Audrey Tang: This will be on the record and we can co-edit the transcript.

Jennifer Morone: That’s OK. How are you doing?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good. Last evening was great!

Jennifer Morone: Yeah. This is really amazing, this place. This was a school or...

Audrey Tang: This was a headquarter for the Taiwan Air Force.

Jennifer Morone: Oh, OK. That’s really cool. There’s a startup hub in it?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Not just a startup hub...

Jennifer Morone: An incubator...

Audrey Tang: There’s an incubator, which we have a lot of resident social innovation teams, but the ground floor is a general purpose. Anyone who can identify with any of the 17 global goals get to use the venue for free for activity.

Jennifer Morone: Oh, great.

Audrey Tang: Like UBI and other things can just use this as a kind of ground zero for their ideas to grow. Maybe RxC too?

Jennifer Morone: Yes! Also, I spoke to Mary Ellen last night so she’s...It’s 2:00 AM for her right now, so we can’t speak with her now but she definitely would like to speak.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Jennifer Morone: She’s working with the UN already on the sustainable goals. I am wearing the pin you gave me.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Jennifer Morone: I’d love to learn more about what you’re doing and how you’re making everything transparent.

Audrey Tang: Sure. This place is a national-level social innovation center. The startup hub, it has north, south and mid-Taiwan hubs. This is one of the hubs. In one word, in one sentence, what we’re doing here is we’re making sure that the social sector can grow to be a force of change and democracy.

Audrey Tang: Toward that vision, our idea, very simply put, is that the more and more the social sector can take functions that was previously limited to public sector, for example, air pollution or water pollution management, the more we should change our governance. Instead of asking for representatives and arbitrating between them, we are now saying, "We have different positions. What are your common values?"

Audrey Tang: Once the social innovators give up the over-idealistic, brainwash-the rest-of-the-population goals, but instead try to propose values that are more nuanced, more eclectic, then we encourage that kind of cross-sectoral pollination by match-making them with the main corporate sustainable strategies and by match-making them with research and academia.

Audrey Tang: The social sector always takes control. It’s just we’re trying to make a new format in which, instead of just advocating for the impossible, it inspires everybody to think toward the common values. Hence, the use of SDGs as common index.

Jennifer Morone: How’s it going?

Audrey Tang: Pretty well. Like social entrepreneurship, just two years ago, before we started this place, not even one in five people in Taiwan have heard of social entrepreneurship. Now, it’s almost one in three. The recognition, the awareness that social innovation can actually redesign social innovations is very strong.

Audrey Tang: Even our leading design centers, which previously focused only on service, product, and space design, they’re now thinking much larger toward social design. They were actually just here and investigating the various ways they can interweave themselves into the social fabric rather than the other way around, which tend to be the case if you’re over-focusing on product or services line.

Jennifer Morone: Do you know the university ETH in Zurich?

Audrey Tang: ETH University?

Jennifer Morone: It’s ETH. They say E-T-ha. In Europe, architects and designers have moved away, since at least a decade, from being focused just on making objects and buildings and more on social change, in the way you are describing.

Audrey Tang: You mean ETH Zurich?

Jennifer Morone: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I’ve heard of it. The Institute of Technology, right?

Jennifer Morone: Yes.

Audrey Tang: We have a very nearby university, Taipei Tech, which really goes into this place and runs, for example, hackathons around self-driving vehicles and things like that in a very ETH-like co-design philosophy.

Jennifer Morone: Do you want to talk about RadicalxChange?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Jennifer Morone: Do you have any ideas, as a board member, on driving it forward?

Audrey Tang: Actually, she wrote a blog post. [laughs]

Jennifer Morone: You did?

Audrey Tang: A few things.

Jennifer Morone: Oh, right, the one that came out recently?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: We intended to write both QV and cost, but then the editor said that the COST may be way over-complicated for one article to tackle, so we just left in a few acronyms so that people can understand what COST is about.

Audrey Tang: The blog post version has the full exposition. The Mandarin version actually use Sun Yat-sen’s words for COST, like 照價徵稅, tax on the self-declared price, and 照價收買, buying at the self-declared price.

Audrey Tang: I think that resonated pretty well, as you can witness last evening. Whenever you showed Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s photo, [laughs] he has a quite a few reactions from the audience.

Jennifer Morone: Is he well-received?

Audrey Tang: Well, relative to Chiang Kai-shek, of course, he is more well-received.

Audrey Tang: It gives people some inspiration to think of the truly revolutionary nature that Sun Yat-sen was proposing at the time, radical also, and economically sound.

Audrey Tang: All that actually isn’t what people usually associate with Sun Yat-sen. He was like Confucius, in that they are often nowadays interpreted in a more doctrine-like way, like institutionalized Confucianism.

Audrey Tang: Confucius was actually quite radical at his time. I think it’s good to have people re-evaluate Sun Tat-Sen just by way of us quoting him.

