Juyoung Oh: We’ve done lots of the open data in our open government activity, too.

Juyoung Oh: We are personally very interested about you and what you’ve been doing for years.

Jennifer Kang: It’s really great to meet you.

Audrey Tang: Yes, the same. I’ve always been a creative commoner as well. I participated in the first translations of the Creative Commons. Ever since the introduction of Creative Commons Zero, that is their public domain universal, I’ve been adopting it for all my software work.

Audrey Tang: So thank you for the commons as well.

Juyoung Oh: OK. Before we start the interview, I will briefly introduce the purpose of this research. This research is actually conducted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in Korea for the building of future policy.

Juyoung Oh: Part of that for Jennifer, she’s doing research about how the IT technology can help the democracy move to the next level, how we can gather others’ opinions, how we can use them when we make a policy decision, and how can we use them to do policy changes?

Juyoung Oh: That’s the brief introduction about that. The questionnaire that I sent you this morning, we’ll just follow the questionnaire. Is it OK for you?

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course. Yeah.

Juyoung Oh: First for us, what is your key role as digital minister? That is quite a new concept to us, digital minister.

Audrey Tang: Actually, this is a new post in Taiwan as well. I’m the first digital minister. My job description is on my Twitter. You can easily see that job description. You probably have already seen that, so I would not read it aloud again. It is a form of a prayer.

Audrey Tang: A digital minister’s work is actually to coordinate across all ministries toward digital transformation. I don’t have a ministry. My office is one person dispatched from each ministry. At most, I can have 32 colleagues. At the moment, I have 22. In each team, also in each ministry also has a team, what we call the participation officers or POs, in charge of the digital transformation around public participation.

Audrey Tang: There is a core network of people who send people to my office and a periphery network in each of hundred people now working toward digital transformation.

Audrey Tang: This is a role that is mostly coordinating the various different values, like between economic development and environmental sustainability, between scientific innovation and equality and inclusion. These are sometimes seen as competing values. My work is to find out the digital ways to make common values out of different positions. That is my main work.

Juyoung Oh: That means that you must be really, really busy because you have to meet a lot of people, you have to arrange, and also you have to recommend the best solution they can use.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Juyoung Oh: Would you briefly introduce your daily routine as digital minister?

Audrey Tang: It’s a different routine every day of the week. Wednesday, like today, I meet strangers that I’ve never met before. This is my office hour. Sometimes, there’s a delay, so sorry about that.

Juyoung Oh: That is OK. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Before 2:00 PM, anyone can step into my office and talk to me. There’s a queue. My only ask is that our conversation to be published under Creative Commons. After 2:00 PM is the pre-booked time. They’re guaranteed to have 40 minutes of my time at a time, but they have to book maybe weeks in advance.

Audrey Tang: Combined with those two – it could be through teleconference, it could be visiting – I get to understand the latest social innovations and to find them the correct partners in the different ministries to help them in their social cause. Wednesday is with the advocacy groups.

Audrey Tang: Every Thursday is the cabinet meeting where I bring those ideas to the cabinet meeting. On Thursday afternoon, there’s a Board of Science and Technology meeting where we collectively decide how to spend our, for example, budget toward developing 5G network, how to do AI research, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Because it is a place where all the scientific and technology budget is made by each ministries’, we have to harmonize their proposals so that they have the maximized synergy toward the common global goals rather than each ministry working its own silo.

Audrey Tang: In that role, I help the Ministry of Science and Technology, but also, our horizontal minister in charge of Board of Science and Technology, in helping them to bring social innovation. I just learned from Wednesday to the Thursday meetings and the cabinet meeting.

Audrey Tang: Now, on Fridays, we meet with people who raise petitions. Anyone who get 5,000…

Juyoung Oh: I’m sorry. The sound’s a little bit disconnected.

Audrey Tang: It’s a little bit disconnecting? Is it OK now?

Juyoung Oh: Yeah, yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK. Every Friday, anyone who get 5,000 signatures in an online platform called the Join platform can call a meeting by the voting of the participation officer network. Every Friday, every other Friday or so, we also meet here in the Social Innovation Lab or in different ministry to talk about issues that are raised by e-petitions.

Audrey Tang: It could be about banning plastic straws gradually to replace them with things that does not cause a sea plastic waste, all the way to how to make the mountain climbing more informed, using the latest GPS technology.

Audrey Tang: Or it could be about how to build a hospital in a remote area of Taiwan so that their ambulance travel time can be shortened. There’s no limit to those e-petition, other than diplomatic and defense. Other than that, everything can be raised and be deliberated on a Friday.

Audrey Tang: Then on Saturday, I usually go around and giving talks, public speeches, attend the Oslo Freedom Forum, or things like that. On Sunday, I spend time with my family. [laughs] On Monday, it’s special, because it’s our team meeting.

Audrey Tang: Our team have lunch together, and each one brief about the work they have done in the previous week, as well as the things they plan to do the next week. The thing is that, because I give no orders, and I take no orders, all the people who join my office get to decide their own work.

