Nathan Storey: I’m going to take these off so I’ll be a little more present. Thank you so much for, first of all, the training a couple days ago and then meeting with me today.

Nathan Storey: This is an interview for a new podcast called "Rebel Cities," where we’re exploring how experiments in places around the world are reinventing participatory democracy to resist exploitative capitalism or national policies.

Nathan Storey: We’re looking at places from municipalist cities in Spain, Northern Rojava, Jackson, Mississippi, Taiwan, and other places that are really doing some unique things at the local level. It’s really an honor to talk with you about what’s going on with the public digital innovation space and vTaiwan and g0v.

Nathan Storey: Just to set us up, a lot of the other stories that we’re telling are often about a location at a local government or movement in opposition to a national movement or a government. Taiwan might be a different case or maybe not. [laughs]

Nathan Storey: I know that I’ve heard you say a few times to Western audiences that you’re from the future. I want to see if we can talk about some of the things that are going on in Taiwan and how they might inspire other places that are trying to reinvent their own democracies.

Nathan Storey: That’s my intro. I wanted to start. I know that a lot of this stuff you’ve talked about extensively. I’ve read and heard some of the interviews. We can do a brief summary of some of these things because we do have content other places.

Nathan Storey: I wanted to start bringing us back to the Sunflower Movement. If you could just give a brief introduction of how Taiwan got from the Sunflower Movement to where you are now with vTaiwan, PDIS, the network of participation officers and national e-petition platform.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Since we’re in New York, Taiwan is indeed in the future, about 12 hours in the future, but not far future.

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014, the Sunflower Movement occupied the Parliament for 22 days. It was the result of the passing of the trade service agreement, the CSSTA, with Beijing. It passed without much of a deliberation in the Parliament.

Audrey Tang: The reason why is that Taiwan considered, at the time, Beijing as one of its domestic cities. Constitutionally, it did not have to go through the same protocol as deliberation for international treaties.

Audrey Tang: Since the MPs were kind of on strike, the students and Occupy just took over in a demonstration. A demo is not about protesting. It’s about a demo of how people -- half a million people in the street, many more online -- can deliberate about aspects of this CSSTA in a democratic manner that is direct democracy, which is like many other Occupys.

Audrey Tang: Unlike many other Occupys, we intervened with a lot of ICT technology to support a facilitative protocol. Because of that, every day the crowd converged on consensus a little bit more instead of diverged.

Audrey Tang: The 20 NGOs each deliberating one aspect of CSSTA also benefited from the crowd as cross-pollination between the different ideas that the NGOs have. At the end of the Occupy, it consolidates into a set of consensus that was accepted by the head of the Parliament, and so Occupy was a victory.

Audrey Tang: It was a demonstration, to everybody in Taiwan really, that this kind of technology many people did not imagine that would scale to this number of people actually works. Because half a million people participated in some form in it, it gained a lot more legitimacy than the administration which at that moment was about nine percent of popular approval.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the Occupy, there was a city-level election. For the first time, the Taipei city has a independent mayor. Also, the Tainan city mayor, Lai Ching-te, ran with the campaign of open government and won reelection because of it.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who did not agree with the Occupy values did not get elected mayors. That’s how the previous Prime Minister at the time resigned. The new Premier using a very engineering think process thought that "If this thing actually works, we should have it as national direction."

Audrey Tang: The new Premier declared that crowdsourcing and open data transparency are just going to be the national direction from the end of 2014 onward. The Occupiers, as well as supporters of the Occupy facilitative methods were invited as advisers and mentors to the public service to teach the public servants how to listen to people at scale.

Audrey Tang: I was kind of an understudy minister starting from that point onward. The minister for cyberspace at the time, Jaclyn Tsai, herself coming from IBM Asia, actually asked at a hackathon whether we can build a Internet society-inspired process that let people to deliberate about upcoming digital economy issues such as Uber and AirBnb and so on.

Audrey Tang: We built this completely open source protocol for deliberating online and then using the online deliberation as the agenda for a face-to-face deliberation that is then re-broadcasted and live-streamed with online input.

Audrey Tang: This whole focused conversation method, which was introduced to me also during the Sunflower Movement, became a codified platform for co-creation across sectors. That’s the vTaiwan project. After vTaiwan project ran for a year or so, and it resolved quite a few cases like the Uber case was ratified in August 2016, I was invited by the new cabinet, the new Premier to rejoin the cabinet, this time not as understudy, but as a minister in exactly the same office as Jaclyn’s was.