Audrey Tang: It’s also true that, in Asia, the use of art and poetry to correct capitalism’s brainwash -- superstitions, for lack of better word -- superstition like forced association of words -- competitiveness being the main superstition, but there’s many other superstitions -- is, in Japan and Taiwan in particular, quite trendy.

Jennifer Morone: Superstition? Or using art and...

Audrey Tang: Using art, poetry, and music and to re-imagine things. We don’t have that much cultural ties to capitalism anyway. In the constitution, which is driven by Sun Yat-sen thoughts, you can find some RadicalxChange ideas just in our constitution alone.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a very fruitful society to not only come up with technological solutions, but also come up with counter-narratives that doesn’t feel counter but it’s normal here. Then you can point at Taiwan, just like many people point to Estonia and say, "If we rethink things from scratch, this is what we get."

Audrey Tang: That is the direction that I would like to amplify through both our RxC Taipei and other nearby chapters, which I’m very happy to attend.

Jennifer Morone: That would be great.

Jennifer Morone: Last night was predominantly blockchain people, correct?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I think that’s because Vitalik was here. A lot of people just came to see Vitalik.

Jennifer Morone: Did you see the...? No, you maybe left already. There was someone from the Cultural...

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Culture?

Jennifer Morone: Yes, the Ministry of Culture.

Audrey Tang: Yes, Neil.

Jennifer Morone: He’s very interested in artistic and design projects like we are talking about, that are more focused on social innovation.

Audrey Tang: They’re part of III, Institute for Information Industry, which is 18F, but decades before 18F.

Audrey Tang: This corner is actually also maintained by III. These are all III staff. [laughs] It’s very interesting, the definition of this space. The C-Lab, or the Contemporary Culture Lab, which is the largest space, is Minister of Culture, but this corner, Social Innovation Lab, is III and Minister of Economy.

Audrey Tang: Here we see a very interesting, very RadicalxChange-like dialog the entrepreneurship side of things and the artsy side of things. I think it is a good ground. I think this project has been refocusing on platform cooperativesim. Platform co-op is very close to data trends or whatever other things.

Jennifer Morone: We’re actually collaborating with some members of the Platform Cooperativism Movement.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ve heard of, yeah.

Jennifer Morone: Matt, RxC’s President is working with, collaboratively, on a handbook for local government officials, particularly mayors, so they can better grasp and implement RadicalxChange ideas.

Audrey Tang: The usual suspects.

Jennifer Morone: Yes, so there’s a lot of cross-collaboration and cross-discussions with like-minded preople and groups, which is really what we need. What we would really like to see are more co-ops.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re trying to rekindle the co-op culture, because there’s been, I think, a decade or two where there’s no significant co-ops happening. The old one are all running really well, but the main implementers and founders, indeed, are well in their 60s and 70s.

Audrey Tang: Now, young people, when they start a startup, they would choose companies or they would choose associations, but they wouldn’t even think of co-ops.

Jennifer Morone: Really?

Audrey Tang: That’s the situation in Taiwan. We’re, in the past couple years, trying to change the regulations, because constitutionally, one of the clause in constitution said that the state is charged with promotion of cooperatives, which is quite a socialist part of constitution.

Audrey Tang: We didn’t really implement that very well, though. That’s something that the Ministry of Culture could see as an angle, because it’s constitutionally protected, yet we have not implemented it well.

Jennifer Morone: That’s unfortunate. We have discussed whether, maybe in the future, RxC could operate as a co-op.

Audrey Tang: If it’s a traditional co-op, then it’s 1p1v, but we’re doing QV, right?

Jennifer Morone: Yes we are!

Audrey Tang: [laughs] I like the idea of double ratification thing, though, that we all agree to vote unanimously to whatever QV decided. That works for me. Maybe it doesn’t quite matter for the foundation itself to be a co-op, but rather the prototypes, the pilots that we launch, depending on the jurisdiction, of course.

Audrey Tang: Wherever co-ops make sense, maybe we just set up co-ops.

Jennifer Morone: Yes, definitely, an example are the MIDs or Mediators of Individual Data. Otherwise referred to as Data Co-ops.

Audrey Tang: Or for the chapters, yeah.

Jennifer Morone: Ys, true. It would be good to have some kind of protocol for when projects come to us, to make it an easy way of mapping what we choose to support or develop and what we don’t.

Jennifer Morone: Also, if there is a way to implement quadratic voting and quadratic funding for such projects.

Audrey Tang: That would be great. That would be great, yeah. I think what Vitalik is essentially proposing is that using virtual goods to set up many concurrent experiments. Most of them will fail, but [laughs] like, "That didn’t work," and so they build out something more.

Audrey Tang: Once they build out something that actually have a chance of working, then we can re-link it back to the real world and see if it can work in a more sustainable fashion, rather than having everybody buy Ethernet name system domains.