Audrey Tang: Monday is our time to find collaborators within our office. It’s a very agile fashion of developing project using standard Kanban, Rocket.Chat, the usual digital tools. Finally, on Tuesdays, I tour around Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Sometime, I just travel to a remote, rural, indigenous area at the evening of Monday, or even afternoon of Monday. I spend the whole day there and talk to their local co-ops, local elders, local entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs about regional revitalization.

Audrey Tang: When I talk with them publicly, we also connect back to the municipalities, where all the 12 ministries are also online, so that they can see through me the true life story of the local issues, instead of seeing them as very abstract things.

Audrey Tang: That complements our Wednesday office hour, because those people are the one that will have to pay the most time expense to travel to Taipei to meet me. On Tuesday, I meet them in their local place. On Wednesday, I meet people in Taipei.

Juyoung Oh: Wow. That’s quite amazing one week. [laughs] How about the Wednesday? Is there usually a full book?

Audrey Tang: The Wednesday, the pre-booked time, I think, is usually booked to maybe a couple months in advance. The walk-in is any time, so you can find me very easily, actually.

Juyoung Oh: It sounds like you’re a mediator, with using the IT magic things.

Jennifer Kang: As you say, there is 32 colleagues from the different minister. Is there any standard how they, standard to collect…Not collect. How can they hire… Is there any standard when the 32 colleagues… [laughs]

Audrey Tang: OK, what’s my HR policy, right?

Jennifer Kang: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: We’re talking about the core team, right, not the PO network? The PO network has its own regulation, which I just shared to you. It’s a national regulation. It applies to all ministries.

Audrey Tang: You are probably asking who are the people that I hire directly to work with me on a day-to-day basis. There’s two HR criteria. First, they must bring in a new perspective, a new value, a new experience that no other existing team members have. That is to say, they must be complementary to the existing team. That’s the first one.

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Culture will bring a cultural perspective. The Ministry of Communication will bring a communication perspective, and so on. Each ministry can send at most one person. That’s the reason, because otherwise, they are just going to reinforce each other.

Audrey Tang: We want a plurality, a diversity, not an over-determination by any particular value. First, they must be complementary. Second, they must be willing to give at least as much as they take. When they come to my office, they still report to their minister. They don’t report to me.

Audrey Tang: They do their own scorecards. I don’t rank. I don’t rate them. I don’t do any management. We just ask them to work out aloud, meaning letting everybody know what they are working on. That’s my only ask.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, they must be willing to help the other ministries’ values as much as they want the other ministry to help their values. That’s the only two hiring criteria.

Jennifer Kang: The minister, the 32 colleagues, they volunteer for this job, or they volunteer…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they volunteer, but they are career public servants. They are senior career public servants with anywhere from 10 years to 30 years of public sector experience who work with my office.

Audrey Tang: What they learn, they bring back to their ministry. They’re almost like, sometimes almost director general level, or already director general level, when they come to my office. They may be promoted to section chief right after coming back to their ministry.

Audrey Tang: Each ministry can send someone to train for six months or one year, get them back to be the deputy chief or the section chief and send another more junior one to my office.

Jennifer Kang: Oh, that’s quite interesting. Some part, it could be easily, they send them, like a junior, or like a less than five years career, they can be assigned that kind of position. This means, actually, the government take it seriously.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I will also add that everybody who returned from their post to my office back to their ministry have been promoted.

Audrey Tang: That is also a powerful incentive.

Jennifer Kang: Ah, OK. I totally understand.

Jennifer Kang: How long do they stay? Six months to one year? One year?

Audrey Tang: It depends on their minister. If their minister feel that they want someone to go back to contribute, usually, I think that the shortest is half a year. Some, like the communication ministry, the National Communication Commission, delegate councilor Yeong-chin was here from the very beginning.

Audrey Tang: He’s been around with us for three years now and shows no signs of coming back. He maintain very close connection with the NCC, because he was the director general of law in the NCC. He has very good connection to other DGs in that ministry.

Juyoung Oh: How long has PDIS been run?

Audrey Tang: Three years… Well I just said that.

Juyoung Oh: Then all the members are, as you imagine, that they are from the other ministries?

Audrey Tang: There is some exceptions. In Taiwan, we have something called the Institute of Information Industry, or Triple I, III. It is like the 18F in the US. That’s the closest resemblance. It’s a not-for-profit institute, but it also work very closely with the IT-related policymaking.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a think tank, but a think tank is actually a joint venture from the IT sector, the social sector, the academia, and the public. They also send people to my office. Those people are more like contractors. They work on a specific skill.

Audrey Tang: For example, our filmmaking is delegated to one III person. Our back end management, our cyber security product management, is to a specialist. There’s also a few of the specialists, maybe 10 or so, the specialists.