Audrey Tang: The idea is lead an internal change in the public service using most of the same methodology but with career public servants throwing into the mix. That was the participation officer network, or PO network (https://po.pdis.tw/), where we dedicate a team of people in each and every ministry to learn the art of listening at scale through Internet and also through face-to-face deliberation with people.

Audrey Tang: One of our main sources of topics for agenda-setting was set by the people in the national e-petition platform. The national e-petition platform was also one of the things that was a consensus at the national forum at the end of the Occupy. Because one of the Occupy’s consensus points was for the administration to hold a national forum on how to prevent future Occupys from [laughs] happening by having a more consensual way of policy-making.

Audrey Tang: The national e-petition platform was one of the result of that national forum. It was born out of the Occupy’s public will. Because of that, I think, of the 23 million people in Taiwan about five million are actively using the national e-petition platform.

Audrey Tang: The PO network was formed explicitly to work on cross-ministry and cross-agency issues brought by the e-petition platform. There may be local issues such as a marine national park and fishing.

Audrey Tang: There may be building a new hospital versus building a new road in the rural cities of Hengchun. There may be other national issues like redesigning the tax filing experience. It could be about any ministry.

Audrey Tang: Usually, the ministry was able to solicit help from other ministries. It really formed a solidarity network within the administration so that people when they see the petitions from the civil society, they don’t think it as necessarily something of conflict.

Audrey Tang: They can think that, "This is a way, a opportunity to harness some of the creative energies from the streets, from the petitioners and to co-create something that is of common value of everyone and a solution that works for everyone involved." So far, we’ve held about 35 collaborative workshops with petitioners and stakeholders. That doubles as a learning experience for all the public service agents involved in this kind of change.

Audrey Tang: Because of the regulation for PO network is signed into effect by now-Premier Lai Ching-te, used to be Mayor Lai Ching-te. The Premier himself practiced many open government methodologies when he was a mayor, so he’s a full endorser to our method at the moment.

Audrey Tang: Because of the scientific relations is growing fractal-like into specific ministries so that the third- and fourth-level agencies are also forming PO teams as well as to a city level like the Taichung City or Taipei City. They’re also coming up with a very similar structure for civic engagement. We’re trying to change the public service from the inside out, but we’re also committed to be radically transparent of how we’re doing it throughout this process.

Nathan Storey: I’m curious if you can go back to how it felt in that moment when you realized the Sunflower Movement was happening. You’ve talked about this before in the "Wired" article that just came out. Paint a picture. Where were you sitting? What were you doing? What did that make you think?

Audrey Tang: I was in the street and in response to a, I think, IRC call for help the protesters because the CCSTA was being rushed into passing. That afternoon, they had a very impromptu protest the streets close to the parliament that night.

Audrey Tang: When I heard the protest is coming to the certain passing of the CSSTA in the parliament, I think it was a short distance actually from where I lived at that point. I was near the National Taiwan University at the moment and it was about 15 minutes car ride to the parliament.

Audrey Tang: I thought that the equipments that we used 10 days ago in March 8, 2014 is still literally unpacked.

Audrey Tang: At that point, 10 days ago before the Sunflower Movement, we kind of rehearsed all this in the national parade against the fourth nuclearpower plant. That was when we first discovered that because there was a typhoon and a lot of people couldn’t make it to the parade, they nevertheless really want to show their support.

Audrey Tang: Even when we set up the YouTube live, which was just rolled out in Taiwan at that point, there’s more people joining the online broadcast than people in the front of the stage in the parade even though it was entirely unannounced.

Audrey Tang: I think there was a strong sense of relevance of how we, the people who can set up mesh networks or WiMAX networks or others technical infrastructure for communication, can empower not just traditional media but also civic media, that is to say people who happen to participate in the Occupy will want to cover it from their own perspective instead of a traditional mainstream perspective.

Audrey Tang: Because of our close collaboration with the civic media just 10 days before the Occupy, when I went to the site of the Occupy and lent my phone and my expertise in setting up the live-stream, was very happy to find that there’s many people working on civic media are already there and writing their own coverage and reports. I just helped them with the infrastructure. I remember at one point that we need a laptop to reach the WiFi signal that I am providing to the desktop with a capture card that the civic media people are using to shoot the protest.