Audrey Tang: We can actually use it to redistribute something that, for the social change. It’s not saying that people, because in Taiwan, we have many social entrepreneurs using Ethereum not as cryptocurrency, but rather as accountability record for social innovations funding.

Audrey Tang: There is one called Dodoker, that specifically use Ethereum to do cross-jurisdictional crowdfunding for the public benefit project for NGOs, because Taiwan just rolled out our STO regulation.

Audrey Tang: Many people in the voluntary sector also see the SDOs as a crowdfunding by share. If you tie that share with some kind of QV and QF, then you get basically a good legal model to support the distribution. In that sense, STO is used not cryptocurrency at all. It’s just easier to issue security, basically. That’s also one direction I think is very fruitful.

Jennifer Morone: I agree. It would be really good to try and amplify some of these examples and other stories. Is the community, the artists and poets, the cultural community, involved in the design?

Audrey Tang: The C-Lab is very active with creative artists. I think the main challenge, and we just talked about this with the TDC folks, is that authorship needs to be rethought with this kind of social design, because you have to essentially give up authorship for things to actually happen.

Jennifer Morone: Yeah, a good example of creatives collaborating is with the filmmaking community. Even though there’s often one big name, such as a director, it’s a very collaborative process. I know myself and a lot of others...

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The more discipline it teaches, it’s easier to give up complete authorship. The more narrow it is, the more they will see it as their turf and not as easy to convince them into social design. I’m not even talking about mechanism design, but social design.

Jennifer Morone: Myself and a lot of other people in my artistic network, although we’re not really the kind that...well, some of them sell in galleries and are part of that whole circuit, but most of us are more interested in making change, building connections to build projects, rather than authorship.

Audrey Tang: Like graffiti artists? [laughs]

Jennifer Morone: No, not graffiti artists. The more people that work with social issues or climate. Do you know Strelka or Benjamin...?

Audrey Tang: No, how do you spell it?

Jennifer Morone: S-T-R-E-L-K-A. Benjamin Bratton is the director. There’s a whole crowd that struggles with the arts community, they see the futility in it. I went to the Royal College of Art in Design Interactions, which doesn’t exist anymore, but like Strelka and some other programs out there, a multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach is adopted, especially with artists.

Jennifer Morone: There are also many that are frustrated with the categorization of art. It’s cornered into this futile box. I think, for some, it’s more important to be part of something that makes change, instead of the authorship.

Audrey Tang: Will you be around this Saturday?

Jennifer Morone: Yes, my husband is coming in.

Audrey Tang: Aha.

Jennifer Morone: What’s Saturday?

Audrey Tang: There’s a large g0v hackathon happening. It’s bimonthly. g0v, I think, is one of the main unconferences where artists really have a really large presence. I think it’s part of the symbolism of g0v, just forking the government, social participation that encourage people to relabel themselves.

Audrey Tang: Once you go into the hackathon, you will see a lot of stickers, and so you can be a person who can code, a person who can design, a person who can paint, and so on, but without having that defining your role in the community. I think it’s great.

Jennifer Morone: Can you send me the details?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Jennifer Morone: I would like to go, because we were talking about doing something similar.

Audrey Tang: I’ll be here as well. It will make sense to basically just feel the flow of this bimonthly ritual. It’s been going on for 35 gatherings, and each one brings roughly one-third of new people in. They just pitch some new projects, and some of them actually become social enterprises.

Audrey Tang: Watch Out is one of the prime example that grew out of a g0v hackathon. One of my friends in Watch Out Is actually trained as a artist, but I think Rhode Island or something. He now works in Watch Out as a person who can design, a person who can facilitate, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s thanks to the larger, the social connection that makes it you position art as a social change instrument rather than art as art itself.

Jennifer Morone: That’s great. Is it well-balanced between people or does it feel very...?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s well-balanced. It started of course by a bunch of people who are not unlike the Ethereum circle, meaning mostly coders and a little bit of design, but that’s pretty much it. Nowadays, no, it’s up to one-third is actually activists, and also design sometimes is more than coding, and art and actually journalism is a large presence in g0v hackathon.

Audrey Tang: Many coders ends up becoming journalists, data journalists and things like that because people would like to tell a story that reaches the public in a convincing way. Journalism in Taiwan is still seen as a good vehicle for art, for design, for code, to amplify their to reach to people.

Audrey Tang: A lot of independent journalists and institutional journalists are also at the hackathons.

Jennifer Morone: Are there manga comic book drawers...?

Audrey Tang: Manga?

Jennifer Morone: Yes, manga.

Audrey Tang: Sure. There’s a lot of drawers, illustrators as well. Even our training material is manga.

Jennifer Morone: Is it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. That’s another commonality with Japan.

Jennifer Morone: Can I see it?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Of course. If it’s manga, maybe it’s better if we use an iPad. Our main website is called po.pdis.tw for the participation officer network.

Audrey Tang: It’s a training material for the people working as part of their public service job to negotiate not with journalist or MPs, but rather with social activist leaders, and so we have a specific regulation for it.