Audrey Tang: Once they join PDIS, they can also choose to work on any project. They all then evolve to become also facilitators, also public speakers, also teachers, and things like that. Our rule is that the number of specialists must never exceed the number of public servants.

Jennifer Kang: OK. That means that balance matters.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It remains a public sector innovation initiative. It will not suddenly become what we call an external plug-in to the governance system.

Juyoung Oh: Do you have any meaningful project for you done by the PDIS?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We have so many. I don’t even know how to begin. One pretty famous case is that, two years ago, our tax filing system stopped working on Mac and Linux computers, because it was written using Java Applet, which is a technology developed by Sun Microsystem, but then get purchased by the Oracle Corporation, which decided to stop, deprecate, to remove it from use, two years ago.

Audrey Tang: Suddenly, everybody not using a Windows cannot file their tax easily anymore. Unfortunately, on May the 1st, two years ago, the Minister of Finance…

Juyoung Oh: Hello. You’re back.

Audrey Tang: Can you still hear me?

Juyoung Oh: Yeah, I can hear you. Welcome back.

Audrey Tang: As I was saying, around two years ago, there was a problem with filing taxes outside Window system. Unfortunately, the front line support staff said, “OK, so you can just borrow somebody’s Windows computer.”

Audrey Tang: That really angered people. They started an e-petition. The petition is named literally, “The Tax Filing Experience is Explosively Awful.” It gets support very quickly. Instead of saying, defending our policy, we just say everybody who complain about our tax filing gets invited in a couple weeks to the Ministry of Finance by our participation who co-create and co-designs our tax filing experience.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about IT. It is about the whole experience of tax filing. How can we make it better for everyone? Before we posted that invitation, 80 percent of population online, our participation platform, was calling for the resign of the Minister of Finance for using the vendor for corruption or things like that.

Audrey Tang: Once we did the invitation, 80 percent began to say, “Oh, I have a positive contribution.” Then people started to really working together. We run four co-creation workshops that collectively builds the new tax filing experience at negative budget.

Audrey Tang: Using cloud services, elastic services, suggested by the participants, we saved a lot of money, and used a fraction of that to run the workshops. Right now, as a pilot to Mac and Linux users last year, to approval rating of 96 percent.

Audrey Tang: This year, we roll it out to even Windows users, so they don’t have to borrow a Mac anymore. The approval rate is 98 percent. This is not because the design is great. It is because thousands of people feel that they have a say, their idea is incorporated in the design of tax filing.

Audrey Tang: After that pilot case, we then apply it to our universal healthcare. How do we make mobile computing part of it? The National Palace Museum and many, many other public services then are developed in this methodology.

Audrey Tang: We did a, what we call, Government Digital Service Guidelines, in our National Development Council, to transfer the learnings to the municipal governments and townships.

Jennifer Kang: That’s quite interesting.

Juyoung Oh: Like you explained before, there are lots of civilian expert working with you and your colleagues in the other project. They work together. How do they cooperate?

Audrey Tang: The idea, there are two ideas. One idea, and they are very important. Everything else is detail. The first one is that the government need to trust people and not expect people to trust the government. That’s the first principle.

Audrey Tang: The second is that we must bring IT to where people already are, instead of bringing people to information technology. Those two are the key ideas of digital transformation. By making the conversation under Creative Commons, even before making a decision, everybody learns the why of policymaking, not just the what of policies made.

Audrey Tang: By making the national budget visualizable and publicly commentable to the Join platform, everybody learns how their tax is being spent and can laser-focus on the one that they care the most, like long-term healthcare and so on, and social housing.

Audrey Tang: By making all the regulations, no exceptions, up for two months of online public debate, people anticipate what is going to change, and can even call a stop if the regulation doesn’t fit people’s needs. All these three, combined together, makes the people feel that they are trusted by the government.

Audrey Tang: The government expect nothing in return. This is the first, in principle. The second principle with civilian experts is that they already have their gatherings. They already have communities. As I mentioned, on Wednesday, we offer our venue, the Social Innovation Lab, for free for them to host their events.

Audrey Tang: That is how we can then spend time dining with them here. We open until midnight, until 11:00 PM. We have a chef. We have very good cuisine. We have various different social innovation groups that just hosts here.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, they are much more willing to share new ideas. If you share new ideas in a formal setting, nobody want to listen. If you just share it with excellent food, next week, you will return, even if you don’t remember a thing they said, because the food is good, and open until midnight, so you do have plenty of time to mingle.

Audrey Tang: What I’m getting at is that we’re bringing the IT to the civilian expert to amplify their voices. We’re not asking them to come all the way to our meetings to give a 10-minute speech.

Audrey Tang: We are joining them in their local habitat, so to speak, but using IT technology, including telepresence, video conference, 360 live stream, to amplify their voices to the world, corresponding to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: That is our way to work with civilian experts, always in their space, providing them with space, and providing them with trust, instead asking them to come to the government.

Jennifer Kang: Yeah. Like you explained before, for the public servant, promote might be the good motivation to participate.