Audrey Tang: There was a random student just showed up and said, "This is my laptop. It’s running Windows XP. Here’s the administrator password. I’m not going to use this laptop." It’s very interesting because such a young student usually don’t part with their laptop, but it was just given as a gift to the broadcasting station.

Audrey Tang: I remember thinking well, what’s this student up to. It turns out the Black Island youths, which is the movement of the initial Occupy, really could only bring MacBook Air and not anything [laughs] heavier than that because they’re going to climb over the walls surrounding the parliament.

Audrey Tang: This bulky laptop would really get in a way. I remember feeling that there’s a real connection between the traditional student activists and the free software people that we provide our expertise and the civic media people.

Audrey Tang: Those three groups of people are exclusively mentioned in the g0v Venn diagram as the constituents of the g0v movement, but never before I did I feel this very close connectedness between the three aspects of the people.

Audrey Tang: After we set up the initial broadcasting, I went back home and another couple of g0v people came in to support the media coverage and the connectivity. It’s around that time that the students started to break in into the parliament. I watched that from the live video.

Audrey Tang: It’s great that we do have the civic media people there because the entire breaking in is nonviolent because there’s no police in the parliament and they didn’t expect anything like this to happen.

Audrey Tang: When the mainstream media at the very next day tried to paint a student as mobs, we have the live footage as well as high-resolution footage to prove that it’s not the case. Then, we were able to negotiate peacefully a channel for food and medical supplies.

Audrey Tang: The police did not actually dare to move the next day, because after seeing this live video of non-violent Occupy, a lot more people came to counter-surrounding police so that the police, if they to move the counter-surrounding, people will then also move, so the policy just stall there. It starts non-violently and remained that way around the parliament for the next 22 days.

Nathan Storey: What was your day-to-day like for those next...You really took three weeks off of work. What were you doing during that time? Was it continuing your support role or...?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s just building "sitapps", situational applications as needed by the moment. If for one day, the main problem was dealing with logistics and just lunchboxes sent [laughs] sent to the Parliament, then we help building Google spreadsheets.

Audrey Tang: Actually, Google spreadsheets kind of overloaded during the Occupy, so we switched to EtherCalc [laughs] on a small machine that I maintain, which is a software that I co-wrote with Dan Bricklin and to support the occupiers.

Audrey Tang: If they need help with translation, for example, we also work with Hackpad, and Hackpad was also overloaded [laughs] in the very first day of the Occupy, so that they actually rented an extra AWS instances dedicated to the g0v Hackpad apart from their shared hosting instance so that we don’t crash everybody else’s Hackpad.

Audrey Tang: For a while, that went, hackpad.com is under maintenance, g0v Hackpad would actually still function, because it’s a [laughs] dedicated instance of sorts. We was working with Twitch.tv, with YouTube, with YouScreen, with Hackpad -- with all those international collaborative media ways and writing new applications to support the Occupy whenever the need arises.

Audrey Tang: It’s literally the work of hundreds of people. I remember them calling for a Ethernet line because the internal and external communication through the Internet has a 5- to 10-second delay. Rumors spread because of that delay.

Audrey Tang: I remember them carrying 350 meters of ethernet cables to the Occupy site and helping the network team there setting up the intranet that connects directly the video feed from the Occupy site to the street outside the Parliament so that people can watch with their own eyes what’s happening in the Occupy site.

Audrey Tang: We also worked with court reporters, stenographers, so that they can type what they hear in the Occupy site, and it’s broadcasted to the IRC channel and also projected as a sidebar on the street projection screen so as to make everybody very easy to check what’s actually happening.

Audrey Tang: There’s no room for rumor to spread. Rumor control and harnessing the crowd intelligence on what they want to deliberate about and providing social objects -- like a website where you can enter your company name and shows you in very simple-to-understand terms exactly how does the CSSTA affect you and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I’m mainly like a short stop, [laughs] providing help whenever I can to various different projects coordinated by this single website called g0v.today that charts the map, the logistics, and everything related to the Occupy.

Audrey Tang: It became like a home page of the Occupy movement, which people also did a crowdfunding to put that QR code to the front page of all the newspapers in Taiwan, "The Apple Daily," I think and some other newspapers.

Nathan Storey: When you were doing all of these things and helping out with whatever you saw needed to be done -- running cable or writing code or figuring out what tools to use -- in your wildest dreams, did you think that you would be deploying those methods as a minister in the central government of Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: It’s inevitable, right? It’s sooner or later. There’s this book called, "NEO Power," [laughs] that talks about how this crowd current power is collectively reshaping how collective decisions are being made.

