any efforts to train Taiwan’s large pool of highly talented engineering talent…

Audrey Tang: I think many of them, if you are talking about graduate level, many of their classes are already in English. I think the Bilingual Nation plan mostly focused on the everyday living experience of non-Mandarin speakers in Taiwan, and also looks at the kindergarten or very early K-12 education, making sure that people can immerse in a more English-speaking culture.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that if we concentrate on K-12 now, then 10 years later, we’ll be at a point where most of the adult or at least new adult population is comfortable with English. At the moment, we have more than 20 national languages, most of them indigenous. We can’t claim English is one of the indigenous tribes, maybe Dutch. [laughs] Dutch may work, actually, but not English.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, it needs a little bit of time, like 10 years’ time, before we can include English into one of our national or at least official languages.

Jeremy Olivier: Thank you.

Don Shapiro: What is the time frame for changing the numbering system on the ARC to be the same as…?

Audrey Tang: It’s actually already done, done as in it’s already passed as a regulation for all the system providers to start changing their code, but as of when you can get the first, like your original ARC replaced with a newly-numbered card with your old number written on it, so that people won’t get confused, I think that’s next March, if I’m not mistaken.

Don Shapiro: Oh, will be just in time for my birthday, then.

Audrey Tang: It will be a very good birthday gift, yeah.

Don Shapiro: I think we also had a question from our pharmaceutical committee. This idea has been brought up I think quite a bit recently, that Taiwan has such rich data from the National Health Insurance system.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We’re sharing it all.

Don Shapiro: What’s the question, specifically?

Patrick Lu: For our pharma people, they said that we…

Audrey Tang: That they have to find a professor to vouch for them. That’s the current rule.

Patrick Lu: Yeah. It was very difficult for them to utilize the data. Because of that, they may not be able to help the government reach the target of precision medicine. Every time they try to help, they end up with disappointment, because no one in NHIA or MOHW know about this topic. The utilization of the database may also need NDC’s help.

Audrey Tang: Not really… There is a SDK, that’s a software development kit, from the NHIA for this very specific purpose already. The point was there is a diabetes support group called 智抗糖, that’s one of the very good examples. The [non-English speech] , the information bank or whatever, the saving account, the health account, whatever.

Audrey Tang: The personal health bank can be written not only by the insurance provider, which in Taiwan, there is no other insurance provider for these kind of things, the National Health Insurance Agency, but also, for example, if people go to a health check, then that’s actually not the NHIA, because it may not be paid by the health insurance.

Audrey Tang: When it’s paid by, for example, your employer or something, then that’s collected sometimes by the [non-English speech] , the National Health Agency or something like that. Then if it’s like in the military, then it’s actually the defense department, and so on. All these actually are in the single portal that is maintained by the NDC. It’s called MyData.

Audrey Tang: If you go to mydata.nat.gov.tw, that’s the NDC single one-stop portal for everyone to access their own, used to be very scattered, personal data records in all those very different agencies. That’s already done. It’s already the case.

Audrey Tang: For people who want to do research, like precision medicine research, all the NHIA is asking everyone is that they partner with an academician, a full professor, an assistant professor, or whatever, who have a research proposal, and then they get the access to the data.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, I think what they are asking for is already beyond the voluntary sharing of the data for research purpose, because through the MyData portal, they can already collect consent very easily, and it’s not about research that they already have a hypothesis. This is more about exploratory research.

Audrey Tang: They don’t know quite what the hypothesis is, and it’s a little bit more hassle for them to collect everybody’s consent. They don’t know yet which people will be relevant to that particular research. Only in these terms, like when the research hypothesis and the target population are both undefined. In these cases, yeah, there is currently a shortcoming. The NHIA system isn’t built for that use case.

Audrey Tang: For that use case, my thought now is twofold. First, maybe they can do an open algorithm, meaning that they contribute their machine-learning algorithm, but for the data owners, the data stewards like hospitals and clinics to run that, and they share only the insight, not the raw data.

Audrey Tang: That is to say if it’s a deep learning algorithm, a neural network, it only shares the last few layers, not the first layers, so that it can still do a federated training, but it will not reveal any raw data, and therefore not compromising the privacy guarantees that the clinics makes to the patients.

Audrey Tang: As far as I understand, the [non-English speech] AI Labs is already using that model of federated learning in collaboration with independent clinics and also hospitals. That’s one way of doing it, not getting the data aggregated here, but rather getting their neural network distributed there, and then do a training. That’s one part.

Audrey Tang: If it’s too much of a hassle to talk to independent clinics and individual social sector organizations like mutuals and things like that, there’s also another way, which is called fully homomorphic encryption or FHE. The idea is that they can operate on encrypted data, but you can still do training, do neural network learning, do whatever algorithm you want to do on encrypted data.

Audrey Tang: You don’t know what the data is about, but you still run your research algorithm on it, and the result can only be decrypted by the people who volunteer into this project. It’s a new methodology. It only becomes commercially available this year. It’s also one way to look into it. IBM is funding a lot of efforts on that particular approach.

Audrey Tang: The reason why we need a data protection authority, a independent one, is like the Aviation Security Council. They need to serve as this independent social sector board that look at these new materials, new technologies, and say yes, this is a good way to make sure that there is no compromise between data utility and privacy.