Jennifer Kang: For the civilian expert, might be the good food. Also, what do you think, what motivation make them participate democratic?

Audrey Tang: The main motivation is that they no longer feel alone. It’s the solidarity. Before, people may be alone in their community, caring so much about one small thing.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the petitioner that raised the gradual banning of plastic straw, who was only 16-year-old at the time, a senior high school student, she may be the only one in her class caring about carbon reduction and the plastic waste in the sea.

Audrey Tang: Using e-petition, she can find 5,000 people who think exactly, care exactly like her, and form a community. The best thing is that she then learns that people who make those plastic utensils, they are not just for profit.

Audrey Tang: They were also social enterprises 20 years or 30 years before. At that time in Taiwan, there’s a lot of hepatitis B. The virus was a serious threat to the Taiwanese health. Because of that, they started their company making the plastic utensils, because they want to prevent hepatitis B from spreading.

Audrey Tang: They joined this industry for a social purpose. Now, hepatitis B is essentially gone. It’s very easily cured. They’re also looking at new social purposes. The 16 years old feel that, “Oh, then we can use plastic straws, but reshape them from the sugarcane waste to do a zero” – actually, negative – “carbon production line.”

Audrey Tang: She would not feel that, “Oh, it’s the large businesses against me.” Actually, the business owners are socially-minded. They just don’t have the ingredients. That’s something we can co-create. Solidarity across sectors is the main motivation for the civilian experts to enter.

Juyoung Oh: Yeah. [laughs] I’m pretty sure Jennifer experienced the same…Jennifer has the same experience with our government, because she is the first member who opened the government.

Juyoung Oh: Also, is there some successful cases you wanted to introduce that conducted by the PO?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, e-petition is one source. Tax filing system, plastic straw, all these are from e-petition. There also are some cases brought by the PO themselves. For example, I don’t know how much of a culture of wooden seal on a physical paper is important to your culture, but it is important in the Japanese culture, and also, to a lesser extent, in the Taiwanese culture as well.

Audrey Tang: Many people feel, if they have a piece of paper with the ink of a wooden seal on it, it means a lot to them psychologically. The PO of the National Palace Museum, which you may have heard is a very large museum in Taiwan, and they are also a cabinet member.

Audrey Tang: When I say 32 ministries, the National Palace Museum is one of the cabinet meeting members. The NPM faces a dilemma. The young people want to use QR code, want to use NFC, want to use their phone to quickly enter the museum and to navigate the museum.

Audrey Tang: They don’t want to wait in the queue. The elderly people, they want a physical stamp, a physical ticket, as something, like a memoir, that they can bring back to their children. They also don’t like the long queue. The elderly people really don’t like to wait for very long.

Audrey Tang: They tried to introduce kiosk, but they are not very friendly. Frankly speaking, it’s impossible to design a kiosk that’s equally friendly to a 70-year-old as an 18-year-old. It’s just impossible. The PO from the NPM brought this idea to us, and then we run a collaboration meeting with all the stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: People who run tourist agencies, people who sell tickets online, people who specialize in printing, and things like that. We figure out a solution together. The solution is very simple, actually, if you think about it.

Audrey Tang: The solution is you can have maybe a Line chatbot, maybe any ways for the elderly people to get the entry ticket. When they wait in the queue, they don’t have to wait. They just beep their phone to the sensor, and they walk in.

Audrey Tang: Once they walk in, using the same mobile phone or their watch, they can claim a receipt that’s more beautiful, more well-printed, and has a seal ink on it that they can take home as a receipt of using that mobile entering experience.

Audrey Tang: There is no queue anymore, because the collection of receipt is after the queue. They can spend a lot of time, spending more time, with the art and the creativity in the museum, rather than spending time waiting in the queue.

Audrey Tang: They still have a receipt, actually, maybe printed with gold, that they get to keep and share with their family.

Juyoung Oh: In Korea, because Korea, we also have a very active online activity, people wants to speak up their opinion about the political issue, or also, the political conflict. They are more intent to not choose their side and then argue, not like a compromise, exchange their opinion, and wants to discuss about some issue.

Juyoung Oh: How do you think Taiwan’s the same, like people tend to argue, not like exchange opinion?

Audrey Tang: I think argue is just fine. I don’t have anything against arguing, but you have to argue in a structured way. First, you need to argue about the facts. That’s why in Taiwan, when we say open data, we never mean open government data only.

Audrey Tang: We mean open data from citizen science, open data from the private sector, open data from the academia, and finally, open data from the public sector. We use distributed ledgers, blockchains, to make sure we can hold each other accountable, that we don’t have the capability to change each other’s data.

Audrey Tang: Then we put them into a top 20, I think, supercomputer, the National Computing Center of High-Speed Computing. Then let people upload code to calculate on the same data to make predictions and so on. The data argument, fact argument, is always the first step.