Audrey Tang: While people call it a Sunflower Movement or a Revolution, I call it the Sunflower Digital Summer Camp. [laughs] It’s actually Spring, but [laughs] the idea is that it is a demonstration in the truest sense, because anyone who shows up to the Occupy gets this QR code.

Audrey Tang: If they go to this QR code, they see maybe that they can upload their photo. There’s this generator for civic journalist badge and they can print this badge in the nearby 7-11 and stick it to their iPad. They become a journalist.

Audrey Tang: Part of the badge is another QR code that shows a Supreme Court ruling that anyone reporting for the public good enjoy the same access right as a journalist, that they can show this new interpretation to the police officers, may not be refreshed of the latest Supreme Court, Constitutional Court ruling.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that we’re already doing politics without necessarily hurting any minister’s office, per se. Later on when I was invited as mentor and advisor to senior public officials about more than half of them say that they were for the Occupy.

Audrey Tang: During the Occupy, they learned how to do public demonstration and civic engagement by participating there or their children participating there or watching our live feed or downloading those QR codes and supplementary materials.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, this is a minister’s work. It’s not me personally. It’s this current of new power that is manifesting itself before the eyes of the entire public service. I see my role or my title as incidental. When we did working-term negotiation with the Premier of Incheon and his secretary, I said, "I’m just going to continue to do whatever I’m doing." Incheon said, "Fine."

Audrey Tang: It’s I’m doing now full-time what I always have been doing but with the public good in mind, of course. I always emphasize that I’m working with the Taiwan government, not for the Taiwan government.

Audrey Tang: I’m still holding the new power values and the ways of working even with this title. It’s more honorary than anything else, actually.

Nathan Storey: That’s incredible. I want to thank you for sharing all that. I’m going to jump into it. I have a couple more areas I want to talk about.

Audrey Tang: That’s good. It’s good. We have time.

Nathan Storey: Would you mind giving a brief overview of the Public Digital Innovation Space and why you all traveled to New York City to share with us the methods in this amazing two-day training that we took part in?

Audrey Tang: PDIS, our Public Digital Innovation Space is a port, a adaptation of the g0v methodology in the central government. It’s set up explicitly as a leaderless structured network, which is why we call our selves a space rather than a service or a corp or whatever. It’s literally a space or several spaces.

Audrey Tang: There’s an office that used to be Minister Jaclyn Tsai’s office in the central administration building. There’s the office next to it, the Minister Chen Mei-ling’s office of the National Development Council, but she’s usually at the NDC building, so she donates her office to PDIS as an additional space.

Audrey Tang: There’s another space near the Department of Education, Culture, and Science in the central administration building, so same building, but the third floor and next to a bunch of people working on science and education and cultural policies. We also have three spaces in the National Social Innovation Lab near the Cheng Kuo market in Taipei.

Audrey Tang: That’s my office hours space. There’s a gathering space and a library-like space and also a space dedicated for VR in the basement of that building. With those six spaces, anyone can volunteer to join PDIS if they’re a public servant. They send me an email and tell me why they want to join.

Audrey Tang: I talk to their minister [laughs] saying that I want this person stationed there for half-a-year or a year, depending. Then lo and behold, we have a new member. My recruitment netted us, I think we’re 20-something full-timers and 30-something interns this year. Last year it was like 25 interns and about 20 full-timers.

Audrey Tang: We’re growing. This space, basically, admits anyone that brings something new, either a complementary skill set or a complementary connection to the space. We use the same method as any other g0v project, basically having people pitch for ideas and pushing each other into this hole that is their pet project.

Audrey Tang: They have to convince each other to allocate resources to the project. I’m like a shortstop. I’m filling in the gaps then if people need to order pizza, I order pizza. If you want me to take your trash, I do that, too. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Everybody rates themselves, and so I don’t do any rating or ranking or even management. This all kept radically transparent by this constant publishing of our internal meetings to a public Internet and also by this comment board that everybody tracks where everybody’s project is.

Audrey Tang: We also work with the PO network so that whenever a PO needs legal help, needs design help, needs technical help, needs any kind of planning help, then we also supply that help to the PO networks. It is a pretty wild, I guess, and anarchistic space where everybody get to join and live freely and choose project freely.