Audrey Tang: We introduced a network of participation officers, and each ministry now has these participation officers that are in charge of the liaison within the government and the outside of the network. Let me just find the comics.

Audrey Tang: There we go. The training material which is comics is in six languages. There’s English, Taiwanese Hakka, Tâi-gí, indigenous Pangcah, and Mandarin, and also Japanese, but of course we’ll read the English version.

Audrey Tang: It talks about how our tax filing system, after being acclaimed for years, is actually considered obsolete by a designer. He started a e-petition and how we transform the relationship between the designers from the society and government.

Audrey Tang: Previously, we only roll out policies and products and ask people’s feedback, but this time, we just invite everyone to the planning stage and co-create the tax filing experience.

Jennifer Morone: Everyone in the population?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, anyone who complained, because otherwise, we don’t know who they are. [laughs] If they complain, they get a invitation automatically to join the co-creation meeting. A co-creation meeting of course is standard design thinking, user journey, the usual sort, post-it notes.

Audrey Tang: After co-creation for four workshops, even people who are very toxic online, once they enter this workshop, become not really best friend but at least they can live with the public servants. They collectively delivered the new tax filing experience which used to look like this, and now looks like this.

Audrey Tang: What’s more important is that we have thousands of people who feel that this is something that they helped giving birth to. They therefore speak as advocates for this new system.

Audrey Tang: We have a lot more buy-in to this radically new design that people feel that, "Oh, it’s us who created that," and so it has like an approval rating of 96 percent just last year. This year, because it’s now running on windows as well, it’s a Web-based system, so people really likes it. It has actually considered one of the min institutional innovations.

Audrey Tang: Many other ministries, after the success, actually reached out to us. We’re also helping redesigning their mobile healthcare experience, redesigning even the National Palace Museum experience of buying admissions tickets online, and QR codes, and all that.

Audrey Tang: Now, she manages, leads, coaches like 21 interns to systemically look at 14 government services in the next two months and to just redesign the experience.

Jennifer Morone: That’s so good. What is the healthcare system here?

Audrey Tang: The healthcare is Canada style, or rather Canada is Taiwan style.

Jennifer Morone: Single-payer?

Audrey Tang: Single-payer, very affordable, very socialist and also considered the top in Asia and one of the top in the world, and so it’s really good.

Jennifer Morone: Is the Canada system like the UK system? Or do you have insurance in Canada?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s universal healthcare.

Jennifer Morone: It is.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Jennifer Morone: In the UK, you don’t have any bills. You don’t pay anything when you go into the doctor’s. It’s the same?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. There are of course still very minor registration fees, like transaction fees, but otherwise, even if the most expensive operation and so on, the healthcare absorbs all that.

Jennifer Morone: What are you redesigning?

Audrey Tang: Basically, it’s currently tied to a IC card. The IC card, because people are using these mobile devices more and more, they eventually don’t really like the experience of having to carry the IC card, just like if you have taken high-speed rails.

Audrey Tang: Now, a lot of people just use their phone and use the QR codes to scan to beep once when entering, once when exiting, and that’s it. People are looking more toward that kind of experience rather than having to carry around one plastic card.

Audrey Tang: There’s also another use case of more remote, rural areas where they rely more on telemedicine.

Audrey Tang: When the doctor do visit, they, before our redesign, have to carry a very heavy bag of a laptop computer, a card reader, all the usual things, while they can actually nowadays just carry a iPhone or a Android with NFC capabilities and just have a Bluetooth reader, and that’s it. That’s the only thing they can carry. It could be in their pocket.

Audrey Tang: When I say we’re redesigning experience to free people form the current card reader system, that’s the main design criteria. We’re not really changing the payment of the...Actually, we are.

Audrey Tang: There was a petition about nutritionists. [laughs] Nutritionists want to get paid by the healthcare when they sat for ICU Two, but that’s another case. We’re redesigning the experience, not the payment, but we are also redesigning the payment a little bit.

Jennifer Morone: It would be a QR code, or no, it would be something more involved?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it would be a QR code. It will roll out in pilots, starting later this year. If it works really well, then maybe clinics will start joining the pilot program. If people turn out they prefer NFC more than QR code, that can be handled as well.

Jennifer Morone: I met with people in Hong Kong that are building this whole system that I hope we can work with them to make it more data dignified for people, because they’re pulling in lots of different data. It’s a regenerative medicine company.

Audrey Tang: Regen medicine is also very helpful down here.

Jennifer Morone: Maybe I can put you in touch because they’re working with, or have lots of clinics in China and Hong Kong.

Audrey Tang: We just made it legal.

Jennifer Morone: Is there something with the QR code that...I imagine there must be some identity problems where people, would they ever share? I guess if everybody has it, you don’t have that problem if everybody is covered...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, everybody is covered.