Audrey Tang: If this is done by, with all due respect, public service International Development Council, the people who are more inclined about privacy would say that but the National Development Council mandate is to push economic development. Of course, they will say something that compromise privacy. Actually, they don’t do that, but people will keep saying that.

Audrey Tang: If this is a truly multi-stakeholder, a multi-sectoral board that makes their decision like fully homomorphic encryption, like zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, split learning, open algorithm, is fit for this particular use. Even though its unspecified population, unspecified hypothesis, it still doesn’t compromise anyone’s privacy, and by the way, gives you full data utility.

Audrey Tang: If it ratifies the DPS mandate, then all the ministries can rest assured that this conveys the same strength as a interpretation by law. It’s both interpretation by law and an interpretation by the algorithm.

Audrey Tang: For this to work, the privacy act also has to change and to appoint this particular DPA as what we call the competent authority for data privacy, instead of for each fragmented ministry to be their own DPA. These legal changes need to first happen before your pharmaceutical researchers can enjoy an entirely privacy-preserving but also utilizable data.

Don Shapiro: If this is an issue for pharmaceutical companies, do you think maybe a briefing could be arranged from one of your staff members to them?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Don Shapiro: I think maybe that would be helpful.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I actually talked to a few pharmaceutical companies.

Patrick Lu: Pfizer, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. At least one, I think that one, is published on YouTube. I think Joel can help getting the conversation out. Maybe you can just share that link to other pharmaceutical companies who are concerned about two things. One is this advertisement law about illegal advertisement for them.

Audrey Tang: They can’t even share their latest research studies about their products on the Internet, but random people paying for Google advertisements can. [laughs] That’s their first thing. The second this is data utilization. Dr. [non-English speech] , I think, also invited Sean Moss-Pultz of Bitmark, [non-English speech], Microsoft, and KKBOX, they also visit me as a group, talk about exactly the same thing.

Audrey Tang: Was it Asus? I think it was Asus, also talk about the same thing. There’s at least three YouTube recordings that talks about this particular matter. Maybe we can curate a little bit and send to your constituents.

Don Shapiro: Another question has now occurred to me about the future digital ministry or council. Is there an example in another country that Taiwan can refer to? Has anyone else had a similar organization, or will Taiwan be pioneering in this respect?

Audrey Tang: This hybrid ministry/council thing would be a new configuration. Previously, like we of course know, the GDS, that’s the digital service in the cabinet office, is more of council role. After a while, it became part of the DCMS, the Digital Culture Media and Sport, in which case it’s a more ministerial role.

Audrey Tang: For people who think strategy is more important often say that now, of course, it has more budget, but let’s say where the strategy goes, but the flip can also be said if you care more about the budget. We looked at many other jurisdictions when it comes to this strategy/execution, like inbound versus outbound mandate. We think that a balance is needed, which is why I prefer museum is needed.

Audrey Tang: There’s no strict counterpart if we do strike that balance. If it’s purely execution or if it’s purely strategy, then of course, there are many counterparts around the world.

Don Shapiro: If you try to evaluate, which ones of those have been the most effective?

Audrey Tang: It all depends on how much of the digital transformation is driven by the public sector. If the country has a very strong public sector, like Singapore, in which case all the civic tech contributions eventually get absorbed into GovTech. With all due respect, I know quite a few GovTech people.

Audrey Tang: Then, of course, we want the strategy to be set by the government, and the private sector only implements those strategies. That will be the preferred way of doing that.

Audrey Tang: For other jurisdictions where the private sector is much stronger, for example, the US, then the public sector, when it comes to technological innovation, usually the government doesn’t do anything but help the research level and very early stage startups, after which the entire agenda is set by the economic sector, such as Uber is a very good example.

Audrey Tang: That’s more about more social innovation and economic innovation looking. Taiwan is very strange. Like when you use the National Health Insurance card, you are in a socialist country, but if you are using a credit card, you are in a capitalist country. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: For certain areas such as education, and healthcare, and some transportation, public transportation, Taiwan is socialist, but in every other regard, Taiwan is capitalistic. People would say that the government need to play a larger role here, but people would say that the civil society and the economic sector need to play a larger role, and the government should just relax here.

Audrey Tang: The digital organization need to balance both needs. That’s very difficult.

Don Shapiro: Good luck.

Audrey Tang: I’m just the designer.

Don Shapiro: Any other questions that you have?

Jeremy Olivier: What’s your favorite album of the summer?

Audrey Tang: Favorite album?

Jeremy Olivier: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I don’t listen to much new music, but I watched in Disney+ the “Hamilton” movie. It’s really good.

Jeremy Olivier: All right.

Audrey Tang: I guess it qualifies as rap, hip-hop album.

Jeremy Olivier: Yeah.

Don Shapiro: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Jeremy Olivier: Thanks.

Don Shapiro: We had invited you to attend our banquet next week. Although you may not be able to attend, someone from your office will be there.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Don Shapiro: We appreciate that. This was a very difficult year, of course, for everybody. Normally, this event is held closer to the Chinese New Year, but we feel fortunate that we’re able to hold it at all.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Don Shapiro: I think when the president is there, we would like to thank her personally for helping to create this environment. All of us feel really grateful that we are in Taiwan at this point.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. We’re not the most safe place, I think that’s Antarctica, but we come close.

Don Shapiro: We’re close.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Don Shapiro: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Cheers.

Don Shapiro: Thank you.

Jeremy Olivier: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Don Shapiro: Bye-bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.