Audrey Tang: I think this gives advice to a different culture within the central government that we can always try something else and fail spectacularly and write post-mortems [laughs] and have Audrey, that’s me, absorb all the risk involved in doing public service innovation.

Nathan Storey: You’ve talked a lot about how you want to take the risk away from public servants so that they can feel like they can experiment. As somebody who’s worked in government, that resonates with me.

Audrey Tang: I share the credit and take the blame. That’s unlike many other ministers around the world. [laughs] Previously, the public service was anonymous. If things go right, their minister naturally takes the credit.

Audrey Tang: If things go wrong, then there’s always a way for the journalist and the citizen to find who’s the career public servant who didn’t execute the plan correctly, even though the plan was perhaps bogus to begin with. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What we’re doing essentially is having career public servants come up with innovations and try to get STEM resource that they need for this innovation to happen, maybe working with the Presidential Office on the three-month hackathon or whatever other international resources.

Audrey Tang: It’s this culture more than any particular methodology or even digital platform or Hackvoter or Sandstorm or any technical component that we want to bring to New York City.

Audrey Tang: We can view it from the civil society’s side by saying this is a systematic way for people to build a recursive public where people care about public issues without necessarily having government buy-in, but make it very possible for government to buy in.

Audrey Tang: You can do it from a public service perspective and see that this is a way of going beyond the public hearings and the traditional engagement methods to build a rapport with the citizen and invite people who complained the loudest into your literally co-workers. It’s this culture more than anything that we want to bring to New York in the two-day workshop.

Nathan Storey: Yeah, and thank you so much for sharing that with us. I think from that training I have a lot of audio about going into depth through your public engagement methods. I won’t ask some specific questions about that here.

Nathan Storey: It’s just there are so many different layers of what you’re doing, and I think that’s something I’m struck with. It’s this systemic nature of how all of these things add up under this culture of openness and collaboration and the ideas, like you said, that came from the summer camp of the Sunflower Movement. That’s amazing.

Nathan Storey: I want to ask a follow-up about traveling to New York City and participating in these kind of events, and you travel a lot to other places and give speeches about what you’re doing and say provocative statements like you’re a conservative anarchist that’s a minister without portfolio in Taiwan.

Nathan Storey: Can you explain what you’re hoping to give and get from that? I know that you’ve borrowed a lot from other places, like the Focused Conversation Method from Canada, Pol.is from Seattle, the e-Petition platform based on WeThePeople.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and Better Reykjavik also from Iceland, and the CONSUL platform from Spain are also our influences.

Nathan Storey: Yeah. Is that the point of traveling and networking? It’s to find out these ideas or what else? Because you’re acting like a diplomat in a way in the Internet age of government. Is that fair to say? I’ll leave it there. What do you hope to give, or what do you hope to get from this traveling and sharing of your ideas?

Audrey Tang: I’m really just having fun. Back then, when I was doing Perl 6, and I did this implementation called Pugs. It’s the first working implementation of Perl 6 language, and just like any other compiler project, basically we can get optimizing for speed or size or whatever. I coined this item called "optimizing for fun" and it’s still a meme in the Perl community.

Audrey Tang: The whole point is to look at democracy, to look at this co-creation methods, and enjoy it. Too often, what the institutional or the establishment ways of practicing so-called democracy -- while being useful or effective to a degree -- really takes the fun out of it, because people sometimes took a lot of effort and spent a lot of time to cast a ballot, but it’s in reality just two bits every four years, five bits every four years.

Audrey Tang: Most of my work is just to restore some of the fun in it, to create or -- to use a now a little bit outdated term -- gamify the system so that people can find that there is a instant gratification and tangible reward by contributing. Just by pressing Like or Unlike a few times, or by inputs, say, in one statement or one part of the feeling, and feel that they add to the whole, adding to the discussion rather than taking anything away.

Audrey Tang: This underlies a lot of my research, and the PDIS team are also publishing our findings about designing interactive spaces. That’s led every participant to feel that they’re adding something rather than subtracting or taking something away.

Audrey Tang: This is completely in line with what I did around 2005, 2006, just flying around the world doing 20 hackathons in 18 countries, just finding the components to piece a language together and all the while not providing any extrinsic award, [laughs] but just having the interesting reward of joining in something that none of one single language community or one single coacher can achieve by itself.