Audrey Tang: We do that before we do anything else. After we have a common dataset – for example, around the civil IoT, which I just shared a website address here – we have then a common dataset about the air quality, water quality, disaster, and other earthquake prevention, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Based on that, we can talk about feelings. The same data, you can feel pretty good, pretty fine. Another person may feel that we have room to improve. Another person may be downright angry. There is no right or wrong about feelings, as long as they are about the same data, the same fact.

Audrey Tang: Too much time, the online consultation develop into an argument, because I feel happy about something. You feel angry about something else, but we confuse those two facts with each other. We seem to be arguing, but we’re not really arguing, because our reality is different.

Audrey Tang: Once we confirm the base reality, then people can share their feelings freely, and there is no right or wrong. Then we use AI to make sure that people see each other’s feelings. Actually, people have much more in common than they have in difference.

Audrey Tang: The social and institutional media will amplify the difference, because that attracts attention and sell advertisement. Actually, mostly, people feel the same around the same things at the same time. Those are called common sense or common understanding.

Audrey Tang: Then, after we discover the common understanding, after three weeks or so, we move to the third stage. After the fact and the feeling, we move to idea. This time, we can ideate based on the common understanding.

Audrey Tang: In design thinking, this is called a common “how might we” question. Then we enter the second diamond, and we ideate about the ways to deliver on the common feelings. The best idea are the one that take care of the most people’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the last part of the double diamond is to ratify those people’s idea into a new tax filing system, into a new healthcare system, into a new system that does what people have wanted all along. They just didn’t know everybody else also wanted, because they were busy getting distracted on a couple of things that are ideological.

Audrey Tang: That’s the entire method called the Focused Conversation Method.

Jennifer Kang: How about the people, they actually follow the procedure?

Audrey Tang: Because they are technically different events. In this event, you’re only allowed to talk about facts. Everything else is kept on the record, but they are not even informed the next stage. On the next stage, we only ask about feelings and things like that.

Juyoung Oh: Now, this is more about the personal aspect of, and then as a digital minister, what is your future plan? You have done a lot of things so far. Also, I’m just curious, is there any, your future plan that you want to do as a digital minister?

Audrey Tang: This is more an honorary title, actually. My three working condition, as I shared, first, I can work anywhere, location independence. Second, I don’t give order to my colleagues. I don’t take orders from my colleagues, voluntary association.

Audrey Tang: Finally, radical transparency. Everything, including this conversation, every meeting I chair, even internally is made completely publicly under Creative Commons. Because of those three principle, digital minister or not, I can do exactly the same work.

Audrey Tang: Actually, I did that since the end of 2014 to 2015, all the way to early 2016. I wasn’t having any position at the time. I’m untitled. I’m adviser to a horizontal minister, at most. Still, using that civilian capacity, using exactly the same principles, I facilitated exactly the same conversations.

Audrey Tang: With this title or not, anyone adopting the three principles can start what I call a conservative anarchist intervention to their polity that’s focused not on against the government or support the government, but on transforming the government. That’s what I’ve been doing all along, digital minister or not.

Juyoung Oh: So far, what was your biggest challenges, you’ve done these kind of experiments?

Audrey Tang: There’s three preconditions for my three conditions to work. First, we in Taiwan have broadband as human right. If we don’t have broadband as human right, location independence doesn’t mean much.

Audrey Tang: If I go to the top of the Jade Mountain, almost 4,000 meters high, and there’s no broadband there, I cannot really work there. Now, they have 10 Megabits per second, even on the top of the Yu Shan Mountain.

Audrey Tang: If I go to the Pacific island of Dongsha, and there’s no 10 Megabits per second, I cannot talk about the coral reef there. Then they have broadband there. Anywhere in Taiwan, 98 percent or more, the rural indigenous places, they have 10 Megabits per second.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t, it’s my fault. You can talk to me. That is one of the preconditions. That was a challenge, but now, we’ve tackled that challenge. The second challenge, around voluntary association, is that we must have a strong social sector.

Audrey Tang: Not “nonprofit organizations,” not “non-government entities,” not “charities,” not “civic hackers,” but a social sector that includes everyone and see it in themselves their purpose to innovate for the society, with the society, before the government think about those issues.

Audrey Tang: That is the second challenge. Fortunately, we are seeing a lot of solidarity around Taiwan, so that even universities now join the social innovation sector, the social sector. That’s the second challenge we’ve also overcame in the past couple years.

Audrey Tang: The third challenge, and that still remains, is that there are still people who reminisce about authoritarianism, who still thinks that it is more efficient somehow to have a ruler that is wise and can determine everything for everyone.

Audrey Tang: We cannot really blame them, because I was born in the martial law era. I can still remember how the martial law works. It instills a certain kind of mentality to people that somehow prefer an authority to make decisions, rather than deliberation.

Audrey Tang: This, we cannot really solve with technology. This, we can only solve by talking more to the elderly and in participating more in the local community decisions. This will take time. From experience of the third wave of democratization, this may not be an issue at all 10 years from now.

