Audrey Tang: I’ll make a semi-automatic transcript, post it, and everyone can review it starting tomorrow, for 10 days before I publish it. I hope that’s already communicated.

Audrey Tang: Welcome. We have an hour and 20 minutes, something like that?

Q: An hour and 25.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, until 5:00pm. Welcome to Taiwan and just fire away, anything you would like to ask.

Q: To start off, could you maybe tell us about what your role is in government. The challenges and what you see as being what you can bring to the role is maybe a good starting point.

Audrey Tang: Roles and challenges, sure. As you can see in this very cute name card I just received today, [laughs] my official role is called digital minister without portfolio.

Audrey Tang: As the digital minister, I mostly help all the different ministries. I don’t have a dedicated digital ministry, because all the ministries are supposed to be digitally transformed. We formed what we call a participation officer network work, in which there is maybe one to three people from each ministry.

Audrey Tang: They network together and build a virtual task force, with shared chat rooms, shared comment boards, shared tasks that we meet monthly, weekly, and quarterly. What we do is we try to work with the career public servants, not politically appointed ones, and lower their fear, uncertainty, and doubt toward digital transformation. That’s my role.

Audrey Tang: As part of digital transformation, people’s voices and the way that we network together, through self-communication, through social media and whatever, brings people to a sense of being closer to each other and feeling both empowered, in the sense that people can very easily find people with similar ideas, and also disempowered because this very infrequently lead to social change, too. There’s Occupy, but there’s just a few occupies.

Audrey Tang: The thing is we’re working on a more systematic way for the career public servants to view these people’s voices over the Internet as something that we call "dissent as data," meaning that it is something that both lowers the risk of the political communication, if the public servants discuss with the citizens before making a policy.

Audrey Tang: It’s also more time saving, because otherwise we would be replying to them one by one, and through distortion of whatever. Through public forums, online deliberations, and online-to-offline meetings and things like that, we try to get everybody onboard before a policy is developed.

Audrey Tang: That’s my main goal. I also oversee a few other plans, such as the Connecting Asia to Silicon Valley plan, the ASVDA plan, and also the Digital Nation plan, which is about building infrastructures. That’s about my role.

Q: What about the second part of that? What are the challenges? The civil servants that you’re dealing with, are they resistant to change, are they quite optimistic about it?

Audrey Tang: Originally, before I entered, I thought the challenges would be that the civil servants would be risk-averse and not risk-taking enough to try these new tools and new processes, with horizontal integration and so on. But when I actually joined, because I deployed a few very particular anarchistic way of working, those challenges are actually nonexistent. They don’t actually manifest.

Audrey Tang: To explain, in a hierarchical organization, often if that I’m a Minister and I issue orders and the people under me do some decisions and make something, if everything works perfectly, then I get the credit. But if things fail, the media has a way to find which public servant actually caused the failure and they get the blame. In such a environment, nobody actually wants to innovate, because the payoff matrix just isn’t there.

Audrey Tang: What I try to introduce is a kind of radical transparency. That includes this kind of meeting. It’s not just with you media folks. Even any internal meeting that I am the chairperson of, I make a full record, but I don’t publish it. I make a textual transcript.

Audrey Tang: Then I ask everybody who participated in the meeting to review for 10 working days and edit as they see fit. That has two outcomes. First, people actually see the other side’s arguments. In many meetings people just speak without listening, so they have to go over and listen.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that they take away the more irrational parts, the more violent parts of the discussion. When presented to the public, the public sees the civil servants as professional, as civilized, and as being expert. It collectively improves their credit, whether this plan actually works or not.

Audrey Tang: I’m a very interesting blame-seeking, credit-avoiding [laughs] minister, in the sense that this is a whole new way of working, so if it fails, it’s all my fault, but if anyone gets the credit, because there’s the full accountability, the public servants get all the credit. So far they’ve been very much willing to work with this new way of policymaking.

Q: Thank you very much. It was interesting, getting across how civil servant face, and the challenges. How do you see, from the other side in this table. This is a time when everybody is a journalist, right?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Q: Social media usage is wide, and people are on tweets and public platforms. How do you see those challenges, every citizen taking up the machinery in their hand? How do you address that? Do you have a plan or do you find that as a challenge?

Audrey Tang: The question was in the sense of massive self-communication, everybody’s the media. Do I find this a challenge?

Q: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: It’s great. [laughs] I joined with a agenda to empower the civil society to fully understand how the government system works. This is what radical transparency means. In contrast to some other country -- I won’t name names -- who want to control the use of social media through a lot of interesting policies, in Taiwan we try to encourage a civil society to engage in any way they feel comfortable.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t feel comfortable engaging through real name, we accept pseudonyms. If they don’t feel comfortable enough to show up in person, we accept people who type in stuff through livestreaming, in any way they would organize. If the government trusts the civil society, the citizens enough, eventually they trust back. But the government has to do this first.

Audrey Tang: There’s no reason for a citizen to blindly trust the government without a reciprocal trust. That would be fascism. I think the basic idea is that I see all the self-media as useful, as long as we have a way to demodulate. It’s a technical term. It means that it takes all those noises and signals and try to get signals out of these social media signs, people’s petitions, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: As long as we can have a way to consistently get signal out of dissent, the more vibrant the social media scene is, the better. And...sorry.

Q: Digital Minister, I’m from India. India has a massive digital transformation program, which is under implementation. In that context, how Taiwan is looking at the market, is there anything that Taiwan is looking at to tap into the Indian market?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. In my previous life, last year, [laughs] I was a software engineer and designer. I worked with Apple for six years before joining the Cabinet. That was my previous job. As you well imagine, in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of bi-directional communication with India, both in the sense of the movement of talents and the movement of capital, and collaboration on the software chain.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan can learn a lot from India in how we should collaborate internationally, both in the easier movement of talents, both to and from. and also about how we redefine ourselves as a design-first or a software-first place.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, as many of you well know, was known for semiconductors, peripherals and all kind of hardware manufacturing. But we are now also changing in our own value chain, driven by technologies such as AI on the edge, IoT, and stuff like that, which all require us to move closer to the user and closer to design and to user needs.

Audrey Tang: I think we learned a lot from India and India’s previous experiences in working with Silicon Valley and with other regional centers.

Q: Minister, hello. Can you tell more about this project of Silicon Valley, Asia, and Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the Asia-SV plan has two main parts. Well, it’s Asia and SV. It’s self-evident, [laughs] but it has two main parts. One is the regional integration of Taiwan’s mostly hardware, but now also AI and software and design, people and into what we call a virtual national team to focus on areas such as the Internet of Everything.