Audrey Tang: I really do think that this kind of restoring the fun in a democracy takes input from all coachers, and it is not just one single civilization or one single coacher or one single city can complete this massive puzzle by itself, and what we’re is a swarm-like experimentation, and a swarm-like innovation. There’s got to be some way for everybody to know, to have an overview of what everybody else is doing.

Audrey Tang: I’m deeply grateful to venues such as TIC TAC, such as the Personal Democracy Forum, such as the Open Government Partnership and other related venues, where people can annually just share what’ve been doing the past years. It could be seen as a ambassadors’ or a diplomat’s work.

Audrey Tang: What I’m thinking, my internal image of this is really a new kind of international movement of new power projecting as shadows to the various different cities and countries, and just harnessing the different coachers’ innovations into refining this kind of recursive public, and then adding back to the collective intelligence infrastructure that everybody can use to improve the engagement and enjoyment of collective decision.

Nathan Storey: Great, it’s a great service to rebel cities and other places that are trying to make a difference. Yeah, let’s make democracy better, let’s make it fun again.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Nathan Storey: [laughs] I think you answered everything I was hoping to talk about, so...

Audrey Tang: That’s great, that’s great.

Nathan Storey: I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Cool. Thank you so much.

Darshana Narayanan: I have a quick question.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Darshana Narayanan: One of the difficult things of this within the civic hack world that I’ve recently stepped into and notice is the lack of funding or money for these sorts of projects. The sustainable model seems to be, or the model right now seems to be, I work on something until I am really exhausted, [laughs] and then move away into the private sector or someplace where I can make a livable income, and then somebody else takes over. They do the same, and they burn themselves out, and then the next person...

Darshana Narayanan: I was wondering if you have any insight into how this can be, and know how as individuals we can survive within this sector.

Audrey Tang: Back in 2005, when I was doing this Perl 6 work, I also had to take a year away from consultance work and just burn my savings, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. [laughs] On the other hand, nowadays we don’t hear that much about the infrastructure work of open source anymore.

Audrey Tang: If it’s cryptography, the cryptographers already made a fortune with blockchain technology. If it is fundamental operating system, maybe they work at the Linux Foundation, or maybe they work at Microsoft now. [laughs] This whole idea of open source as a methodology rather than free software as a culture is basically...

Audrey Tang: I remember Eric Raymond when he visited Taiwan in the early 2000s, and I ask him why would he fork open source out of the free software culture. He also said, "I’m doing a demonstration," and he meant it in "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" sense.

Audrey Tang: A demonstration that it is possible to channel commercial power into the free software culture without compromising too badly the culture that unites the free software contributors together.

Darshana Narayanan: They’re not the only kind of free software contributors. There are a lot of free-floating people who...It’s the equivalent of the startup industry, but without the VC funding.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that, though. The idea of open-source movement as apart from free software is billing this not as a profit center, but a massive reduction of risk like bugs are shallow. There’s, I was looking at it, also a reduction of cost, like saying if Google had to pay operating system licenses, there won’t be a Google.

Audrey Tang: It bills itself essentially as a time, cost, and risk reducer rather than something that’s in the profit center. That’s the grand narrative that ESR and friends were trying to build, like Brian Behlendorf and the other thinkers, were trying to pivot.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the Mozilla Foundation and the newer foundations around that wave proved that yes, it is possible to build a viable product centered on just reducing the [laughs] fear, uncertainty and doubt of end-users, even, around technology.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that for example, in Taiwan’s national social innovation plan, which is the four-year plan we’re going to sign into existence about a month from now, we exclusively says that it is the government’s work to introduce the impact investors, the venture philanthropists.

Audrey Tang: The people with money that want to translate that money into positive social impact with people who practice openness, who basically establish accountability and the kind of trust that which is even more than fun, [laughs] is very difficult to buy nowadays. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The government is essentially setting up a space for the people to work on mechanisms to do trust in a sustainable way vis a vis people who have a lot of resources in terms of money and other non-blunt resources like [laughs] expertise and try to not marry the two worlds together.

Audrey Tang: Keep those two worlds at what they’re best at and figure out ways like memorandums of understandings [laughs] that allow these two to co-create something that’s larger than any of the two models of creation rather than forcing one side to succumb to the philosophies of the other side.

Audrey Tang: We of course have the long history of the open-source movement. It feels very strange to say this, but it’s a long history now, [laughs] it’s 20 years to draw upon.