Juyoung Oh: Oh, OK.

Jennifer Kang: Wow. [laughs]

Juyoung Oh: Do you think, the IT technology can be used to create an inclusive society, based on your experience, and then your thought?

Audrey Tang: Never start with technology. That’s my answer. The Creative Commons founders, Lawrence Lessig, he has this theory called the pathetic thought, or the New Chicago School, that you might be already very familiar with.

Audrey Tang: There is this innovation in the middle, and the innovation is informed by IT technology, architecture, on the top. It’s also informed by the market forces, market policies, from the right. It’s also informed by the law, the legal code, from the bottom.

Audrey Tang: It’s also informed by the social norm, the social expectation, from the left. The norm architecture market and the code of law forms a kind of square that collaboratively determine the innovation and how it happens.

Audrey Tang: In an authoritarian society, the code of law decides how the market should function, which then decide what technology to develop, which then decide how the society must adapt. This way of working make the citizen very transparent to the state.

Audrey Tang: We can see it in our nearby jurisdictions. I will not name names. [laughs] In democratic states, we’re doing it the other way around. We’re saying that the law should be in service of the people. The people should deploy technology however they want.

Audrey Tang: Based on their deployment pattern, the market should satisfy their requirements. If the market step out of boundary, the law should regulate the market. That’s the other direction of the New Chicago Theory. Now, we’re saying this is not enough, because it still starts from the public sector.

Audrey Tang: We should move the starting point from the code of law to the social norm. The social sector should take the initiative of outlining what is to be expected by technology. This is what we call a norm-first approach, where the social sector design the norms, and the IT sector implement the norms.

Audrey Tang: In UN high-level conversation, this is called co-governance, co-gov, or digital interdependence. There’s many different names, collaborative governance, and so on. The only commonality is that the social sector design the norm. Then the IT sector implement the norm.

Jennifer Kang: I agree with you.

Jennifer Kang: How do you see the role of a civil servant in the future, public servant in the future in 10 years? Do they look like the same? Someone would say that they will be the same in 10 years, in 100 years. Someone will tell, “No, they will be changed. Their role will change.” How do you see?

Audrey Tang: There are, roughly speaking, three different things that a civil servant must answer to. The one is a certainty. If you have no running water or no broadband, the civil service need to answer for it. This is very basic. This is the requirement of certainty.

Audrey Tang: The second is a requirement of justice or equality, meaning that people should have equal opportunities. People who abuse the commons should be contributing back to the commons in an equal fashion.

Audrey Tang: The judicial branch, for example, but also, administration take care to ensure social justice on this regard. That is also a service to the public. Finally, they must also answer in a democratic state, to the will of the people, which actually may not be efficient, may be uncertain, and actually, may be totally counterproductive for equality.

Audrey Tang: They be actually very biased, tribalist, and populist. Still, the public service need to answer to that democratic will, because we’re a democratic state. Those two values, that of certainty, justice, and democratic will, they are not reinforcing each other all the time.

Audrey Tang: Sometime, they fight each other. Sometime, it’s impossible to reconcile each other. I think the role of civil service will change, because the democratic will traditionally are encountered by representatives, by MPs, by ministers, by the leader of organizations that represents the people’s will.

Audrey Tang: I think that will change. In Taiwan, one year, we vote for the president. Another year, we vote for referenda. Another year, we vote for the mayors, and another year, we vote for the referenda. There’s one year for representational democracy, but also, another year for direct, deliberative democracy.

Audrey Tang: Those two track coexist in Taiwan’s governance system. I think we will, in 10 years, see much more people taking direct action and representing themselves, instead of using a representative to speak for them.

Audrey Tang: They will want people who let them speak, not people who speak for them. That is one part gone from the public service 10 years later. We don’t need a digital minister to organize the digital transformation anymore.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we will, at that time, have an analog ministry instead, because everything is digital already. That’s one prediction. Another prediction is the one about the efficiency or the certainty. As many of you already know, with sufficient training data, machine learning can automate a lot of the certainty work that the public service does by hand at the moment.

Audrey Tang: It is in a long trend of automation that the civil service now can save their time massively by delegating to automation the trivial work. Trivial doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It may be very important, like listening to a water pipe and hear it’s leaking, or it’s not leaking.

Audrey Tang: It is not something that a human is best-equipped to do. The human is best-equipped to find creative solutions if there is a water leak. The human is actually pretty bad, compared to machines, to detect whether something is leaking or not.

Audrey Tang: The certainty part, in my sense, will be replaced and augmented by what I call assistive intelligence, or AI, meaning that they’re always at an assistive role, not a creative role, to human beings. That take care of the certainty part.

Audrey Tang: If the assistive intelligence take care of the certainty part and the collective intelligence take care of the democratic will, then the public service will concentrate on creating spaces to ensure social justice. That is to say, to find common values, despite the different socioeconomic positions of their community members.