Audrey Tang: The primary vehicle of Internet of Everything, having robotics, autonomous cars, and things like that, we try to select a few of those topics and work with the regional governments, the city governments here or elsewhere in Asia and to set up test fields that has relaxed regulatory requirements, that has integration programs with the local society introducing the new technology and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Basically, if we’re going to serve as test beds and for the National Development Council in charge of the Asia-SV plan to then connect these test results to the Silicon Valley or other innovation center counterparts. We both make sure that the entrepreneurial ecosystem can ship from here into accelerators and incubators in SV, and the other way around if they are looking for somewhere to test their ideas.

Audrey Tang: There’s quite a few area, such as AR, VR, IoT, cybersecurity, autonomous cars, and things like that that are the focus of such test projects at the moment.

Q: Do you think that the work you do fits in every country or just in Taiwan? I think not just Taiwan, but do you think about the work you do fits in other countries, like Brazil for example?

Audrey Tang: Great question. I don’t think I’m working for Taiwan. [laughs] I’m working with Taiwan. The idea is that all the tools that we develop, all the systems that we use, most of them didn’t originate from Taiwan. The visualization tool that we use to gather people’s feelings about Uber to solve the regulation problem, that originated in Seattle.

Audrey Tang: The e-petition system, that originated in the US. Many of the collaboration platforms that we did originated from Iceland or from the Occupy in Spain or from New Zealand. There’s also a lot of South American participants as well in the transcription system that we’re using and things like this.

Audrey Tang: It is a international collaboration that tries to make democracy more transparent and also more accountable. I see this as a international movement that is not specific to any country, but Taiwan is in a pretty, I would say, privileged position because our citizens demand this of politicians and is willing to bear the cost of introducing such systematic technologies, even when it’s expensive.

Audrey Tang: That ties into the test bed idea that’s common to the Asia SV, in the sense that we can deploy these systems because these people really want it, especially after the Occupy in 2014.

Audrey Tang: Now, after we settle and worked on something good, we can hold events like Civic Tech Fest, as part of the WCIT, and then get other countries, practitioners like the Etalab from France or US Digital Service into the place and compare notes and try to spread this methodology.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s not specific to Taiwan. It should work on any country that is democratic. It isn’t picky about the democratic system. It could be representational. It could be centralized. It could be delegated. It could be liquid.

Q: Are there any other of your type in the world that are doing this in a digital perspective, any other countries? Who would you talk to for any advice? You seem to be doing a lot [laughs] of unique things in this whole sphere. Any other countries you might lean to for any advice?

Audrey Tang: Who are my counterparts? [laughs]

Q: Sure, do you have counterparts?

Audrey Tang: Quite a few I would say. In the regional government, because it’s, as a rule, easier to innovate on process when the scale is smaller. If you just have a community of maybe 5,000 people or 500 people, it’s trivial to introduce these kind of things.

Audrey Tang: I do learn from a lot of the experiments that was done on a smaller scale, and also larger scale like the participatory budgeting folks. They’re also developing their own methodologies, and that has a very interesting relationship with the representational democracy, but there is a lot of systems and methodology that I learn.

Audrey Tang: In our international collaboration, chat rooms and so on, you see people in all sorts of legislative or administrative positions, all over the world. I wouldn’t single out any countries, but it’s at least 20 or more countries. We’re just chatting every day about the things that we do. Most of it is on Twitter actually.

Q: Very interesting.

Q: In this journey moving from the hardware industry into the digital age and digital applications, how is Taiwan going ahead in this regard? Will it cause, in particular, to the entrepreneurial system by support of entrepreneurs?

Q: I know there is Taiwan accelerator that was launched last year. There was been some reports actually criticizing the slow progress of Taiwan’s economy on international records. How fierce is the competition across the strait mainly? In terms of entrepreneurs, to what degree you’re actually relying on them in the transformation towards the future?

Audrey Tang: They’re everything. [laughs] I think here we make a distinction between purely for-profit entrepreneurs, which is well outside my purview actually, and social innovators, social entrepreneurs, which are my main focus.

Audrey Tang: I see the last mile of digital transformation always fitting the needs of people. Say the government develops a long-term healthcare application that lets elders track their health needs and get whatever personal care. On the last mile, there’s going to be an app or some virtual voice talking to the elders for the delivery.

Audrey Tang: But it works much better if they talk in the local context, if the script is collaboratively created by that township or that region. It works better if they speak the accent of Taiwanese Hoklo or Hakka that was spoken in the region. All this needs social entrepreneurs in that region. There’s no way that the government can tailor make the services to fit the needs of all the regions.

Audrey Tang: The same goes to autonomous vehicles. In some areas, maybe people want to integrate with electronic tricycles first. Maybe in some places people would want to a minivan to work with the schools. Again, this requires social entrepreneurs to identify local problems and further their social missions by solving these problems.

Audrey Tang: I think the idea of entrepreneurial spirit that most of the young people here in Taiwan that I see who become entrepreneurs, if they are just after the for-profit money, most of them are not in Taiwan anymore. There is, frankly speaking, better capital markets.

Audrey Tang: If they are for the betterment of the society or to fulfill their social mission, Taiwan is the perfect place because people are very acceptable of innovations as long as it delivers a social value.

Audrey Tang: So we work with social entrepreneurs literally every week starting October. Every Wednesday is my office hours. I’m in the Taiwan Air Force park. It used to be an air force military zone, but now it’s being transformed into a social innovation lab.

Audrey Tang: It’s just what you expect from incubators or accelerators. The social innovators reside there for six months and work with the social innovations team. I’m just one of the mentors. My office hour’s every Wednesday, and people can go and talk to me on social innovation. We rely on them for the last mile, and we rely on people who are entrepreneurial, but with a social mission.

Q: I’ve asked a question already, so I hope that’s OK. I wondered, were you surprised when you were invited to be a minister? Do you think someone could do your role if they hadn’t have left the country and gone and experienced life by Silicon Valley or somewhere else altogether?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think there’s plenty of people who are qualified for this position. All it requires is just a willingness to be a channel, a translator, between different worlds. What we call cross-sectoral is actually different worldviews. What I do is mostly translating those worldviews into the views that other people can understand. It’s a role of a medium, so to speak. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Because of the radical transparency, all the transcripts that are left, anyone who picks up this digital minister role can pick up exactly where I left. The idea is not that I’m particularly keen on making decisions on behalf of anyone, but rather making sure that everyone sees what everybody else is doing.

Audrey Tang: I think it just requires an open mind. Of course, linguistic skills help, but I think it doesn’t particularly require any life experience.