Audrey Tang: I think this is also what the civic tech world need to realize in relationship with both the gov tech crowds as well as the more wider social innovation, sustainable development, and venture philanthropy, impact investment world, because at the moment, civic tech is kind of a subset of this wider world.

Audrey Tang: I think if we’re going to build a recursive public and plural sector or whatever other new words that people have coined around it, we need to move from being one of the items to be invested into this crucial point where it’s like the hub where around which data accountability and responsibility can be built so that all the different players can come to trust each other more as the transactions goes by.

Audrey Tang: Exactly as the fundamental infrastructures, like Mozilla Foundation has done for the open-source movement.

Darshana Narayanan: You envision the government would play that role or can play that role?

Audrey Tang: At the moment, I think the Taiwan government is eager to play that role, if just to say, "We want to contribute to SDG 17 [laughs] partnership for the sustainable development goals."

Audrey Tang: Because it is Taiwan’s forte to connect our very strong semi-conductor hardware, Internet of Things, AI, whatever ecosystem, with this kind of international disaster relief and poverty relief and medical help, agricultural help, that Taiwan government has been doing like any other good charity [laughs] for the past decades. These two are already what Taiwan is doing.

Darshana Narayanan: This is a way to point at that problem in a more efficient, in a better way.

Audrey Tang: Not necessarily better, but a more transparent way, because I think the current challenge of a true open multi-stakeholder governance is that we all know that it works on open-source projects really well, and it works reasonably well in an Internet society and other more ICT-related topics. It is far from clear that the same model works at scale to solve social problems. That requires a lot of local domain knowledge, local expertise, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is a active research area, but because the Taiwan administration prides our self in innovating governance, so I think it does help that we’re just piloting a lot of this and failing a lot and document the occasional successes as well as all the failures. Again, absorbing risk, but not just for public servants but also for anyone who want to use not necessarily civic tech but any kind of social innovation for the public good in a multi-stakeholder governance model.

Audrey Tang: I hinted at that during the workshop, that we’re assigning a lot of the wording of open multi-stakeholder process into the, for example, National Digital Communication Act as well as other acts. We’re trying to propagate this idea -- that this is a new, exciting way of doing governance that anyone can join without the government spearheading it.

Audrey Tang: But if you run into any roadblocks -- it could be money, it could be time, it could be the legislation is in your way, and anything else -- then you’re welcome to find me on a Wednesday office hour or on the Tuesday tour around Taiwan. Let’s just figure out together how to get that roadblock solved.

Audrey Tang: I view the 12 ministries involved in this Social Innovation plan as independent charities in their own right. [laughs] Each has their annual goals to meet.

Audrey Tang: Instead of seeing the civic tech people as vendors, or as just protestors, or people working on alternatives, it’s essential to establish this as the issue 17, point 17 idea of seeing them as full partners.

Audrey Tang: That may realize this independent charities -- that’s ministries -- goes in a more effective and efficient way than the ministry could ever do by their self, and then form long-term relationships not necessarily through procurement but possibly through alliance in various different ways.

Audrey Tang: But we’re also changing, of course, the procurement process and everything else to enable these kind of partnerships in a much more efficient fashion.

Darshana Narayanan: That would go a long way, certainly. I wonder what the equivalent is around here. In...

Audrey Tang: There’s the Request for Innovation process. There’s the RFI process, which is, broadly speaking, similar.

Audrey Tang: ( NB: It’s the "Call for Innovations" process: http://www.nyc.gov/html/cfi/html/index.html )

Darshana Narayanan: I should look it up. The Request for Innovation process.

Nathan Storey: There are some local governments experimenting with changing procurement to require open-source.

Darshana Narayanan: That’s true.

Nathan Storey: Yet allow smaller vendors or allow engagement with broader stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: Right. There’s this I think Presidential Management Agenda or something like that, freshly published, that’s basically the US digital service playbook, but done in a way that’s very much like the SDGs.

Audrey Tang: There’s this CAP goals 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, and how it relates to the existing success cases and how the agency people can just learn from those success cases and fit it in in their culture.

Audrey Tang: I think there’s a lot of the public administration language in the presidential management agenda here that really resonates with the way how we phrase things. But of course, I understand that it’s one thing for the federal government to publish something that and it may be years [laughs] before a local agency can fully implement that, but I think the wording is definitely in the right direction.

Darshana Narayanan: Thanks for the resources.

Audrey Tang: We’re good?

Nathan Storey: All right. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.