Audrey Tang: That co-discovery of justice, of setting the norm, I think that requires human wisdom, and that will not go away.

Juyoung Oh: Wow. That was quite great perspective for the future. The last questions.

Jennifer Kang: I have a question.

Juyoung Oh: Jennifer watched some interview video of you that you were telling that you want to put everyone, every Taiwanese opinions and thought on the system, meaning put on the PDIS or PO. It’s a little bit hard, because the…

Juyoung Oh: If, actually, we can reach to the people’s opinion, it involves someone who using the platform. Someone who is not using the platform, how do you approach to them? What is your strategy to meet them?

Audrey Tang: As I said, I come to them. I don’t ask them to come to our platform. Every other Tuesday, I just visit an indigenous tribe, a rural area, and so on. Last time, we visited, as proposed by one of our youth councilor in the national administrative, a place where they farm clams, but using a very sustainable kind of farming that coexists with solar panels, renewable energy, and use natural sea waves to regulate the salinity of the clam pond.

Audrey Tang: That coexists with a very good birds and other ecosystem. This is great, because it doesn’t draw clean water from the underground. It doesn’t endanger the bio system, when you think about seven generations in the future. If I ask them to come to Taipei to give a presentation, I will only understand maybe five percent of what this is all about.

Audrey Tang: Because I actually went down, picked the clams, and participated in the farming process, and we had a conversation with all the local social entrepreneurs, both young and old generations, we actually can then see what our national policies have succeeded and where our national policy have failed.

Audrey Tang: This is very important, because they tell their story not just to me personally, but for all the different ministries’ people, telecommunicating through video conference. We figure out a solution right there. In older public service systems, this is impossible, because first, you don’t have direct access across ministries.

Audrey Tang: You only have access vertically. If things go right, if you find a good solution, it’s always your minister that gets the credit. If your plan doesn’t work, your minister can always blame you as a public servant not implementing things well.

Audrey Tang: In that environment, there’s very little incentive for a mid-level career public servant to truly innovate, to forge connections across ministries and across sectors.

Audrey Tang: Because of radical transparency and location independence in voluntary associations, they can now what’s on their mind even pseudonymously, using the online platform. It’s the public servants using the platform. The local people, for them, it’s just a town hall meeting. It’s bringing me to fish some clams.

Audrey Tang: It’s just sharing their opinions in the places they already, like a local café, that they’re already chatting to share their opinions and complaining about the government. For them, this is something that they already do all the time, right?

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we amplify their voices. If the career public servants find a solution right away, then they get the credit because of the radical transparency. If it doesn’t work, it’s always my fault because I am the chair of the meeting. They’re in Taipei or Kaohsiung or other municipalities. You cannot really punch across the screen, right? You cannot harm those public servants.

Audrey Tang: I’m in the locality, [laughs] so basically I absorb all the risk. But they, the public service, get all the credit. This system is then becoming much more possible for the people to not only feel listened to, but also listen to each other as well, and find that they actually share common values.

Audrey Tang: It’s just the bandwidth of the state was too low. The bandwidth of the society is much broader.

Jennifer Kang: I have another question. Youth Council, your role is youth council, right?

Audrey Tang: Youth Council, yes. That’s at an administration level and chaired by the Prime Minister and by the Premier.

Juyoung Oh: She wants to know what’s the role of the Youth Council?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. This is a new invention as well, as new as my digital ministry, only three years. The Executive Yuan Council is different from every other Youth Council, because those are the reverse mentors of ministers.

Jennifer Kang: Reverse mentor, uh-huh.

Audrey Tang: For example, I was the reverse mentor, back in 2015, of Minister Jaclyn Tsai. A reverse mentor is like an understudy. An understudy is someone who works with you to learn your daily job, and some day may be able to do the same job. That’s an understudy.

Audrey Tang: A reverse mentor is an understudy that also has something to teach. As an understudy, they may be young. They may be 30 years old, 20 years old, but their ministers think they can help the minister to show the direction of the future.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, they are also mentoring their minister, even if their minister considers them also understudy. This is what we call reverse mentorship. Usually, the old mentor the young, but in this case, the young mentors the old.

Audrey Tang: Each ministry can find such a reverse mentor, and together, they form the National Youth Council. Each one is considered a leader by the minister that recommends them in their ministry’s business.

Audrey Tang: It’s very broad. They talk not about only young people at all. They talk about Sustainable Development Goals. They talk about indigenous rights. They talk about ecological farming. They talk about everything, like how to revitalize entire regions, not only one old house or two. They talk about how art can revitalize education system.

Audrey Tang: There is no limit to what they can discuss. What they propose is decided by the Premier to turn into national policy by every Youth Council meeting very quickly. This is a much more binding process than a pure advisory position.

Jennifer Kang: Mm-hmm.

Juyoung Oh: OK, the last one. Someday, the time will come after the digital minister. What is your future plan? Do you have any plan for the after the digital minister?