Q: Concerning ASEAN countries, specific Western Indian, how far is the digital integration with Southeast Asia? Particularly, in Malaysia where I come from, Penang is known as the Silicon Valley of the East. I just want to know how is that situation, as you transform from hardware to software.

Audrey Tang: What we like particularly about Southeast Asia, the countries, is that each country has its strong verticals and that they link together in ways that are beneficial to everybody who linked. I think this is actually a very interesting model that’s unlike how the United States, the states, link together, or how countries in the EU link together. There’s very distinct characters and a lot of growth in this area.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, in all of the verticals, there’s probably some parts of Taiwan to compare with the best in Southeast Asia. I won’t name names. The idea is that we learn from the parts of Southeast Asia that does better than Taiwan in a certain vertical, and then we build a trust, a bi-directional chain.

Audrey Tang: We do this not only through trading. The traditional focus is trading, but now it is more about the culture of the educational. We are seeking to increase people’s stay in Taiwan. We’re issuing, if the legislative let us pass the law, that will enable, in the next session, people to stay in Taiwan without finding an employer first. That’s what we call a Gold Card visa. It’s like the Singapore one, but it’s renewable.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that people with a certain kind of talent, the leaders in your country and other South Asian countries can be free lecturer here, without seeking any particular employment, but getting paid very high and being valued by the society as people who bring these ideas and these methodologies.

Audrey Tang: If there’s one thing Taiwan needs to learn from South Asian countries is this kind of respect for diversity and the respect for different worldviews from different cultures. I think we can still do a lot. We do this just by integrating these overseas mentors into the society through programs like the visa program.

Q: In terms of speaking about all these goals, about a shift from the hardware to the software production, as well as digitalization, is there any concrete reflection in the educational system already?

Audrey Tang: My part-time work, [laughs] before I joined the cabinet, in addition of being a consultant, is partaking the K-12 curriculum committee. There’s a curriculum rewrite that is now being approved by a multi-stakeholder committee deliberative, including the students themselves, which is very democratic, as far as I can see.

Audrey Tang: Before that, there was a many-year process where we worked as the developer of a new curriculum, a curriculum that is not anymore capacity-, skill-, or examination-based. The previous curriculum valued students on how well they score, how well they rank, relative to each other. There’s predefined five disciplines or seven disciplines, and people are supposed to be excelling at something.

Audrey Tang: Now we’re doing away with all this. The new curriculum, which is pretty revolutionary, is focused on what we call literacies or the building of characters. The three main characters are autonomy, interaction, and the common good.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we stop predicting the world 12 years in the future, because nobody can do that anymore. We understand that if the child entering primary school learns to learn by themselves, to interact, and to work for the common good, that never gets old.

Audrey Tang: Any task along the way that they’re having to master, they will never identify with those particular tasks, compared to the previous education system, where people, if they’re ranked number one at a certain skill, they somehow develop an identification of those kind of skills.

Audrey Tang: This is very dangerous in the age of digital transformation, because all of those specific skills are going to be automated by AI, anyway. People would face frustration if they over-identify with any particular task and skill.

Audrey Tang: The idea is for the new curriculum to build up a generation who just think about their social missions, think about what common good they can bring to the world, or whatever self-fulfillment they want to make, while making others no worse. The idea is that whatever task they learn along the way is discoverable. If this gets automated, that’s great, because they can focus on the higher values. That’s the curriculum.

Audrey Tang: It’s a refocus on STEM, but not just on the skill of STEM, but what we call media literacy. When we were learning all kinds of different educational resource from the Internet, try to be critical thinking, and have the teacher, instead of lecturing, to learn with the students. As you can imagine, it’s quite controversial, but it’s now mostly passed. Front-line teachers are now being retrained in this kind of very autonomous learning.

Audrey Tang: Where, in the rural areas, we cannot reasonably explain people to adopt this overnight, we developed, over the Internet, courses and a shared AI system. People can experiment with personalized AI and things like that, and make sure that all the schools, everywhere in Taiwan, has equal access to 300 megabits or more bandwidth, so that we don’t leave anyone behind while digitally transforming and do this.

Audrey Tang: I care about that a lot. Mostly I worry about if we don’t do this digital inclusion in education, with this very innovative curriculum, there will be two countries -- one who will successfully adopt this education, and one other that are left behind. We’re trying to pull it ahead.

Q: How have the teachers, as a profession, accepted the new policy or the new way of thinking?

Audrey Tang: They’ve had time to prepare. Taiwan, maybe ahead of most Asian countries, have a law about experimental education -- three acts, actually. Anyone who wants to be home-schooled, community-schooled, or alternative-schooled can legally apply to their local CE or county.

Audrey Tang: As long as their personal curriculum passes review, they’re free to use any K-12 resources, while keeping their schedule entirely flexible, in the hands of their parents, and so on. As a result of that, there’s a lot of alternative schools in Taiwan, through the Experimental Education Acts.

Audrey Tang: There’s many different schools that bring this kind of autonomy-based, capacity-building way of education to the K-12. There’s hundreds of children already, families already engaged in this kind of education. There is an awareness and a literature about this kind of education that’s been going on for the past decade.

Audrey Tang: It’s mostly that our curriculum committee looks at the parts of alternative school that has worked, discarding the ones that hadn’t -- that’s what experimentation means, right? [laughs] -- and take the parts that actually worked into the regular education. I would say, at most, five years ago everybody saw it coming, so they’ve had plenty of time to prepare.

Q: Thank you.

Q: I have a question. There is an issue, very important in the world right now, the elder people, how they can be included in this digital transformation. How do they accept it and have the tools to do that?

Audrey Tang: I can talk for hours.

Audrey Tang: My four grandparents are all still around. The oldest one, my maternal grandpa, is 99 years old. The youngest, my father’s mother, is 85. I still work with them, in a sense, every week through video conferencing, through monthly visiting, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Really, the elderly have a lot of wisdom. As long as people can communicate in an inter-generational context, that does not privilege any particular generation. I’ll take one example, the arrival of Pokémon GO. If people have played Pokémon GO, it’s this augmented reality game, where people go on the street to capture -- I feel silly saying this [laughs] -- virtual pets.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot of young school children bringing their grandparents. They’re like companions in doing this kind of learning together. That’s because neither generation has seen anything like this before. They’re both new to this thing, so they can learn together.

Audrey Tang: All too often, when we talk about inter-generational communication, it’s one part trying to educate the other part or one part trying to lead the other part into innovation, dragging and screaming. With genuinely new experiences, with virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, things like that, none of the generations have seen this before.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot better inter-generational learning context and social integration context when all generations talk about what to expect to a technology, instead of having the early-adopters dictating what the rest of the people do. That’s the main idea.