Jennifer Morone: ...sharing the QR code.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a problem, and it’s one-time use anyway. It’s just like Apple Pay. It generates a random number just for that period of time.

Jennifer Morone: I actually haven’t used Apple Pay, so I don’t know, or WeChat. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What about Ethereum? [laughs]

Jennifer Morone: I’ve used that, but not on the phone. Only from the computer.

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t have a HTC Exodus either. They tried to give us one, but it’s above the acceptable range by public service. We’ll figure something out. [laughs]

Jennifer Morone: I’d love to hear more or see more stories, some more examples.

Audrey Tang: Sure. This week actually, we’re inviting the OPAL, the Open Algorithm people to Taiwan. There was this kind of zero-sum backwards thinking about privacy versus economic benefits.

Audrey Tang: What the OPAL is doing, called Open Algorithm, is, very simply put, a way for people to share through a intermediary, they call it data controller, and to partner with private companies. This acts as a trust for the people involved, and the Open Algorithm Institution basically accepts code from the developers. Unlike open data, which is data flowing outward, Open Algorithm is code flowing inward.

Audrey Tang: They get checked for, just like cyber security audits, to make sure that they are not privacy-harming, they are privacy-preserving. There’s mathematical properties -- I know Glenn is also looking into that -- called differential privacy, so you can show which epsilon is actually the acceptable range for people’s code to submit this way.

Audrey Tang: Then this is run by the data operator, and then the Council for the Orientation of Development and Ethics also provides the ethical review. It’s not just the code must be privacy-preserving. Also, the use of the code must be ethical as well.

Audrey Tang: Then it is run to publish in a common format the algorithm’s output, but never the data itself. Then people get to enjoy comfortable quantitative analysis in the aggregate statistics of these medical data, but the privacy is never compromised and is open for everybody to audit.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s a pretty comprehensive and GDPR-compliant way to do research. It actually has a lot of buy-in from UN and other places. I think this place is where I can think of a data steward, data trust, or mid, however, we call it.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a good position if we can just get these people in line. Then it creates the ecosystem for this to happen. If you don’t have that, then there isn’t an incentive for people to set up data trusts.

Jennifer Morone: Definitely. Do you have any ideas on or have you been speaking to people about...?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because we’re also getting GDPR adequacy in Taiwan. Maybe later this year, we’ll get GDPR adequacy. Then afterward, all the research need to be done this way. We’re preparing for it. We already have a pretty good data collaborative system that is non-privacy concerned called the civil IoT.

Audrey Tang: That combines the citizen measurement of air quality, water quality, and things like that, and integrate it into both disaster prevention and also long-term climate science. The picture looks something like that. It’s already a working data collaborative.

Audrey Tang: This part is, I think, top 20 supercomputer in the world. We have broadband as human right, so any K to 12 student can have free access to those in-place data. This part really works really well. We consciously choice a non-privacy-related domain to prove that it’s working, independent of the GDPR adequacy work.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that rivers won’t sue for privacy, although in New Zealand, they might. [laughs] We haven’t adopted natural personhood yet, [laughs] so there is no privacy issues. Then we have this already ready to export already.

Audrey Tang: Then after we get the Open Algorithm part in, then we can create a really compelling ecosystem for data trusts.

Jennifer Morone: Interesting. It OPAL here or are they in other places?

Audrey Tang: Open Algorithm is a global movement.

Jennifer Morone: It is, OPAL.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, OPAL. It’s much larger than Taiwan. I think it’s started by Alex "Sandy" Pentland.

Jennifer Morone: Oh, yeah, Sandy Pentland from...

Audrey Tang: From MIT Media Lab.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Audrey Tang: We’re all part of this MIT/IEEE thing called Council on Extended Intelligence, or globalcxi.org. We just published our first call for comments. Extended intelligence, which is assistive intelligence plus collective intelligence, is the main banner.

Audrey Tang: Within it, there is also what the CXI people call data agency, which I think is more or less same as data dignity, maybe 80 percent overlapping. The data agency part, that combines digital identity with data policy and things like that, is also part of the CXI.

Audrey Tang: I think Sandy is heavily involved in that section. I am more involved in the post-GDP design, like expanding the planning horizon to be multigenerational. The various sectors, if they can think in a multigenerational way, their interests actually align.

Audrey Tang: If they think about next quarter, they don’t. GDP, for all its uses, is actually not very good for long-scale thinking. Based on SDGs, CXI is also doing, like, 10 indicators that are much more holistic. You can combine multiple levels of abstraction, instead of just having localism, I think.

Audrey Tang: Last evening, also, there was a talk about that. Localism mean different things to different areas. We can actually more holistically chain those different areas together in a way that is more system-syncing. GDP totally lose that.

Audrey Tang: It’s not anti-GDP, but it’s post-GDP. I think all the folks here are part of this vision. I think we are, like Sandy’s here. I’m happy to make introductions if you see any of...