Audrey Tang: I’m always a minister for digital transformation. I’ve been doing that for at least since my first startup, that’s in ‘95. A very long time now.

Audrey Tang: Minister has two meanings. One is the government Minister with an uppercase M. One is the evangelical minister with a lowercase m, like spreading the good news. A spread of good news, of how the digital can turn competition, which is a limited resource in a zero-sum game, into abundance, which is reinforcement into each other, into a collective sustainable goal.

Audrey Tang: That transformation from scarcity to abundance, exactly actually as the mission of Creative Commons, is what I have been preaching as a minister.

Audrey Tang: First for free software movement, and then the open-source movement, and then the open access movement, and then the open hardware, open data, and open government movement, and now the intellectual commons movement, and many other movements as well.

Audrey Tang: All these movements are just individual symptoms of something that’s larger that we think beyond scarcity. In that sense, I will remain being a minister with a lowercase m in this position, whether or not I’m an uppercase digital Minister.

Audrey Tang: I will show you my name card. This name card, if you can see it, says digital minister, but in lowercase. It doesn’t say actually which country I’m working for. It only say Taiwan can help. What this signifies is that I’m not working for the Taiwan government. I’m working with the Taiwan government.

Audrey Tang: That is the critical difference between the uppercase Minister and the lowercase minister. I consider myself always a lowercase minister, whether it’s uppercase or not.

Jennifer Kang: I’m personally curious that, what makes you attract to the open? Since you are very young, you are a very…There are a lot of alignment with the open things.

Audrey Tang: My first encounter with the open access community is with the archive community at Arxiv. I think Cornell University maintains it. Even today, my papers are published under Creative Commons in the social archive.

Audrey Tang: I encountered the archive community when I was 14 years old. That was 1995. I see people just posting papers even before they publish to the journal. I was just a junior high school student. I don’t have the money to pay for the academic journals, but I get to read those research even before they make to the journals.

Audrey Tang: When I write the collaborators about cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, they treat me like a fellow researcher. They don’t know I’m just 14 years old. We’re just solving problems together in an academic community.

Audrey Tang: Without an open platform, without the digital platform, this is impossible. I would have to take maybe an airplane to visit their lab and work maybe 15 years to become their postdoc before we can collaborate like this.

Audrey Tang: Because of the World Wide Web and the open access community back then, we were able to start collaborating even I’m just a 14 years old who speaks very little English. This is how my education began.

Audrey Tang: I sent this material of my email correspondence to the principal, the head of my junior high school, and she, after considering it for a couple of minutes, said, “OK, tomorrow, you don’t go to school anymore. You just work with the scholars, and I will cover for you.”

Audrey Tang: At the time, it’s mandatory education, so if I don’t go to the school, my parent will be fined. There will be a penalty. My principal, the head of the school, says, “No, it’s OK. I will just fake the record to the ministry of education so you can pursue your education with the World Wide Web community,” which she thinks is the future.

Audrey Tang: I have very optimistic prospects about the innovation capacity of the public sector, of the career public servants, because of my encounter with my head of the school when I was 14 years old.

Jennifer Kang: That’s how your journey started.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Juyoung Oh: I’m quite impressed that you mentioned that you are only digital minister and you always will be.

Jennifer Kang: Do you have any friends to come in Seoul?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I did visit Seoul, actually. That was I think for a cyber-security conference. I’m more than happy to come to Seoul.

Audrey Tang: I believe our Open Government partnership National Action Plan, which because of political reasons is now just called the Open Government National Action Plan – we dropped the P from it – it is very kindly supported by the Korea government, the OGP liaison.

Audrey Tang: We did have a regional meeting with pretty much all my deputies came to Seoul to learn from the OGP process and the IRN process. We will kick off our National Action Plan really quickly, maybe a month from now. Then starting next January, we will begin the co-creation process with the social sector.

Audrey Tang: At that time, if any of your OGP community – I’m sure Creative Commons Korea is part of your Open Government community – is interested, we’re very happy to do bilateral or mini-lateral gatherings in South Korea, and I will love to come.

Jennifer Kang: Because I watched the g0v summit. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. We’re very close to each other anyway. Last time, the g0v movement, the social sector, organized a hackathon in Okinawa.

Jennifer Kang: Yeah, I heard of this.

Audrey Tang: Everybody flied the same distance and have the hackathon together. I’m sure that we can repeat that experience, too, if you’re interested in co-organizing.

Juyoung Oh: OK.

Jennifer Kang: OK, thank you for your time. You must be really, really busy. Thank you for your time. Thank you all the movements. It was quite inspiring. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for the great questions, and thank you for your contribution to the Commons.

Audrey Tang: We get to publish this under Creative Commons attribution. This very seldom happens. I usually have to convince my interviewer of the importance of Creative Commons, but you’re…

Audrey Tang: I’m really happy about that. Thank you for contributing to the Commons.

Juyoung Oh: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Jennifer Kang: Hope to see you again sometime.