Q: How do you compete the increasing influence over countries, as Korea, Japan, or China, in digital technologies? Where do you see advantages over Taiwan? Do you have some plan of cooperation, maybe with the government, to build from Eastern Asia more super power in digital technologies?

Audrey Tang: Great question. I’m a very collaborative, not at all competitive person, mostly because I drop out of junior high school. I don’t even know what it means to win or lose on an examination. I think I’m seeing it with a more collaborative perspective.

Audrey Tang: If, as I said, the South Asian countries, or, as you mentioned, some North Asian countries are particularly good at some vertical, I think that’s great. That means that talents are more efficiently utilized. If you are into this thing, that’s the place for you.

Audrey Tang: I think what Taiwan offers, aside from the obvious advantages of a diverse ecosystem and the fact that any vertical innovation can happen here, because it’s a quite self-sustainable terrain. I think what we also offer is a tolerance, and I would even say an embrace of failure.

Audrey Tang: It’s not quite Silicon Valley level, but that it’s pretty good in Asia, in the sense that if a young person tries something and fails, their friends are like, "OK, this is great. We all learned something from it." Whereas, in most other places in Asia, that would be the parental expectations alone, would be something. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I think that’s also the general atmosphere. Even before the legalization of gay marriage, people are already very tolerant of LGBT communities, people with different expressions, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All this points to the idea that Taiwan, like my generation, is the first to enjoy freedom of speech. My parents’ and grandparents’ generation paid dearly for it and nobody wants to leave behind this kind of freedom. Freedom of expression has taken on an almost unchallengeable position.

Audrey Tang: When we work with social media, we always work with the premise that there must be no censorship. There must be no limitation on how people can express themselves. I think that makes for a diverse and sustainable ecosystem, as I described, and that makes innovation happen in a way that’s, perhaps, not particularly strong on any given vertical, but makes a lot of synergies.

Q: Can I ask one more, please? I would just want to mix up a few things, bringing on what you said. You touched upon interacting with your grandparents. You spoke about your view on the LGBT and the Pokémon GO. You even said you’re a school dropout. All these things are pretty interesting, and being a young minister in this portfolio.

Q: We have a population out there, a young population. Especially in the part where I come from, the Middle East, we have a young population so full of energy and vigor but in a destructive mode. Is there any message that you have to these youth out there? There are two views. On the other side, we have the Blue Whale kind of things coming up.

Q: Is there any message that you have for these youngsters out there? Something on the positive side as to what they can do, how they can bring in new and innovative changes?

Audrey Tang: I think that the general idea is that, while outrage mobilizes people, it doesn’t actually result in social production. To do such a production, one needs to listen to all the stakeholders and that includes listen to people who are unfamiliar, people who you find strange, or even repelling.

Audrey Tang: For all the social entrepreneurs, that is a requirement. It’s not something that you can just learn by reading books or reading analysis. If there is a social injustice, if there is a social issue that makes some young person go mad about it, my advice would be just to turn it into a learning experience.

Audrey Tang: Learning, not in the sense of reading books -- although, that helps -- but by actually getting to know the people in both sides or many sides, who suffer from those or deliver those injustices. Then, try to form some sort of solidarity that lets them at least trust you to a degree where you can get useful information.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, innovation just flows from there. When people organize together, when people have solidarity, they somehow think of a better picture, a better way of working together, even if it’s just 10 people or 20 people. That will transform into a small social entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: We see that happen many, many times here. When, after a disaster, after a typhoon, after an earthquake, that disrupted the local social order, people of course fled the place, but the people who stayed, after its cataclysmic event reformed into a much stronger solidarity ecosystem. We see a lot of social innovation post-disaster.

Audrey Tang: Whatever injustice is caused -- it could be political, it could be cultural, it could be societal, it could be just natural disaster -- it is a crack in the society and the light gets in, for people to get stronger and to listen to each other more. There was a question from this side.

Q: Since you are a without-portfolio minister, I’d like to talk about China. We were talking to some people, your colleagues earlier, and we have seen that, economically speaking, Taiwan and China, they are very much integrated. 40 percent of your trade is with China, and one million Taiwanese in China. My question is do you see bigger integration with China coming to technology?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Even after becoming a digital Minister, I taught classes in China. I’m not averse of anyone who want to attend my VR lectures on how to make civil deliberations work in virtual reality. That’s one of my research projects before I joined the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: We’re still continuing this project because it’s easy to talk about budgets and laws, but if it’s about construction of a park or an airport, you really have to do it with VR. We all wear glasses like this and we see a holographic projection of the airport that we’re going to construct and things like that. It makes it much easier to focus on objects if it’s tangible.

Audrey Tang: I taught classes over the Internet. I even connected a Hangzhou classroom with a Kaohsiung classroom in this kind of VR environment. Of course, there’s no risk, because it’s not my bodily presence for me to visit and it also violates no bilateral or multi-lateral things, because there’s nothing to says one cannot watch a real-time movie of a minister. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: There’s quite a few ways, I think, we can integrate the virtual domain. The knowledge itself, and technologies and methodologies, they are inherently cross-border. As long as everybody keeps to their cybersecurity, as long as there’s no anonymous attackers bringing the Internet down, Internet, by itself, is a machine run from trust.

Audrey Tang: I trust that the knowledge and technologies that’s shared in the commons on the Internet will be to the benefit of everybody involved, including, of course, the People’s Republic of China’s government.

Q: I would like to go in more ground level. Now we have hundreds of Taiwanese companies working in China, probably you’re going to see more in China than in Taiwan. How do you see the future of this interaction?

Audrey Tang: As I said, as far as trading, or just profit-seeking is involved, it’s really not my department. [laughs] I’m not the Minister of Economic Affairs. I’m mostly working on the digital transformation of the government system here and in dialogue with the wider civil society.

Audrey Tang: My collaboration with the people you mentioned, was about people who work in a remote place. We of course work on cybersecurity infrastructure to make sure that they can safely call home and to make sure that the collaboration tools work with regards of the very specific Internet situation there and things like that. That’s the end of my purview. I am not the Minister of Economic Affairs. I’m sorry.

Q: IoT digital inclusion technology, they are not reaching everybody. In a culture like Brazil, too big, too huge. They are not reaching everybody. Yesterday, Mr. Vikram Pickard said that there’s a ping pong between the industry and the politics. "Oh, it’s your fault."

Q: "No, it’s your fault. It’s your fault."

Q: The thing is, for this solution, it’s with you. It’s with the civilians. Where is the solution between this war, this game between industries and politics?