Jennifer Morone: Joi Ito is there?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, Joi Ito, too. He’s actually one of the co-founders of this movement. I was contacted by the IEEE, John Havens, but there is also the architect of GDPR here and so on. I’m happy to just make connections.

Jennifer Morone: Great, thank you. I think it’s more important to get all the people that are thinking about these things together, rather than compete.

Audrey Tang: Very much so, very much so.

Jennifer Morone: It’d be good to have somebody from RadicalxChange get involved.

Audrey Tang: I think RadicalxChange has a much resonance with the entrepreneurship scene. That is something that those traditional societies often lacks. Even Media Lab isn’t directly entrepreneurial. I think that’s the main connection.

Audrey Tang: Also, the now environment also aware, art part, is also very good, because usually, these advocacy institutions see art more as an instrument. What RxC is that art need to lead the aspiration or consciousness change, rather than the other way around.

Audrey Tang: Code is just implementation of a new norm, as inspired by art. We don’t see much of that in traditional institutions. I think those two main connections is where RxC can really offer partnership and value.

Jennifer Morone: Yeah, I agree. How are we on time?

Audrey Tang: We have 20 minutes.

Jennifer Morone: Oh, OK. That’s great. We talked about internally, for RadicalxChange, having leadership elections, I think, every year. I don’t know if it will be done at the conferences, which won’t be exactly a year.

Audrey Tang: It’s like, people go to conferences to vote? That could sell tickets. [laughs]

Jennifer Morone: I don’t know.

Audrey Tang: How would that work? If you organize a local chapter, your local chapter counts as one electorate or something? [laughs]

Jennifer Morone: I don’t know. That’s something we’re thinking about, and also, whether you have elections of the board, because then, they would elect the new leadership at the executive level, and so on. There’s this kind of discussion that...

Audrey Tang: Sure. I know that, for example, most of the governance principles, I learned from the Debian Constitution, which is an open source way of having fearless leaders democratically elected. There was no QV back then, so we have to conversant voting, but it was pretty good as well.

Audrey Tang: In any case, I’m familiar with that. The main thing is just, Debian isn’t expanding as fast as to require a new governance mechanism, but RxC is still expanding really quickly. The stability of the constituent, if you will, is the main concern.

Audrey Tang: That’s actually the research question that I posed to Glenn, in that if you allow accumulation of votes, but your base is also still expanding, doesn’t that create what Vitalik referred to as, "Privileging this generation at the cost of the next"?

Jennifer Morone: Yeah, exactly.

Audrey Tang: I really don’t think that accumulated QV is the best way to go.

Jennifer Morone: I agree. Does he think it is?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. I don’t know. That was the question I posed in our previous call. If he thinks a token, or fake money, as he calls it, QV that is renewed every election cycle, that, I think, could work better. It doesn’t privilege the old guards. I think we’re still too young to introduce accumulated votes.

Jennifer Morone: I agree, unless they were valued differently, or only for certain elections, certain...

Audrey Tang: Also, I would like to also introduce different mechanisms for agenda setting, because too often, when electing one person, some people elect for their platform, or some people elect for their charisma.

Audrey Tang: You can’t really set up an arbitrary, rational Habermas discourse veil of ignorance to get that effect away. We know that there are people with charisma, like Glenn, [laughs] and that it would be very hard to decouple the charisma with the platform.

Audrey Tang: If we try voting for platforms, specifically platform items like to-dos, instead of people, then I can see it working much better. Like, to be a chapter leader, to be some member, or something gives you a voice to raise the agenda.

Audrey Tang: We actually use machine learning to, on each agenda, ask the community to refine it, so that people can agree on common visions. This is what we usually use. It’s a system called Pol.is. It’s called P-O-L-dot-I-S.

Audrey Tang: Basically, around each agenda, like, how should we integrate autonomous driving into our society? Each person can state a simple statement of a binary sentiment that other people can agree or disagree, up or downvote, but there’s no reply button, so there’s no trolls.

Audrey Tang: Once people agree or disagree sufficiently, they will see that first, their social media friends are all over the place. People who hold different opinions are not necessarily enemies. Second, that there’s far more consensus that anyone imagined.

Audrey Tang: Mainstream media, indeed, social media tend to over-amplify the divisiveness. Actually, most people agree on most of things most of the time with most of their neighbors. What this system shows is that, around one agenda, there is actually far more consensus among community members.

Audrey Tang: Then we can just take the top consensus, package them into a framed statement that can be a QV ballot item. I think, after this kind of early-stage consensus-making -- or really, just consent-making -- people won’t feel that they lose if they don’t get the QV result that they want.

Audrey Tang: Even if the QV voice crisis goes into some other items, they will still have participated in the shaping of those items. I think it’s very important after a vote, everybody feel that they have won something.

Audrey Tang: Rather than voting for people. Easily half, or more than half, of people feel that they have lost something. Having this kind of AI-based agenda setting, even before we put things on the QV ballot, I think, is crucial.