Audrey Tang: I think they are like two sides of the same coin. As long as things work, in either taxation or consumption, in a hierarchical collection, and then redistributing way, whether it’s in industry or it’s in a government, there really is no good force to promote inclusion. If it’s capital-seeking or taxation-seeking or rent-seeking, it’s naturally preferring the places where it’s concentrated.

Audrey Tang: There is a concentrated talent, concentrated development, concentrated what, and the people who cannot or will not make into those concentrated places gets discounted, in a sense. This is, of course, a general dynamic.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think this is anyone’s fault or anyone’s blame. It is a natural consequence of a one-dimensional value system, that values something that is accumulative. It’s a proxy of utility of value of human quality of life, but it’s a pretty bad proxy, in my book. That’s the general answer.

Audrey Tang: When I work in social enterprise or social innovation here with these three groups of people, we see people who are entrepreneurs, who set out to solve a societal problem, mostly young people. We see NGOs, the not-for-profits, taking care of the parts that is neglected by industries and by governments.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s a huge number of people in the voluntary sector. Tsu Chi, for example, is almost governmental size in its aim and in its reach. The NPOs, including Tsu Chi, as I mentioned, now turn to work with the market in a way that is innovative and is sustainable in its business model but, at the end, it’s still an NPO that takes care of regional needs.

Audrey Tang: We see more and more companies, big companies, with a for-profit vision or mission, including foreign companies like Facebook, who then suddenly take such a mission because they see their work as something that is being embedded with humanity. As a fellow human being that, perhaps, do not want their society to go hardly wrong, they see it as more than social responsibility and see it more as a social mission.

Audrey Tang: We have the entrepreneurs and NPOs turned into sustainable business models and we have the for-profit companies seeking its social missions. I think they converge in the middle of a very old world. It’s something like cooperative economy or solidarity economy, in the sense that people collectively define what is valuable in this society.

Audrey Tang: I think this value-building thing is the core of solving the inclusion problem, because it’s just uniting people who see such injustices as something that they can actively work on, no matter which sector they’re at and they can converge on something. We have a lot of examples like that in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think, if people in any of those sectors now stop and say, "It’s all the industries fault. It’s all the government’s fault. We didn’t elect the right people," this just never gets solved, because it has to be solved in a local context-sensitive manner.

Q: I want to ask you about the relation between the IT, the information technologies, and the communications. IT made communication easy and free. We can connect each to other beyond the borders, or race, or generation because of SMS and so on.

Q: But also, fake news, misunderstandings, or maybe discriminatory expressions can be easily spread. What should we do to make the correct progress for better communication?

Audrey Tang: Great question. First, I don’t use that F word. [laughs] I see the words "fake news" as an affront to professional journalists. It is designed, I think, to sound like there’s something to blame with the media, so I don’t use that word, sorry. Instead, I use...

Q: Don’t be sorry.

Audrey Tang: Well I’m not like certain other politicians... [laughs]

Audrey Tang: ...seems I’m preaching to the choir here.

Audrey Tang: It’s a term with no legal definition. In the legal definition, we have rumors, which are either true or false, but it just means it’s unsourced. There’s disinformation, which means that it purports to be legitimate but it’s actually, actively spreading untruths.

Audrey Tang: There is a lot of other different sorts of disinformation around in the legal system but there’s no term with more ambiguity than the term "fake news," because it could refer to any of those modes while discrediting the media. It’s an interesting design, but I won’t use that word.

Audrey Tang: It is true, that with the social media, for the first time, it’s easier to share something than it is to read it. In the old, traditional media, we typically read something. Even if it’s a blog post or something, we read it, and then we share it. That’s the normal way of working with things.

Audrey Tang: With social media, if they can engage your fast-response system in the first six seconds, through imagery, a title, or whatever, people, then, are inclined to share it before they finish reading it. That causes the story to go viral, which is great for advertisers, I suppose, but it also makes reasonable discussion almost impossible because people form their opinion without reading through it.

Audrey Tang: Then, any other counter, rebuttals, or fact-checking is now facing an uphill battle, because people are already set in minds on a particular thing, in its affect. This means in the sense that there’s an emotional charge associated with these words.

Audrey Tang: How to solve it? A few things. I was part of the people fighting the original spam wars. At some point in Internet’s history, spam seemed like an unsolvable problem, because it costs nothing to send an email and it costs us a lot of time to read through the emails. Now, we don’t get much spam anymore, and that is because the payoff system has changed. It now costs something to send an email.

Audrey Tang: Every gateway along the way, without censorship, unite with every other point, to create a reputation system that blocks the worst senders. People who go into loopholes to take over machines to send spam emails, they no longer easily do that because of the upgrading of the security system, the fundamental matrix of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Translate that to the social media scene, that would mean we would stop seeing this information as something human made. Maybe we see it as an epidemic, just like spam was. Maybe we start negotiating with virus, because it’s not possible. It’s different categories. Maybe we just see it medically, and build inoculations.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, if we listen to each other very carefully, have a civil debate, a deliberation on a certain thing, like we did with many controversial cases like Uber, people get immune to future propaganda, to future disinformation.

Audrey Tang: People have listened to both sides of ideas and have considered it very carefully. As we are now building this kind of deliberative media interest into the K-12 curriculum, we’re ensuring that a generation will grow up learning things by arguing and thinking from many different people’s sides.

Audrey Tang: Once people do that for some very basic concepts, then they are not prone, like my generation or any older generation, to any specific font, any specific voice, any authoritarian layout that will convince them without reflection as to the authenticity of those events.

Audrey Tang: For people who are already adults, the civil society are already working on I wouldn’t say an inoculation now, more like an immune system. For example, the g0v movement, G-0-V movement, that I am still a part of aims to, again, identify. The idea of g0v.tw is to look at the government websites, the .gov.tw websites, and identify the ones that are missing, broken, or just not very well done.

Audrey Tang: Then, we make an alternate version under the same domain name but with the gov changed to g0v.tw, so we don’t have to place high on search engines, because people know just to change the governmental website, the O to a zero and get into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: There’s one project, the Cofacts project in the g0v, that tries to build a LINE bot. LINE is a popular messenger system, an instant message system here, that you can just add it as your friend, and then share whatever disinformation in your family, chat room, or whatever, into it.

Audrey Tang: You will automatically check whether it’s true or not, and it will link to a collaborative, edited Wikipedia-like database to verify the authenticity, and also work with international fact-checkers. The beauty of it is that it’s not something government-sponsored. It’s not something government-mandated. It is just society volunteers, many of them work in media themselves, to try to work out this automatic delivery system.

Audrey Tang: The government’s part in it is just, first, we shouldn’t make rumors ourselves. We shouldn’t tell lies. This is very basic, but it’s easy to forget.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that when there is some fact that we can provide to aid those fact-checkers, those collaborative efforts, we need to make the Frequently asked questions each into its own URL, in a very easy-to-disseminate format, in a very easy-to-share, basically, make it content form-like, so that the truth spreads as easy as rumors.

Audrey Tang: Make sure that all the evidence-checkers and people who work on media literacy can then use these as easy sources. That is what we’re actively doing. I think, Taiwan is where we work with the constraint that we must never censor anything.

Audrey Tang: Which is why you see the digital minister replying on Twitter and Facebook, within 30 minutes, any time there’s anyone mentioning my name or if there’s any policy that I’m making and things like that. It’s the idea of the authentic, bi-directional communication. It’s a long answer, but it’s OK.

Q: Do we have some information how much start-ups is created each year and how much will not survive for one year?

Audrey Tang: I think the one-year mortality [laughs] ...Most of the start-ups didn’t really linger. The idea is that, as in Silicon Valley, we pivot. We don’t fail. [laughs] The idea is that for many, I would say a majority -- I think that the number is like 85 or 90 percent of startups -- they just start building a business model. They find out it’s not a market fit. Yet it’s born out of a social mission, so they try a different business strategy to further the same social mission.

Audrey Tang: The social entrepreneurs that I work with, many of them try four or five different iterations, maybe one as a NGO, one as a coop, and the other one as a company, whatever angle they can get donations, investments, or whatever. Then finally finding a way that has learned sufficiently from the stakeholders and fit into the market.

Audrey Tang: I think that is natural. I’m not arbitrarily thinking that we should improve the success rate of startups, as long as it’s to the benefit of the ecosystem, that they pivot and write postmortems and let the ecosystem know where they failed, when they pivot.

Audrey Tang: Yes, please.

Q: You talk about the Internet is based on confidence, but at the same time, we’re having an increased problem with security.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Q: We have, for example, more attacks on hackers or a lack of privacy in data, and increasing use of keys or passwords, which are more letters, capitals, and capitals, number, whatever things. What the deal with all this stuff with the real Internet?

Audrey Tang: There’s two different layers. There’s cybersecurity, which is the infrastructure and the personal data and privacy protection, which is in the content, in the layer that runs on the infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: For the infrastructure, we are now looking for the legislative to pass the Cyber Security Act, which will secure for the critical infrastructure, as well as for all the government systems, sufficient people who are versed in cybersecurity. We’re trying to create a market where if you learn cyber security as part of your university program, or whatever, there is like four or five different job slots for you once you’ve finished basic training.

Audrey Tang: There’s a market shaping play, and I think it’s been pretty successful, even without this act being passed to introduce sufficient cybersecurity training to public servants, especially on the local level. As part of our special budget, we also allocated the necessary hardware and infrastructure upgrades for all the last-mile systems that are mostly still running Windows XP or older, and are primary vectors of attack. We’re very much look into it, and then building this into a industry.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is home to Trend Micro and a lot of cybersecurity industries, and we’re looking to integrate it with IoT even more now that the autonomous cars will be everywhere. Cybersecurity, it’s life and death if it’s an autonomous car.

Audrey Tang: Private data, that is the harder problem. In Taiwan, we do have a privacy law. We’re even more strict than most other country with a data protection law, because every ministry that holds personal data doesn’t even exchange, by default, with other ministries. (laughs)

Audrey Tang: Many other countries have a data protection authority. We’re working on that, as well. At the moment, all the 32 ministries are their own DPAs. It means, of course, there is very little -- I would say almost nonexistent -- cross-ministerial data linkage for analysis and social good purposes, which is something we’re looking into.

Audrey Tang: That also means that people are, by default, pretty safe, because the data silos are there and the personal data never leaves the silo. It only gets exchanged upward. It’s upheld by our supreme administrative court, so we’re in pretty good hands.

Audrey Tang: Of course, there are a lot of people who say they have good algorithms that can improve people’s lives, cure cancer or whatever, only if they have access to these kind of personal data.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of computer science advances in recent years that allow us to bring those code published and into the open for peer review, and then for those data silos to run it locally and just publish the statistical or aggregate results.

Audrey Tang: This is the superior model than just turning things into, "You have to sign a lot of NDAs, and we have to basically make you a ministry or associated with those two ministries, and for you to do your research with access with all the data." We were not looking to that model.

Audrey Tang: We start from a very conservative position, and even as we expand for data for social good, we never let the citizen feel that their personal data is somehow a asset of the state that the state can capitalize on. This is a very dangerous metaphor to work with. That’s the basic data literacy plan. I hope that answers your question.

Audrey Tang: Yes?

Q: Putting on your innovator hat for a second, your futurist-looking hat, you mentioned Pokémon GO. That’s been one of the most amazing innovations in the last fall, because literally it got people outside doing things together of all ages.

Q: Of all the technologies that you see or may see coming down the line, what is the next multi-generational technology that you feel will hit and will bring everyone together once again, but in a bigger scale?

Audrey Tang: On a bigger scale? I’m going to read you a poem. [laughs] It’s something that I composed just a couple of days before becoming a digital minister.

Audrey Tang: It’s something I wrote in New Zealand, and if you go to my Twitter account, @audreyt, that’s pinned on my account. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: When we see Internet of Things, let’s make it a 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, and

Audrey Tang: When we hear "the Singularity is near," let us remember: the Plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: The whole idea is not one single singularity-like technology that transform the society. It’s the other way around. It’s the plurality. The society with sufficient data literacy, computational literacy, and critical thinking demands something of the technologists.

Audrey Tang: I’m never of the techno-Utopian view. I always see technologies as not neutral. They are like Pokémons. They evolve. They work with each other in interesting ways, they have specific properties, and it’s only if the society in general partake in the development of a technology can it actually integrate.

Audrey Tang: I’ll take autonomous cars as the example, because it is both IoT and AI. If you are in a car with no steering wheels, then it’s also a VR because the car itself is a surrounding immersive experience. It is something that takes all those elements, a little bit of them, together.

Audrey Tang: In effect, what this creates is a new intelligent species, or a new intelligent life form on the streets, that reacts with people’s signals, with people hailing it, with police whistling them and asking them to stop, and we need to find a way to interrogate.

Audrey Tang: Just how people working with animals can somehow speak and translate for the animals’ feelings and nonverbal cues, we also need people who are not programmers who can interrogate with just laypersons these kind of autonomous cars. What is it seeing? How does it perceive the world?