Jennifer Morone: Can I see that page right there?

Audrey Tang: Sure. This is a Pol.is system. It’s very simple. We are using it to talk about diplomacy, of all things. The de facto American embassy in Taiwan have collaborated on this particular we got. For example, our previous question, which runs for two months, was how to promote Taiwan’s role in the global community.

Audrey Tang: Everybody agree with that, it’s just how. Many people voted, and it looks like this. You can very easily see what are the wedges, because this is principal component analysis. People are naturally grouped like Netflix clusters. Their feeling toward the PRC is obviously the main thing that drives the people apart.

Jennifer Morone: What is this supposed to be?

Audrey Tang: This is the automated clustering. This is, based on your vote, your avatar will move among clusters. You can see cluster B, most of them think -- 85 percent of them think -- that every time PRC close the international door for Taiwan, the US should try to open one for Taiwan someplace else, that they are here.

Audrey Tang: Group A really doesn’t like the idea. Many people feel unsure, actually, but still, there is more people opposing than for this statement. If this is mainstream media, they all will just focus on this and amplify the message for divisiveness.

Audrey Tang: Actually, the picture looks like that. Again, only five divisive statements and a lot more consensus statements. This is called group-informed consensus, or GIC, meaning that it have to convince supermajority in both groups.

Audrey Tang: Even if you get 500 friends to vote exactly the same as you do, it makes no difference, because it can still get delisted from the list. You generally have to convince people on the other side as well. The first one is about Indo-Pacific alliances, the second one is about public health and good governance.

Audrey Tang: This is about the regional stability. This is about the importance of rule of law, freedom, religious tolerance, how to share our story, and how we actually are even better than the US when it comes to human rights and addressing equality, and how it can specialize agencies.

Audrey Tang: Maybe convincing to admit in Taiwan the US should participate in the Presidential Hackathon, and so on. All these statements are then, after the two-month period, read aloud by, moderated by yours truly, but participated by the AIT people, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, such as the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Audrey Tang: They must only talk about those 10 things in that meeting. Then they provide accountability by saying, "This year, we are just going to send our AIT personnel to the Presidential Hackathon. Check mark."

Jennifer Morone: What happens at the Presidential Hackathon?

Audrey Tang: I talked a little bit last night. Basically, the Presidential Hackathon is a process in which that 20 teams are selected every year -- this year, by QV -- out of 100 or so teams. They’re all very interesting social innovations, like this one uses the so-called WaterBox to measure for water pollutions in the waterways.

Audrey Tang: Where one side may be a plant, one side may be plants, so industrial and agricultural use. Because we have a new law that just passed that says if any industry nearby the farmlands pollutes the water, then the central administration has the authority to disconnect their power and water supply.

Jennifer Morone: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yes. They are forced to move off after 20 years, anyway, but within 20 years, if they ever become pollutants, they will get shut down. It’s interesting, because then, with this law, which wasn’t there, it’s now in the plant’s interest, of the business owner’s interest, to prove that they generate no pollution.

Audrey Tang: They will actually sponsor those WaterBoxes. Then the farmers also will sponsor those WaterBoxes, because they want to know, who is the pollutant in the upstream area, multiple upstreams? These are cheap IoT devices that will just upload all those numbers, just as AirBox before that for air pollution measurement.

Audrey Tang: There’s more than 2,000 nodes that upload to a distributed ledger so that people can be sure that nobody can mutate each other’s numbers. It’s a public accountability system. This is, I think, very promising. This one used machine learning to detect false debts and illicit financial flows well before it happens.

Audrey Tang: It’s also an interesting one. This used machine learning to automate the sentencing for drunk driving, because no judge or prosecutor feel a lot of personal accomplishment doing those very mechanical chore-like things.

Audrey Tang: It’s done by AI, and they also use crowdsourcing to provide a dictionary to translate the prosecutor’s documents into laypeople’s language, because we’re now about to introduce a jury system. It’s very important that every knows what happens in the court process.

Audrey Tang: This one address the plastic waste at sea, and so on, and so forth. Basically, all of them, we coach them, the 20 teams, into trilingual teams. That is to say they have one person specializing in public policy, they have one person specializing in the domain, and the one person specializing in the data entrepreneurship or tech part of...

Audrey Tang: They’re trilingual, each team. Even if they didn’t start out as trilingual, we make them trilingual. Then, like last year, one of the five winners eventually used machine learning to automate the detection of possible leaking points in the supply lines, the pipes, of water so that the people who hear those leaks can work more fruitfully, by focusing their energy only on the points that may be leaking. They don’t have to spend all the hearing of the spots that are not leaking, which is not a lot of fun at all.

Jennifer Morone: Like machines in a hospital.

Audrey Tang: Right, exactly. We index each of them with a specific SDG target. When, for example, New Zealand learns of this, which is a new situation for them as well...They didn’t have water shortage. Now, because of climate change, some places are starting to.