Audrey Tang: When it perceive a complex situation and stop cold on the middle of the road, what exactly is going on? If we see it as a integration of a new kind of animal, then it could be either like a dog, who domesticate us when we domesticate dogs, or it could be like a wild animal and people just develop a very bad feeling toward it as part of our evolution.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is, instead of bringing everybody to the street with pitchforks perhaps, we’re trying to make autonomous vehicles in a way that respects local needs. Like if one city, what it needs is tricycles, or the other regions, what it needs is a minivan or whatever, we work with the technologies.

Audrey Tang: We create a regulatory environment that encourage this kind of sand-boxed experimentation that is set with the consent of the population involved in that region. That brings then people to the streets to experiment to work with these kind of new animals, but in a way that is fun, that is inclusive, that is not just one small part of the population enjoying private jets while the others [laughs] toil on the ground.

Audrey Tang: That’s the basic idea. It’s not just one technology. It’s the society’s way of integrating technology. Yes?

Q: Can you state the readiness between the manufacturers? Taiwan is home to the Foxconn and the Quanta computers. Now, with the shift to the software side, how does that pan out? What’s their state of readiness? Are you in interaction with them on this?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We had a very long meeting, a multi-day meeting, the SRB meeting to review the semiconductor industry and the hardware manufacturer industry, and how they respond to AI. I think there’s a few key takeaways.

Audrey Tang: AI, to me, is like fire, to make an interesting comparison. Fire is something that the human beings fit internally. We eat raw food, and do something like that, decomposing it into smaller molecules internally, but human beings can only do so one meal at a time.

Audrey Tang: In the primitive society, whatever could not be cooked just was left to rot, and there’s no civilization. When fire was invented, people externalized something that was happening internally, but people can do it in batches, and so prepare food so it lasts longer and people gets healthier.

Audrey Tang: Now, with AI, what we’re seeing is specific parts in our cognitive function, in our cortices, for example, looking at your face and thinking of your name, for example, hearing some English and translating it into Mandarin. That’s some of those cognitive functions that we do, and we’re moving it outside and automating it.

Audrey Tang: Whatever that we move outside, we’ve also identified as part of ourselves, because it’s still the same cognitive function, just as the relationship of many people with their cell phones. It’s the same idea, just an extended personhood. With this, comes the idea of whether we need to perform those intensely personalized computations on the cloud or on the Edge.

Audrey Tang: If it’s on the edge, then it’s still part of the overall personal computing mission. It’s still something you can understand, you can interrogate, and it’s like a personal assistant that will never tell your secrets to some other parties, even it’s just for learning purposes.

Audrey Tang: If it’s done just in the cloud, then it is actually very dangerous, because people develop a learned helplessness. The news feed is that way. I’m not saying which company. The news feed is that way, and there’s no way for me to tune it, and so people become more like television, watching, relationship with AI.

Audrey Tang: The semiconductor people that I’ve listened to during the SRB said that they’re very willing to make the edge devices and make AI, the computation learning algorithms, run very efficiently, both in the energy efficiency sense and also on the computation sense, when it’s integrated into one person’s life, without over-reliance on the cloud.

Audrey Tang: That, for them, means more product lines, more specialized, sensor-specific development of chip sets. That means a lot more utilization of 5G spectra, and so on, because there’s it’s the cloud, and the computation is actually minimal.

Audrey Tang: If it’s a mesh or a fog it actually makes the local community is like a pool of common resources for their IoT things to talk to each. They see this as a more diverse ecosystem, and that ecosystem-building play is beneficial to those manufacturers of those semiconductors and peripherals, so they’re in on this general idea of developing AI integration with society with AI on the edge focus.

Audrey Tang: That’s our general plan and the DIGI⁺ plan is now devoting a whole chapter, and we’re doing this through multi-stakeholder consultation. In the upcoming months, there will be forums on the DIGI⁺ website where you can see more captains of industry chiming in of where they want their special interest group to go, while fitting over a DIGI⁺ landscape.

Q: Can you describe a normal day for you here?

Audrey Tang: That depends on which day. [laughs] Every Wednesday and Friday I’m not here, regularly, WCI team notwithstanding. The idea is that I’m a teleworker, and there is a teleworker regulation back in 2015 in Taiwan, and even earlier for public servants.

Audrey Tang: Very few people know about this in the public service. It turns out that whenever any public servant’s work relates to Internet in some way, they can work in whatever hour, in whatever place, and there’s already a ruling on that. I negotiated with the Prime Minister when I entered the cabinet, [laughs] saying that I would telework two days a week, and he was like, "OK."

Audrey Tang: That builds quite a few interesting repercussions. First, the cybersecurity departments get very anxious. They moved in and paid a lot of penetration testers and so on, to make sure that the everyday system that I use is provably secure. [laughs] Which is great, because that increased confidence of the virtual working space system that we’re deploying here.

Audrey Tang: Second, it makes those paper-based forms and what we call just paperwork go away, because through paper, you can reach me maybe three days in the future, but through email, you can reach me instantly. That changed our working culture.

Audrey Tang: Everybody in my office, the public digital innovation space, the PDIS works like this. There’s 25 of them. They’re all like volunteers who comes from all parts of the ministries and industry. Basically, we maintain a virtual workspace that allows us to still continue working, whether I’m in the Administration or not.

Audrey Tang: If it’s a Monday, then I wake up at 8:00, go to work at 8:30, enter here at 9:00, and start those lunch meetings, and because I’m an Anarchist, I don’t give commands to my staff. They do whatever they want, but they need to keep everybody posted in our weekly meetings.

Audrey Tang: Every Monday, we list on the dashboard what we have, what still needs doing, who are the project owners. The ones are left, usually I do it, but that’s less frequent nowadays, so it is a very free weekly iteration, working task force.

Audrey Tang: That connects with the wider participation office. I work in every ministry, whom we meet every Friday. Every Friday, we work on an e-petition case that is proposed by 5,000 people or more to solve a regional or a national problem. We convene with the participation office and all the ministries that are involved in this case.

Audrey Tang: Collaboratively, use design thinking as a design method to map a policy map of why exactly are we here. Where can we move? We ideate on some possible solutions, and I bring it to the Prime Minister and my colleagues the next Monday to make into national policy.

Audrey Tang: It’s a sure way for people to get 5,000 counter signatures all way into a radically transparent discussion, all the way into the Prime Minister’s desk, so this is a binding power of transfer.

Audrey Tang: Every Wednesday, I start my office hour at TAF with social innovators, and afternoon is a weekly hackathon with the civic tech community. With this, I try to bring the social innovation community and the civic tech community together, just by working in the same place, sharing food, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That’s pretty much it. Every Thursday, I work with the DIGI+ folks. Every Tuesday is mostly for media and for visiting, touring around Taiwan to meet social innovators, regionally. Every day is quite open.

Q: Can I ask, how much success do you think you’ve achieved so far in the role? From the sounds of it, it sounds as though your ideas have gone down quite well. How have they gone down with your fellow ministers? Were they kind of open to it?

Q: Sorry, it’s a multi-question really. With that, were you worried when you were invited into the cabinet that you could be seen almost as a sort of puppet, rolled out there as a kind of cool anarchist mascot, but there is no real stuff going on. Does that make sense?

Audrey Tang: Of course there is a mascot-like effect, but I don’t think it’s bad... Because this mascot is really strange. It stands for anarchy, and anarchy means self-governance. So it is a constant reminder that don’t wait for the government to do something.

Audrey Tang: You can always make something that’s collective, that may be not working as perfect but is a prototype for the government to see and then eventually adopt. So it is a mascot of increased cross-sectoral support.

Audrey Tang: Now, my core mission, which is to lower the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of career public servants, I think that part has gone particularly well. As before, when it was 2014 or 2013, most great public servants hear the words civic tech, civic participation, radical transparency, they associate it with mob scenario, with just uneducated masses and whatever.

Audrey Tang: Now with this very regular weekly meeting, they see that people who sign the petitions, they’re not protesters. They’re not mobs. They’re actually professional user experience designers who want to contribute to the tax filing experience. So we do co-creation workshop with them and actually improve our tax filing system.

Audrey Tang: They see that, first, it’s politically advantageous for them to engage with the public, because they deliver highlights. The second, it also lowers their communication cost. I think, at this particular regard, it was pretty successful. I wouldn’t say it’s my success. It’s just this natural way of working in a design-thinking informed kind of way.

Audrey Tang: The challenges still remain, of course. As you mentioned, many other ministers or ministries, like if we do one case every week, there’s thousands of cases every week that isn’t done this way. It also creates a expectations, especially on the local level — "The national government can do it, so why can’t our city do this?"

Audrey Tang: So it does create a pressure to the cities. But I think the mayors have risen up to the challenge, either through deliberation workshops, participation budgets, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of room to improvement, but all of them now chant the open government ideals, which I think is great. As long as the general direction is right, we’ll eventually get there.

Q: Sorry, you have another 10 minutes, right? We’re taking up a long time.

Audrey Tang: No, that’s fine.

Q: From your time of being a hacker, can you share something interesting? How was it? Do you miss that now? Do you miss doing it now?

Audrey Tang: Well, I’m still a hacker.

Audrey Tang: A hacker is something that people call you. It’s not a self-defining title. In the hacker community, people become a hacker if other hackers call you a hacker. It’s recursive, so you can’t really shake that label now.

Audrey Tang: To be more serious, I was not a cybersecurity expert. I know cybersecurity but not on a master level. I was not either a white-hat hacker who exploits system weakness but reports them or a black-hat hacker who does the same but for their own benefit. I’m not a secretive researcher in that sense.

Audrey Tang: I’m a hacker without hats, in its original sense, in the sense that someone who immerse themselves into a system of course finding out its flaws, but instead of exploiting them, built new systems that doesn’t suffer from the same flaws. As you can see, I’m now doing the same with communication, with the governance systems, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I would say I’m still hacking the system, but not in the sense that I’m destroying or discrediting the existing, working very well conservative system. I’m conserving the best part -- the social mission, the public good part of governance -- but just working on new ways to lower the fear, uncertainty, and doubt for everybody involved.

Audrey Tang: I’m hacking the society in this kind of way, by contributing whatever interaction design that my team and the external team has to offer to get civil society to care more about public good. If they can work with the public servants, that’s great. If they can’t, now with radical transparency, people know what the public servant’s doing, so now do something else. I think it’s a win either way when you hack the system this way.

Q: Do you like being a minister? You think your freedom is more restricted. Or did you like it before?

Audrey Tang: Travel is limited. I can’t really jump on a plane anymore. I have to get a couple weeks or actually a couple months advance notice to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs folks, but I think that’s being worked around.

Audrey Tang: I did what my fellow hackers did. I visit mostly through tele-presence now, through tele-robotics with an iPad that has my face and a 360 camera so that I can feel the atmosphere. I did that in Madrid, Boston, Sydney, Moscow, and many other places. Other than the restriction of travel, there really is no other difference.

Audrey Tang: Actually, that was the deal. When I was recruited into this position, there was one month of public Q&A with the public where journalists can ask me question, but only publicly, and for me to answer, and then only publicly. It’s a one month negotiation of what does society ask of me.

Audrey Tang: People mostly tell me that they want me to continue to do whatever I was doing before being a digital minister, but working on it full-time and supported by taxpayers. I think there’s no substantial difference and I still enjoy my work.

Audrey Tang: Any other questions? There’s some seven minutes. You’re all good?

Q: A little esoteric but what might you be doing in five years time?

Audrey Tang: People ask me that all the time. There’s a companion question: "Where do you see Taiwan going in five year’s time?"

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, the island, is raising 5 centimeters every year, so time it will be 25 centimeters higher five years down the line. It’s been around for a million years, so it will keep raising itself up.

Audrey Tang: I work to be radically honest. I work on a daily routine. I work on a daily schedule. I’m a creature of the day in the sense that I wake up and I see a plan what to do and just allocate maybe four or five hours of actual work, and almost always get it done by midnight.

Audrey Tang: My inbox is always zero by midnight. My only focus is getting things from inbox always zero by midnight. The idea is that I can just wake up and try something new, because there’s no baggage from yesterday to work with. I don’t even know what I will be like tomorrow. I imagine in five years...

Q: It’s a bit far off.

Audrey Tang: It’s far off my horizon. But I think that is required during the digital transformation because there really is no roadmap for a digital transformation. Every day new technology comes, new societal needs come, the participation officers, the youth counselors, everybody serve this new social dynamics.

Audrey Tang: If there is a five-year plan, I think the plan is just to get the infrastructure and inclusion right. Whatever else happens, we need to process it on a day-by-day basis.

Q: Thank you.

Q: Along with that, because it sounds to us a very long working day, if you’re working till 12, is work and the rest of your life separate or is it all rolled in as one?

Audrey Tang: I’m kind of a perma-work person. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: When the previous prime minister asked my motivation of joining the cabinet, whether it’s social duty, a citizen’s obligation, a furthering of some vision, or whatever, I was like, "No, I joined for fun."

Audrey Tang: I find this work interesting, which is why I keep doing it. I don’t think I need to fun time or relax time, because I’m finding just this conversation very enjoyable in itself.

Audrey Tang: So we’re good? All right. Thank you so much.

Q: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Great conversation.