Audrey Tang: They invited this team after three months of our Presidential Hackathon, into their own GovTech Hackathon for another three months to co-create solutions with them.

Audrey Tang: They just informed us they are also very interested in the water box. They have dairy farmers that, at one hand, requires clean water from upstream and is often accused by downstream that they pollute the water. They want something that prove that E. coli didn’t come from them and so on.

Audrey Tang: It has international appeal. Every year the president give out a award to five teams. The five teams are guaranteed to become part of public policy in the next year.

Jennifer Morone: Great. How long has that been going on?

Audrey Tang: This is the second year. Previously, it didn’t reach a lot of people. At 120 processes, mostly just a dozen judges. Now, because of QB, there’s easily thousands more people now actively looking at each of the topics.

Jennifer Morone: Who picks the topics?

Audrey Tang: Anyone can get one submitted.

Jennifer Morone: They create the topics?

Audrey Tang: Anybody can propose something. Using QB, we sort them into the top 20.

Jennifer Morone: Right, so these were independently proposed by the Hackathon groups.

Audrey Tang: Right. About half of them are initiated by the public sector, half of them from the social sector.

Jennifer Morone: I wasn’t sure if these topics were things, "OK, this is what we want to work on. Everybody choose one." I didn’t if there were specific focuses already.

Audrey Tang: No. It’s not like that. We index them into the 169 SDG topics after we see their proposal. The Presidential Hackathon is about social innovation. It must make a positive impact on the society environment. It’s very rare that somebody propose something that’s not tied to a SDG topic.

Audrey Tang: The SDG process ensure that anything that increase the social optimality gets...No girl left behind, was their slogan. It’s bound to be part of SDG. We’re not saying that if you propose indexing on SDG at the beginning. We will find you an SDG target.

Jennifer Morone: These don’t go to waste. They find somewhere to work.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We learn it from the g0v grants. g0v grants learned it from Germany, from the Prototype Fund. We have witnessed that Prototype Fund is very good on encouraging failure. The successes are not guaranteed to enter into federal or state budget.

Audrey Tang: There’s no guarantee that if you win it will be adopted by the public sector. That makes the social and private sector have to find their own funding model. That precludes maybe half of these idea from happening. This is why we have special meeting for the president’s trophy.

Jennifer Morone: Do you know Gov Labs?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. I’m part of their global advisory group.

Jennifer Morone: There’s an event coming up in Berlin in August that I can’t go to. I’m not going to be in Berlin. They want to have RadicalxChange presence.

Audrey Tang: Presence. I’ll be in Osaka.

Jennifer Morone: Do you know anybody that would, that could speak to the Gov Labs?

Audrey Tang: The Gov Lab, you mean the NYU one, right?

Jennifer Morone: Yes. That’s the only one I’m aware of.

Audrey Tang: Yes. The Governance Lab. I don’t know about the Berlin activity. I guess it depends on the topic.

Jennifer Morone: Yeah.

Jennifer Morone: It’s the Web3 Summit. Is there WiFi access?

Audrey Tang: There is.

Jennifer Morone: They want to talk about quadratic voting and data as labor with, oh, dGov, sorry not GovLab.

Audrey Tang: Not GovLab? OK, dGov, Distributed Governance with a lower-case D.

Jennifer Morone: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware, but not familiar with them. Is there a RxC Berlin chapter?

Jennifer Morone: There is one, but leadership has changed since the first meeting. A lot of the people were involved with the conference, so we got all too busy. We’re going to restart but with more Germans hopefully involved this time and more diverse...

Audrey Tang: There’s 83 people joining that Meetup, so not too bad.

Jennifer Morone: Yes, so I should find somebody from that community.

Audrey Tang: I would suggest, if there are people who already came to the conference, then maybe start there. They can work as liaisons. Even if I show up, I stay in Germany for one year when I was 11, but my Deutsch is very rusty.

Audrey Tang: It’s good if there’s someone from a local chapter. I don’t have anyone immediately in mind that will be around Berlin at that time. I will be in Berlin in November though.

Jennifer Morone: You will?

Audrey Tang: Just a few days, but I’m happy to attend also in RxC capacity if it helps. I’ll be in Berlin November 21st to 23rd, if there are follow-ups or meetings that I should attend. I’m already scheduled to visit Mozilla, which is, again, ideologically very close to us. I’m happy to schedule other meetings or public events.

Audrey Tang: All right, that’s pretty much it.

Jennifer Morone: Yes. Great. That’s good. I’ll be there at that time.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. See you in Berlin...

Jennifer Morone: Yes.

Audrey Tang: ...if not Osaka. [laughs] I’ll see Vitalik in Osaka.

Jennifer Morone: I don’t know who, I guess somebody from RxC...At least if you two are there and you’re representing...

Audrey Tang: It’s good.

Jennifer Morone: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.

Jennifer Morone: I had a great time.